News Feature

To Survive the Technology Age, Businesses Must Improve IT Systems

By Bud Albers

November 01, 2000 — CIO — In today’s world, a good many things must change for technology to have the kind of impact on business that most CEOs are hoping for. The demands most large organizations have placed on the typical IT department show a blatant lack of innovation in their vision of how their businesses will grow in the next century. Corporate leaders must realize that in order to survive the technology age they must continue to advance their technology systems. In order to do this, they must see IS departments no longer as problem solvers, but as business developers.

If most CTOs or CIOs could hear what business executives say about their organizations behind closed doors, they would be considerably less than pleased. No matter what the level of their effectiveness is or has been, many of the traditional stereotypes are still present: lack of speed, lack of business savvy or unnecessary expense. These stereotypes need to disappear if technology is to have the necessary level of impact on an organization for it to survive in the world of e-business.

The first thing any CTO or CIO needs to understand is that the operating imperative in the Web environment remains "speed is king." Most businesses aggressively use this tenet as a surrogate for planning, particularly when it comes to the new world of interacting with your customers via the Web. The instant access to millions of websites, combined with the innate human ability to generate new, innovative ideas on a daily basis have led us to a "gotta have the solution now" attitude that has resulted in the notion of Internet Time. In Internet Time, long-range planning is a thing of the past and real-time, reactive planning-marked by late-night, coffee- and pizza-fueled workweeks-is the name of the game. What most of us in the technology professions know, but are reticent to admit, is that with rare exception the current definition of Internet Time is an impossibility.

Trying to solve any complex problem on Internet Time is like saying, "Pay me now or pay me later." Few quick solutions will scale or solve a problem in its entirety. If they do, it is largely because they were tailored so tightly that the problem gets solved at the expense of scalability, maintainability or extensibility. And this relentless focus on the short term will only come back to haunt your company.

Yes, you can indeed shorten the calendar cycle at times, but only by paying a price. This may strain my personal credibility with the 100-hour-a-week, options-laden technology crowd, but pushing your team to 20-hour days is a short-term solution that is not sustainable as a business matures. The end result of consistently driving technology development on Internet Time is poor quality output and, ultimately, self-selection of key resources as those who are continually trying to deliver against unachievable targets decide to leave in pursuit of life balance and personal sanity.