Dr. No or Dr. Yes, time to decide

Pratima H

INDIA: A Hollywood actor once remarked interestingly on the difference between men and women. "Yes, I can not give birth to a baby but on the other hand, Man! I can open all those jars on my own!"

Now some of us may shrug off the irony. Nothing huge of course. Opening jars can not be as strategic as bringing out babies. But let's face it. When a stubborn jar stares you in the face, even for that millisecond of a moment, it gets all your attention, power, muscle, endorphins, chakras and nerves about it.

CIOs (not all, not everywhere, but still) have been caught up with these jars for long. It's hard to say no when business folks are stuck with some technical lids, and tactical bottles. But even though it takes quite some sinew and strength (though not comparable with child-birth), the paradox is that, once the jar is unscrewed, it seems like a run-of-the-mill job. And almost a thankless one!

That, in part, explains why some CIOs have been trapped in the Dr.No tag. But that alone doesn't explain what they should be doing exactly to correct the aberration. So we catch some minutes with Milind Govekar, Managing Vice President, Gartner Research, when he uncorks some hard-hitting ideas. "Automating one mess can lead to a bigger mess." Why does he say that?

So much around us is changing. So rapidly. What stays, in your view, even in this flux?

For one, the chasm of trust between IT and business. The pressure to do more with less also continues. Hopefully the attitude issues between IT and business would undergo a correction.

Elaborate.

Big disruptions are happening now. Increasingly a lot of areas are being ploughed away by Cloud. They could be turning out as the best way of bypassing IT. I met a CIO who knew and acknowledged that most of the time he is recognized as Dr. No. Today, he is asking himself - why can't be as agile and open-minded as business desires?

But what's wrong with that? It may sound conventional but it's stable.

IT cost is a big lump in a business. To add to that look at the way this trend of consumerisation has thrown around big toys in the hands of CEOs. Sometimes IT is fairly seen as a dinosaur by them. ‘Why can't IT design applications that I want and like' is a question that crops up often. Of course, with Cloud, there would be security and compliance issues and that's why the idea of a service broker is gaining muscle. But that also leaves with a question mark on IT's traditional perimeters.

Does that hint that the way IT is accounted for has to change? What can you suggest for a CIO who wants to leap forth and invest in new paradigms, but does not want to be dragged by obsolescence?

Chargeback is a concept used by IT to recover costs for long now. But that system lacked transparency to a big extent. The new terminology as I see it is ‘showback'. The logic is there is nothing to hide costs but to show costs in the right areas, so there is more transparency. One starts asking about the levers one can use to control costs. New cost allocation models come up and they are very different from the buckets that were used to fill and count earlier. That was not valid, not predictable, not fair, not controllable and archaic. This is just the opposite.

How?

In a service-based pricing, which would be the utopian framework, one breaks everything down to activity-based costing. But even that would be overkill. Like the other end of the spectrum. So, some measure mid way would work best. A resource-based model for instance. Like- cost metric for a hardware o software or memory resource. In most organizations, the type of service decides the kind of resource. So investment in IT will be driven by the mindset one uses to break down costs.

While convergence is a good destination, how does one ensure this potluck party does not turn into just another heterogeneity problem IT has always been running desperately from?

IT has started becoming another archaeological science, which paradoxically does not acknowledge the death part of those lifecycles we usually study so intensely. Organizations that will be successful would be the ones that are ruthless. At the same time, convergence would not be delivered by one single vendor off the box, if we are expecting something like that. Lot of system integrators would be involved in it and a lot of it would happen out of IT. Architecture can not be built on hope. It has to be planned around the whole discussion of integration. Standardising, consolidating, integrating the whole journey is a key IT role. Automating one mess can lead to a bigger mess.