The Growth Of Business IT

In my popular post on “The Future of the IT Department” I covered how IT is changing rapidly in enterprises and touched on how business aligned IT teams are going to become more relevant. Some of these agile ‘business focused development and delivery teams’ will be official IT sponsored initiatives whilst others will be somewhat rogue business division sponsored teams working without the IT department as a response to the expensive, often poor quality service provided by the IT division.

The rapid pace of marketplace innovation and the lack of flexibility of many IT organisations within enterprises, when fuelled with the consumerization of IT and the growth of cloud computing is leading to a boom in DIY business application development. Gartner predicts that…

“Rank-and-file employees will build at least a quarter of all new business applications by 2014, up from less than 5% in 2007.” [_Gartner_]

For many years now there has always been the power in the business to harness Excel macros and VBA to enhance end-user productivity, but now this is being enhanced by new friendly end-user tools such as easy  mobile app development, the ability to host new websites in the cloud in a few clicks and a whole SaaS model to replace your IT in house infrastructure over night .  

The business benefits of this boom are clear to see. The ability of end-users and Business IT teams to manipulate the data and process flows to meet the shifting demands of the market are attractive. Customer demands can in theory be more easily met by those closet to the customer building applications quickly and with their day to day use clearly in mind. As the market changes the user can adjust their homebrew application to fit the market, or throw it away and start a new one. Instead of  a business analysis working closely with the developer to create an application she can reduce the communication overhead by just building it herself. Even if the application is only to be used as a POC this is a very efficient process to find out what works and what doesn’t. In this article on BusinessWeek the CEO of NetApp explains the benefits seen by  encouraging employees to build their own tools, such as cost savings and customer satisfaction. It’s not all peachy though. There are obvious pitfalls to this approach. the IT organisation may be slow and expensive but they often have genuine reasons for being that way. Interoperability, support, security, regulatory concerns, supplier contracts and economies of scale are all topics the IT organisation has to consider and so too does the business if its going to promote this DIY application approach.

Business run IT teams can do very productive work and react quickly to change, but from my experience the problem comes when they have to rely on the IT department to support the implement their change and that’s where tension can arise. Teams outside the IT structure can find it hard to understand the constraints of the IT department. I find developers in business sponsored teams have a real desire to be productive for customers but lack some of the rigor that is prevalent in IT based teams (particularly around maintainability and change control). The IT department can seem to be a blocker to the teams agility when it is unable to adhere to the timescales expected by the business teams. I think some effort needs to be made on both sides to understand the constraints the other teams are under and work together. Critically I feel the IT department needs to realise that this trend will continue and the IT org is at risk of becoming irrelevant (other than to keep the lights on and maintain legacy systems). Perhaps this is the natural evolution of the consumerisation of technology but I do think that IT organisations can have a very relevant role to play in this shift. By sponsoring agile business centric development teams to support the business better the IT organisation of the future can have a very relevant role and IT professionals are ideally positioned to populate these teams and support the growth in DIY applications whilst adding some beneficial structure.