Another common sticking point that shows up in IT funding approaches in Level 2is the “stealth infrastructure” trap. The logic (or illogic!) behind this is, “The business does not understand all this infrastructure stuff (or plug in your enterprise-wide IT improvement initiative du jour – e.g., SOA, Enterprise Architecture) so we will squirrel away funds through other sources to pay for it (e.g., underspend our training budget, add a bit of “slop” to project budgets, add a small margin to steady state service charges, IT research and development activity).
The paradox here is that below high-Level 2 maturity, it is true that the business does not understand many of the IT infrastructure components. And yet, sheltering them from these arcane issues is to deny them the education they need to become more IT literate, and therefore, more effective in leveraging IT for business value. Now I’m not saying that you have to expose them to the technical minutiae – but you do have to be able to translate this stuff into business implications. As a consumer of electric power at home, I don’t need to understand how electrons flow through wire, or how 3 phase electric transmission works, but I do need to understand the risks of ice causing low hanging tree branches to snag transmission lines, and potentially cut the power supply when I least need an interruption! An educated consumer is a smart, effective consumer, whether that is a home consumer of electricity, or a corporate consumer of Enterprise Architecture.
Another important trick here is to ensure that individual components are packaged together into “bundles” that are meaningful to the business client/customer. Contemporary IT practice is to use Service Management as the underlying discipline. We will expand on this important concept in a later post, but for now suffice it to say that the service “bundles” must make sense to the service consumer, and be aggregated at a high enough level to have meaningful business value impact, but be sufficiently granular to enable meaningful “cost-to-serve/value-of-service” trade-offs. For example, when I onboard a new employee, as a business manager I don’t want to negotiate for and pay for separate services to equip the employee with a PC, a cell phone, an Internet account, passwords, a help desk account, etc. I want an “on-board new employee” service that might well draw from IT, HR, facilities, and other enterprise-wide services.
If there is any place for stealth infrastructure, it is in an emerging service that I’m trying, as a service manager, to refine – for example, and early experiment or pilot with SOA. But even in that case, I think it is better for all if the business understands there is a need to, and price for advanced IT R&D, and keeping an eye to the future. They don’t need to understand all the components of this R&D at a granular level, but they do need to understand, and buy into the fact that we have chosen, for example, to spend 1% of the IT budget on advanced R&D as an investment in our future.
Filed under: Business-IT Governance, IT Infrastructure, IT Management, IT Maturity | Tagged: , Enterprise Architecture, IT funding, IT research and development, Service Management, SOA
