Paul Wallis

Falkirk, Scotland

CTO

One of the main differences between professions like engineering and architecture and IT is that for many years they have been fully documented.

Like IT, the very complex projects they manage involve many related assets, processes and people. Yet unlike IT, the business and the professionals can easily understand each other and these days disasters are fairly rare.

Why? Because they have simple means of communicating with each other. After all, how could complex things like skyscrapers or bridges be built without blueprints or engineering diagrams?

It is this easy to understand “big picture” of the business and IT relationship that has been missing.

To create this picture, and enable business and IT to speak a common language, understanding dataflows is critical.

It is the understanding, documenting, and engineering of them which is key to managing complexity.

If we have a simple picture of how each dataflow moves across and through the assets of the business the responsibilities, roles, risks and costs of every IT resource, or group of IT resources, employed in support of each business activity or set of business activities can be clearly visualised and, thus, understood.

By attaching value meta data to dataflows and cost information to IT assets, we can start to assess the ratio between IT support costs and the value of the contribution of IT to the business.

Which means IT can speak to the board in the language it understands – that of money. It also means that IT will be fully documented, providing a standard for governance and a foundation for professionalism.

A critical time for IT is rapidly approaching. The Companies Act of 2006 comes into force in the UK in October 2009. Directors and managers - including IT managers - could be jailed if they fail to ensure that the right IT systems are in place to store and retrieve data and that electronic communication with shareholders is robust and secure.

Without full documentation of assets, people and services and a clear understanding of how data flows through the business, many IT professionals could find themselves with more to worry about than a bad reputation.