I want to pick up on this theme as we head into the holidays. In Part 1 I talked about the drivers that are impacting business-IT maturity – Universal, Business and Internal IT. Now I want to look at some of the overarching principles I’m seeing in business-IT maturation. The idea is that these principles will help you accelerate your IT maturity – provide some guideposts for reaching organizational and structural decisions.
1. Principle of Business-IT Convergence
I first heard this articulated by colleague and Professor James Cash, Harvard Business School. This is best understood in the context of maturity itself. At low business-IT maturity, there is a virtual (sometimes real!) wall between the IT organization and the business it serves. As maturity increases, the wall becomes more porous – we find roles that are quite blended (business relationship managers), and we find increasing IT knowledge in the business, and increasing business knowledge among it professionals. By 2017 (this blogs title, after all!) I expect convergence to have become almost total – while there will be a small highly specialized IT organization (largely concerned with Enterprise Architecture and Partner Management) the rest of what IT organizations do today will have become dispersed and distributed throughout the business.
2. Principle of Open Source Domination
I expect Open Source will be THE WAY that software is developed. There will still be a need for some development of objects and services that cannot be obtained from Open Sources, but this will be minimal. This will clearly have far reaching implications (in fact, it is these implications that will lead to the relentless ascendancy of Open Source everywhere).
3. Principle of Public IT Infrastructure Domination
As unlikely as this will seem to many today, I believe that by 2017, the reality of “The Web is the Computer” will be long established. As a result, few companies will have their own data centers, preferring to use that great “on-demand” data center in the sky.
Well, I suspect that one or more of these 3 principles will inflame a few pre-Christmas rants, so I’ll leave it for now.
Filed under: IT Infrastructure, IT Maturity | Tagged: business-IT convergence, Open Source, Public IT infrastructure
[...] and evolving IT supply (tools, processing capacity). I’ve talked before of the coming business-IT convergence, and IC’s were a very primitive form of [...]