Recently I attended a Gartner event in San Francisco and saw lots of focus on “Business Value of IT”. Subsequently I heard 2 Forrester analysts talking on this topic in Mumbai last month. I started wondering that on one hand we are talking about long-term vision about using IT to steer business objectives and on the other hand we are unable to realize that business changes much faster than IT and thereby IT that is being purported as the savior for businesses can actually appear as the impediment. So why are we not talking about the usage of IT to streamline IT first?
IT department itself is so fragmented that Gartner says that almost 80% of the information is nothing but unstructured data – be it numerous excel spreadsheets, documents or presentations or even disparate point solutions. Those point solutions manage the finance, human resources, inventories etc (as offered by SAP, Oracle, Peoplesoft) but how about managing IT? Do we have integrated “Peoplesoft for IT”? Probably not because “IT” is still to be considered as a “Resource”. I got hold of an old but very apt article that I think would help people to understand the context. Ofcourse, hitherto, PPM solutions have made their mark in the industry but if such tools have to bring value more than the high-level project abstractions presented through the executive dashboards then we must recognize the need for their integration with a strong Software Life Cycle Management component -- the execution layer. This would be the stepping stone to managing "IT" as a "resource".