Flexibility and quality of IT delivery

Today’s IT infrastructures, as well as corresponding organizations and processes, are often too rigid. Time-to-market is especially important in today’s fast changing business environment, where innovation, driven by new IT technologies, becomes an increasingly important competitive advantage. 

Today, many CIOs try to increase their IT flexibility by using agile and iterative development methods, such as Scrum and RUP. 

We have observed that often more weight is given to the theory of sophisticated development processes than to roll-out and operationalization. We think that companies should start small in theory, but should operationalize quickly. People and corporate culture are of the essence to improving agility. Project leaders and developers need to understand the overall goals; they need to know that risk-based iterations are more important than just using a new standardized documentation template. 

Outsourcing parts of IT is another approach to increasing IT flexibility. We are convinced that outsourcing can be a good decision and may increase flexibility, but it is a very difficult undertaking and many companies fail to reap the benefits. Defining and ensuring the service quality is one of the biggest challenges. Outsourcing works only if quality control is applied rigorously. We are also convinced that, in many cases, some applications and technical architecture functions, as well as software management functions, should remain in-house. 

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a flexibility-related buzzword that is often misused. SOA has been a popular term for quite some time now, but we still see only a few service landscapes that consist of reusable services. If SOA efforts are not done right, they may well result in lower performance because of protocol overhead, or in reduced flexibility because versioning is not in place and dependencies are not managed well.  

By getting the granularity of the services right, implementing versioning, designing the services to outlast future applications and implementing new protocols where necessary, SOA can well be successful. It is a difficult process, but it is the path to SOA making sense.  

Cloud: it is remarkable how such a simple term associated with bad weather and rain can be so popular. Why is this? We know that cloud computing promises to deliver exactly what many CIOs and business managers are looking for: to buy just what they need – that is, a platform or a service – without needing to care about its implementation, future capacity, fail-safeness or infrastructure architecture.

Of course, the reality is different and CIOs must still care. Using cloud services without having strict service level agreements or an overall business architecture, as well as IT and security architecture in place, will result in even more inflexibility and high costs in the future, caused by vendor lock-ins, insecure access, identity management challenges or architecture incompatibilities.

We are certain that cloud computing will change the IT landscape despite these issues. The democratizing force of the cloud nurtures innovative services that would never have materialized in the days of a few gigantic companies dominating the whole enterprise software market. We think that ‘platform as a service’ can increase the flexibility of an IT department if companies have implementation concepts in place before they start using cloud services.

Acrea’s experience in improving IT flexibility will help you identify the major stumbling blocks on the way to your flexibility strategy and ensure you receive the most benefit from it.