The CEO of an IT consultancy once recounted to me the blow-by-blow of a difficult conversation he’d had with a client CEO, the head of an auto parts company. It was at the midpoint of a traumatic IT project, an experience all too familiar to many of us in the industry. The remarks of the frustrated client CEO proceeded along the following lines (this paraphrasing omits many colorful "colloquialisms"):

"When I build a new parts plant, I’m told how much it’s going to cost, how long it’s going to take and what it will do when it’s done. Sometimes we have problems, but the people in charge come pretty close to doing what they say they will. Even if they don’t, it’s for a good reason that I can see and understand. Why can’t I buy a new computer system that way? Why can’t I get you IT people to work like that?"

It’s a good question. Why can’t IT people—whether they are developing custom software, installing an off-the-shelf package or upgrading infrastructure—work like that?

As IT executives, you must have heard many variations on this theme. Maybe you’ve trumpeted the theme yourself. Shouldn’t IT involve less art and more science? Shouldn’t it be more like real engineering? Why aren’t IT processes repeatable? Why are they so immature? If a car worked the way a computer system does, goes the oft-forwarded Internet joke, you’d have a major accident three times a day and have to fix the car by switching it off and then back on. Absurd.

So will IT "grow up" someday so that implementations involve the orderly, disciplined and predictable sorts of processes that we achieve in engineering and factory settings? Let me go on record here and now: It won’t happen. At least not in the way these comparisons—between building a parts plant and building a computer system—suggest. It’s not as simple as that, and the idea that it is prevents us from making much-needed progress.

IT is different in important ways from many other familiar domains, and it needs to be managed differently. Until we make adjustments to our management processes and explain them satisfactorily to our customers, we’ll continue on a treadmill of high failure rates and frustrated clients.

You Can’t Always Know What You Want

Ask an experienced manufacturing engineer from the above mentioned auto parts company what he wants a new parts plant to do, and he will likely be able to provide hours of detailed description. He’ll have a tangible, physical sense of the specifics. But ask the same engineer what he wants from a new IT system, and you’ll get a different reaction: You’ll get ideas, but they won’t be as specific or as extensive.