The Secrets of IT Success: Transforming Companies
A $200 million contract to implement a new system for handling welfare payments for the state of Colorado improperly cuts off some recipients, denies food stamps to deserving families, and overpays others by as much as $10 million. Implementation of a national online system for recording births, deaths, and marriages in the United Kingdom was halted after, among other faults, the system failed to adequately check teachers’ criminal records, thus allowing convicted molesters to work in classrooms. Events such as these have occurred regularly for years, resulting in a growing and widespread concern that big IT projects are likely to fail.
For the most part, the criticisms of many IT projects are valid. But, perhaps too little attention has been paid to the fact that many IT projects do succeed. In fact, no IT project, large or small, fails completely or succeeds completely. But this should not obscure the fact that well-developed, disciplined, and tried-and-proven methodologies for successfully managing IT projects—and reducing IT risk—do exist. Best practices of these methods can be distilled into three major phases and a set of defined characteristics.
Research into the nature of winning IT projects has identified several common characteristics, including alignment with business goals and strong technical design. One foundation of successful IT engineering that receives comparatively little attention is the presence of a universal language that can be used to describe a project’s goals and methods to everyone affected by it.
Just about any corporate executive or employee can relate to goals such as simplification and agility, and most can easily understand how improving customer service or productivity can help achieve them. Translating the language of IT into (and from) the language of operational intent is a critical task for the successful IT engineer. How critical? The fact that IT missteps are so common despite the fact many IT engineers are familiar with well-researched failings—such as weak alignment with business needs—indicates that there has to be something more to it. That something is a universal language.
Creating a universal language sounds like a challenging task, and it is. Consider, for instance, the IT consulting firm charged with developing a common reporting tool for a European logistics and services multinational with 550,000 employees operating in 220 countries. Under these circumstances, a common language is clearly both essential and, to say the least, challenging. Yet, with the help of visual models, the job was completed successfully, including training 2,000 global employees in the use of the new system—and in only eighteen months. Creating this universal language for describing deliverables is not a one-way process. IT engineers must get hands-on, boots-on-the-ground familiarity with stakeholders at many different levels of the organization that is to be transformed. Meetings, dialogue, and feedback from grass roots to C-level is a key part of this development effort.
There is more. To be consistently successful across a broad range of industries and applications, IT project engineering life cycles must address three major, integrated phases.
STEP 1: It must address the community in which the solution will operate. It must understand the needs of the customers, the supply chain, and the transactions necessary for the day-to-day running of the business.
STEP 2: Working with the organizational stakeholders, it should understand and categorize the operations of the organization, decomposing the business into activities, business rules, and technologies.
STEP 3: Finally, it must grapple with the technical requirements of the system.
A closer look at each of these three elements reveals details of how this engineering is to be accomplished.
COMMUNITY ANALYSIS
All organizations operate in a community consisting of customers, suppliers, partners, and other entities. These members exchange quantities of information, products, and services that are also key elements of the community. Technologies, including legacy systems, are included in the community, as well as current and future capabilities that are to be addressed.
Analyzing and understanding the community in which the enterprise operates is enhanced with building visual models of the enterprise operating in its community and developing inventories of the technical, user, and capability assets. In this sense, community includes people and other entities, information transactions, technologies, capabilities, and assigned roles.
Community analysis is understandably more complex when dealing with large, multinational, or governmental entities. But the principles are the same whether the organization is large and global, small and local, old or new. To generate understanding on both the business and IT sides of the equation, to capture organizational goals comprehensively, and to enable effective training and buy-in, IT analysts and engineers must identify with and embrace the community to be transformed.
OPERATIONS ANALYSIS
To get the enterprise from where it is today to where it needs to be in the future requires a deep understanding of the operational activities, capabilities, and business processes. This work is the focus of the operations analysis phase. Here work activities are identified, captured, and catalogued so that information flows, technologies, roles, and other processes and elements can be accurately mapped. The analytical results from this phase give a clear perspective to move from the business’s needs to the requirements of the new technology that will need to be implemented. Community is, in this sense, the wellspring of IT success.\
Operational analysis is central to making fundamental choices, such as whether to introduce a large and complex new system or to build pipelines to allow existing systems to work more synergistically and effectively together. Clearly, neither solution is appropriate for every situation, and the same can be said of many other choices that must be made in IT implementations. Operational priorities and requirements drive these choices, and understanding the nature of full enterprise operations greatly increases the success rates of IT projects.
TECHNOLOGY ANALYSIS
Analyzing the systems is the most familiar part of this process for many IT project engineers. This phase is where technical needs are defined and blueprinted, and their intersections with business rules are specified. It’s critical in this phase to make sure that the original purpose and operational objective of the project, as well as the intent of the user need, is recognized and incorporated into the final solutions.
Effective systems analysis means more than looking at technical systems. A multidimensional analytical view encompassing user workflow, technologies, data, security, business rules, and interfaces can greatly enhance the pure IT view of transformation. Engineers have to examine the behaviors between data exchanges, applications, workflow, and other aspects of the operational activities, beyond hardware and software. Business analysis skills will come to the fore, and an ability to accurately assess technical and operational risks and rewards is of particular value.
None of these elements exists alone. For example, systems analysis must take into consideration sometimes very large user communities, as was the case with a federal government benefit information portal designed to be used by millions of ordinary citizens. Keeping this system usable for both citizens and the technicians who would maintain it had to also mesh with the operational needs of the entire project.
In all three phases, a key ingredient is supplying a visual tool as part of the universal language that will be used throughout the project to facilitate clear communications between members of the community affected by it. Consistent and unambiguous visual expressions of the operational need and intent immeasurably enhance the likelihood of a successful IT implementation.
CHANGING THE PERSPECTIVE ON IT
The IT industry has operated for many years under the cloud of the understanding that many IT projects are likely to fail. It’s natural that if the IT industry does nothing to change this perspective, we must assume that beliefs will continue in this way. However, now IT customers are looking at the way projects in other engineering areas are managed and wondering why they cannot achieve the same successes in their own information technology initiatives.
This attitude is translating into increased oversight of IT projects, more rigorous analysis of the operational environment, and the introduction of demanding benchmarks that must be achieved on the way to completion of even medium sized projects. The development of effective best practices for IT projects (large and small) has been needed for some time. Now that they are here, expect them to become standards to which an increasing number of IT projects will have to adhere.
The headlines about IT project failure rates haven’t stopped yet, and probably never will. But an even moderately inclusive survey of IT news reveals that successes are also there and are being recognized. Some are truly outstanding transformational experiences such as an Asian bank rendered nearly insolvent by regional economic crisis restructures itself around a shared services model for hundreds of branches, helping it slash costs and re-emerge as a global leader.
While these success stories may not be the norm today, it would be a mistake for IT engineers to assume that they can continue with the faulty track record of yesterday. Impatience with unsuccessful IT initiatives, while long-delayed, is building. The good news is that a methodology for consistent IT project success is here, and better news for the IT industry is not far behind.
Don Schaefer (schaefer_don@bah.com) is a principal at Booz Allen Hamilton with expertise in large-scale systems engineering and transformation. Steve Tulk (tulk_steve@bah.com) is a senior associate at the firm with expertise in requirements engineering and enterprise architecture. Booz Allen Hamilton has been at the forefront of management consulting for businesses and governments for more than ninety years. The firm provides consulting services in strategy, operations, organization and strategy, and information technology. More information is available at www.boozallen.com.
