Focus IT Therapy for Best Effects

Opinion: Miracle systems, like miracle drugs, are more products of planning than luck.

People often treat IT in the same way that they treat prescription medications. When they walk into the IT architects office, they dont want to be told to make lifestyle changes like cutting fat from their organization charts and workflows. They want a technology pill that will make them better.

Like patients who watch too much TV and read too many articles, enterprise IT consumers tend to demand that pill that they saw advertised the other day -- regardless of whether its really the cost-effective solution for their own specific problem. And they want their IT doctor to anticipate and deal with any and all possible interactions and side effects, at the same time that they hound the good doctor to pile one solution du jour on top of another.

This phenomenon is not confined to the demand side of the IT equation. IT providers can also fall into the trap that medical school professors call "treating the chart instead of the patient." An IT application development team can focus on a single symptom: an underperforming business process, perhaps, or a manual system that seems to be a candidate for automation. They can solve that single problem; then another single problem; then yet another single problem, and only gradually (if ever) come to realize that their proliferating and uncoordinated systems have now become the problem; moreover, that their approach has calcified obsolete practices in ways that will now make them far more expensive to streamline and modernize.

If IT builders can fall prey to misplaced Dr. Feelgood thinking, they can also avail themselves of the same process analytics tools and methods that pharmaceutical companies are urged to adopt by that industrys analysts and consultants. While reading a current article on the Web site of "Pharmaceutical Processing," I was struck by the ease with which I could mentally substitute key nouns in my mind to transform the recommendations from the sphere of drug development to that of IT systems construction.

"Pharmaceutical quality assurance and control are predominantly based on data taken from relatively small test batches," noted the author. Ditto for predicting the actual performance in practice of any non-trivial IT system, and therefore ditto the need for rigorous monitoring and follow-up in the field. "Building quality into pharmaceutical products requires a thorough review of intended therapeutic objectives, patient population, route of administration, and pharmacological, toxicological and pharmacokinetic characteristics [as well as] the chemical, physical, and biopharmaceutical properties of the drug." Ditto for clearly stating the goals of an IT system, the execution and end-user environments, the means of service delivery, and the core characteristics and failure modes of the technologies to be used.

If people are going to use phrases like "IT professional," then they should also make a conscious effort to adopt the disciplines of a profession -- rather than following the paths of least resistance that one expects of a technician. Its our duty to understand the problem, not to cater to the patients preconceived ideas about how to treat the symptoms. Its our obligation to solve problems without creating at least as many new ones. Its also our role, sometimes, to give the unwelcome news that an organizations way of life is the real problem, and that nothing else will really work until thats changed.

Tell me what symptoms youre being asked to treat at peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com

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