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A civilization without instrumentalities? Incredible!
-Warren Stevens in “Forbidden Planet” In a recent Charlie Rose with the topic of IT in the period of financial crisis, Rose asked Leo Apotheker of SAP how they will be able to maintain their market share in, say 5 years, when the IT world is so well known for massive reversals and rapid irrelevancies.
Apotheker said that the only way to keep up is to track with the changes that will occur in the way business operates over the next 5 years. He said that one of the big changes he sees (all the following is my paraphrase) is the way that businesses will become radically networked entities (which is almost an oxymoron…like saying ‘essentially diffuse’) and that they will become webs of partners and alliances under which the various parts of the whole product will not always be created within the defined legal organization. The example he gave was Procter and Gamble which he said had decided at the beginning of the new century, rather than continuing to be the standard business case example of product development excellence, that they would actually get a lot of their new products from partners. Apparently today, 50 percent of Procter & Gamble new products are being developed outside Procter & Gamble, by partners. At first this sounded like a reference to the garden variety supply chain and outsourcing changes that have been occurring for 20 years…but he was really talking about the all the boundaries between internal and external service delivery and production becoming more flexible, fluid or dynamic than that. The nerd in me was reminded of the phrase Doctor Morbius used in “Forbidden Planet” to describe the heights that the Krell civilization reached before its mysterious collapse… “A civilization without instrumentalities.” …in other words, a profound and qualitative change to the way we think of the identity of businesses. This also made me think of a topic we’d been discussing internally at Swingtide about the challenges of perfecting the modularity of shared services…where new parts of a business could be plugged in and parts being divested could be unplugged…all without the disruptions and trauma we usually associate with M&A activities. It’s enough of a problem for any company to try to figure out how to have IT perform its function of enabling business strategy when the corporation is sitting still enough to have its portrait painted. Think of the way this flexible borders problem affects orderly and efficient IT service delivery. The way people usually solve it now is via ad hoc projects for each event of change. But there’s no point in having fire drills if there’s always a fire. The point is that IT management should plan to scuttle the ad hoc activity approach and think instead in terms of a discipline that is oriented to almost continuous change. We call this discipline Technology Business Operations or TBO. It’s a structure of roles, functions, interactions and rules of engagement between business and IT service delivery that can survive the changes because it supports the changes.
As ways of creating value become more kaleidoscopically various …the greater the stress on having flexible process rigor around IT finances, financial controls and the structures around IT service delivery.
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