How Force.com enables an analyst-driven approach to development projects

Michael W. Topalovich, CTO
Delivered Innovation

For years, the rallying cry for the CIO has been to align IT with “The Business.”  This presupposes that there is a wall between IT and other functions and processes within an organization, which of course we know to be the case. While nearly every business function that lives in its own silo has challenges integrating with other functions within the organization, IT has been particularly challenged because of the technology-centric reality of its world; while other functions may not necessarily have a direct impact on the value chain, IT is often viewed as being completely disconnected from it in many organizations.

Technology vendors have long targeted the CIO with messaging that implies an understanding of ITs alignment pain, and they have offered myriad remedies for closing the gap between IT and the underlying business processes that create value in an organization. Everything from enterprise applications to network management tools have promised to lead beleagured CIOs to the Shangri-La of “IT-Business-Alignment.”  Ironically, the technology with the most promise for bridging the IT-business divide has been right here under our noses, but only a relative handful of visionary organizations have embraced it to drive business value.

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George Gilbert: Private Clouds: IT Operations Finally Meet Moore’s Law

This is a really well-written post from George Gilbert and Juergen Urbanski of TechAlpha.  The point made is that our ability to innovate in the cloud is not constrained by available technology, but by cumbersome IT service delivery models and processes.  While on the surface this may not sound like groundbreaking analysis, the depth to which Gilbert and Urbanski explain the issue allows us to conceptually separate the underlying costs of managing infrastructure versus what we have accepted as the predominant value proposition of cloud computing – which is that infrastructure is standardized and commodified, therefore no longer necessary in the context of procuring and provisioning applications.  This is an important distinction, because infrastructure is not just going to go away…and IT operations is the biggest bottleneck currently keeping organizations from fully embracing the power of the cloud and leveraging new technology for business growth.  And far from simply being a descriptive overview of such challenges, the authors also give a clear prescriptive vision of some strategies that can be employed to evolve the IT service delivery model to align it with the exponential curve of technology improvement.

Three key points:

Moore’s Law has enabled new applications by powering computing on an exponential price/performance curve. But increasingly, the proliferation of a new generation of large-scale applications is being constrained by another price/performance curve that hasn’t shown much improvement: IT operations and the cost of delivery.

To [Timothy Chou, ex-president of Oracle OnDemand], the key promise of the cloud is to reduce the cost of delivering applications by improving IT operations.

IT administrators have traditionally organized themselves into server, storage, network and application tribes. Dramatically reducing the cost of IT operations will require unprecedented levels of standardization, specialization and automation across these traditional administrative silos.

I tend to have very spirited philosophical discussions with Jon Sapir from Power in the Cloud / SilverTree Systems, and as much as he tries to get me to blog about some of this stuff, I tend to put it off indefinitely.  Just came across this thread and thought there were some important thoughts to build off of:

The old / traditional approach had a lot more players involved…I always envision enterprise IT as two funnels connected at the most narrow point, with one funnel being IT and the other being “the business.”  On the IT side, the fat part of the funnel is web programmers, platform programmers, DBA’s, etc.; the connection to the business side is the program manager, who takes specs from the business program manager and hands it off to a lead architect, who then disseminates pieces to platform / application / database architects, who then give specs to the relevant coders, who are then checked by a parallel QA organization that is segmented similarly by function.  On the business side, the program manager is connected with a business process architect who assembles requirements from lead business analysts representing the business functions involved with the system, who then fan out to all of the end users of the specific functions / departments to gather feature / function / interface requirements / feedback.  And scattered throughout is about a dozen project managers, each running their own project schedule for their piece of the world.

Force.com disconnects the business users from the stack, eliminating the direct involvement of IT and changing IT’s role to one of data / process governance + management.  In some organizations IT may still provide the programmer, but in many cases the business architect will directly design the system, and the analysts will configure the system to the specific needs of their constituents.

The future piece further abstracts the business from IT, pushing governance to the periphery of the business where it is managed by analysts and designed by the business architect to overlay horizontal, end-to-end processes rather than a vertical / function-driven organizational structure.  IT may provide technical services, but the internal IT organization, for all intents and purposes, is just one of many service providers that the business provisions IT services from.  In the most likely scenario, IT manages the connectivity to the cloud, data/information security policies and overall governance, and potentially manages the service delivery / financial relationships with cloud providers.

Does this sound like a reasonable description of most enterprise service delivery processes?  Is management and governance the role that IT will take on?  Will IT simply become a service provisioned directly by business process owners?  Does SaaS / PaaS / cloud computing really make such a significant impact on organizational and business process structure?  For every answer we come up with, there are about five new questions.