One way or another, I've been in the technology business for a long time. As a result, it's easy to assume that every company has bought into the benefits of various information technologies, and has deployed a significant number of those technologies as part of their day-to-day operations. While this is a fair assumption with larger companies that simply couldn't operate without a certain level of automation, there are still many companies that are operating in a manner that was common ten or twenty years ago.
I spent some time recently getting caught up with a person I met a couple of years ago while they were working for a client. This person made a move to a new employer in the last year, and was explaining how her new company has been operating without a primary line-of-business software system. They have instead been relying on a lot of Excel worksheets operated as ad-hoc databases developed by individual employees. My friend has been doing some much-needed education, demonstrating the power of a central database and the analytical power of SQL. The immediate result has been a great deal of enthusiasm, and a sudden recognition of how many company issues can be addressed by applying this technology. However, each issue and opportunity is being viewed in isolation, without looking for the commonality between them that could lead to an integrated IT architecture.
In hearing of this, I cannot help but recall how many businesses I've seen over the years who were struggling to bring some order to the chaos created by a multitude of technology "islands". While this case is increasingly rare, I think that even for companies well versed in the application of technologies to the solution of business problems, the tendency is to look at a specific issue and apply a technology to address it, without taking a broader view of the company's goals, objectives and challenges, and integrating the technology solutions into a coherent IT strategy.
Information technologies are by their very nature disruptive. Whenever a company adopts a disruptive technology, there is an opportunity to re-examine the company's processes and to engage in some re-engineering of those processes. You want the processes to shape the technology, not the other way around. In this way the company can ensure that the processes that the technology supports are appropriate to the overall goals and objectives of the company. Given the expense - both in time and money - of implementing a technology solution, the technology can have the effect of solidifying the process.
These dangers are multiplied when the technology solutions are applied to individual issues with little or no thought of integrating the solutions into the company's overall operations.
Just as it's important for a company to have a strategic plan, and to evaluate every business decision in terms of that plan, it's also important to have some sense of how the IT infrastructure fits into the company's strategic goals and tactical objectives. This allows decisions regarding the implementation of technology to be evaluated in an orderly, prioritized and integrated fashion, in support of longer-term issues. Irrational exuberance about the ability of technology to address specific problems can lead to a patchwork of sub-systems that will be difficult and expensive to integrate at a later time.
