IT Organization Circa 2017

Earlier in my consulting and research career, especially in the early-1980’s to mid-1990’s, an IT organizational construct typically called “The Information Center” became popular in medium to large enterprises.  The philosophy behind the Information Center (IC) could be captured in a single phrase, “teach them to fish so they’ll feed themselves for a lifetime.”

IC’s comprised a small group of IT professionals (typically between 3 and 15 in number), a suite of tools (e.g., so-called “4th Generation Languages” such as Focus, Ramis, Nomad, and analysis/reporting tools, such as SAS and SPSS) and, especially early in the IC movement, a place for end users to go to get access to these tools and the mainframe computers they ran on – often a room with computer terminals, reference materials, a printer or two, photocopier, and so on.

The forces that led to the popularity of the IC were:

1. Demand by end users for information that was effectively “locked” in computer files and systems.  Remember, back then, relational data bases were not common and many computer systems were batch processes with data stored on computer tapes.  Yet a great deal of money and effort had been spent creating and deploying computer systems to process transactions – a ton of data was being captured, and end users (the term of the day) wanted to analyze and make decisions based upon that data.
2. IT organizations were overwhelmed by requests, and most suffered a multi-year backlog – if you went to someone in IT with a request to run an analysis of last month’s sales performance, you might well be told, “We can get to that in 28 months – can you wait?”  I recall in those days Data Processing Managers (as CIO’s were then commonly called) often touted their application backlogs as badges of courage – “See how popular my department is!”
3. Powerful end user computing tools such as Focus and Nomad, and languages such as APL were becoming available – many of these first offered through time sharing services.  The attraction here was that you did not have to deal with the Data Processing organization, you could pay “by the drink”, and the time sharing services provided training and support.  (If this sounds similar to today’s emerging Software as a Service [SaaS] phenomenon, it did share some important characteristics.)
4. Internal computing power was getting cheaper as mainframe price/performance improved, and as cost of computer terminals came down.

So, in many respects, the IC was a response to emerging business demand (for information, reports, small systems) 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 convergence.

The good news/bad news of early IC’s lay in the fact that the end user literally came to a center.  This afforded the IC a measure of control and supervision over end user computing.  It even afforded a measure of reuse, commonality, and integrity - “Hey, Fred, I see that you’re trying to build a pricing model in APL.  Anne was in here last week doing something very similar – let’s use that as a starting point.”  (Not that APL was well-know for its reusability characteristics!)  Or, “Bill, I see that you want to create a sales commission system.  Susan was looking at monthly sales last month, and we had Data Processing create a sales data extraction routine that loads a Focus data base every week.  I think you can use the same data base.”

The bad news of the early IC model was that the end user had to leave their office and go to the center – perhaps even have to book time on the terminal, or hope that there’d be terminal available.  So, when PC’s came along, end user tools got even easier to use (Lotus Notes, Excel, Access), and the IC had created its own backlog (”I can find a terminal for you at 7am on Monday in 3 weeks time!”) personal computing really took over from IC end user computing, and today’s “shadow IT” phenomenon was born (or, at least, exacerbated).

I believe that IT circa 2017 is all about “end user computing”, though with an important collaborative and cross-enterprise twist.  Level 1 and Level 2 IT is creating an “infrastructure” of capabilities that automate and model the enterprise.  Level 3 business-IT maturity is about unlocking this incredibly rich and valuable asset and putting it back into the hands of the people that can best leverage it.  It’s also about business analytics and the power of number crunching to drive business decision-making.  Perhaps it’s time to look back at the Information Center, dust off the ideas and practices that worked and bring them into Web 2.0 time!