Quocirca's Straight Talking: IT too arrogant?

Historically when times are good IT vendors start to believe they know how to run their customers' businesses. Quocirca's Jon Collins warns that now, as the industry's climate is improving, is the time to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Despite the recent downturn, the IT industry has much to be proud of and there are signs the pride level is once again rising. Within the industry, there is a growing spirit of invention and innovation that marks the end of the millennium-triggered dip.

While it is good to walk the conference floors and feel a buzz that has been absent for years ("the teddy bears are back", one pundit was heard to say), it is worth recognising some of the lessons learned. In particular, there is a danger the IT industry will reclaim its 'we know best' position by telling businesses how they should operate.

IT exists to automate some business activities and to better enable others - for example, building on the work of the telcos to provide a data communications network that spans the globe. Technology is also good at managing facts and figures - collating, analysing and reporting them. It's both an enabler and change agent, resulting in the potential for substantial business benefit.

However, every now and then marketing overdoes it, suggesting the technology is the answer rather than a valid part of it. Without the latest versions of our tools, say some software vendors, businesses cannot possibly function.

Such positioning is not just arrogant, it is also naive. It is correct, for example, to assume that because IT automates business activity, it's worthwhile to have a grasp of that business as an input to IT deployment. It is also correct that much business activity is sufficiently generic to merit the use of pre-fabricated software packages, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

The mistake comes with the message that the business will in some way function better if a certain tool is in place - or worse, that companies without said tool are back in the Dark Ages. Do we really think businesses don't know how to run themselves?

Business service management (BSM) is the current buzzword for an area that has the potential to relive past mistakes. Its central premise involves delivering information on how IT is functioning and linking this to metrics and performance indicators of how the business is functioning. This premise is perfectly valid and the area holds a lot of opportunity. As long as BSM retains a relatively humble view of the world, it deserves to do well.

So where could it go wrong? The first flawed assumption is that businesses were previously unable to measure value. Manufacturing companies have been doing just so for years - as illustrated by the decades-old principles of 'just-in-time manufacturing', as well as the more recent 'agile manufacturing'. Call centres, for better or worse, have also been relying on figures generated by their computer systems to determine how to operate the most efficient and effective operation.

The second assumption is that any technology can be dropped into an organisation with minimal impact and maximum benefit. What this fails to note is that many so-called technology deployments are only fractionally to do with technology and mostly to do with organisational change, politics and other human resources issues.

Finally, IT vendors under the 'businesses need our help, bless them' illusion should face the fact that BSM is not the response to a cry for help from the business community. Rather, it derives from IT systems becoming sufficiently well integrated to enable such information to be visible. It is the systems that have been lacking in the past, not businesses.

The central premise of business service management remains valid. Technology will enable companies to measure what was previously unmeasurable, and such information is powerful, both as an indicator of what is working and as an instrument of change. For once, though, let us not fall into the trap of believing that IT holds all the answers.