Aligning Technology with Business for Digital Transformation

Plugging In IT to Light up your Business

Ashish Pachory

• Verlag: Business Expert Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781949991772
• Thema: Business
• Thema: IT Industry

This book focuses on developing alignment as the foundation for a successful digital enterprise.

Over the last decade, digital technology has made deep inroads into every walk of life, but perhaps nowhere more than in the world of business. Technology now plays an enhanced role in driving business success, creating an entirely new paradigm in which business and technology are inseparable. Enterprises must ride the digital wave without losing their grip on the business basics to stay afloat. In this environment, business outcome is heavily dependent on the close alignment between business and technology.

Aligning Technology with Business for Digital Transformation is a guide to discovering the power of business–technology alignment. Gleaned from decades of experience with global corporations that have shaped the current business–technology landscape, it covers an indispensable organizational requirement in a simple and relatable way.

The book focuses on developing alignment as the foundation for a successful digital enterprise. Interlaced with real-life examples and anecdotes, it should help not only organizations in unlocking their true potential but also individuals in building the skills and aptitude necessary for succeeding in the digital world.

CHAPTER 1

The Way Things Were…

The universe, they say, started with a Big Bang and went through a phase of hyperinflationary growth before things cooled down and the expansion rate stabilized. Once this happened, conditions evolved that produced stars, planets, life (at least here on Earth), and eventually, pockets of intelligence.

As it morphed into its present form, the universe also splintered into dimensions. There was no concept of space and time before the creation event. Don’t get alarmed yet—this is not a book on the physics of the Big Bang! The reason I bring up the subject in the opening lines is that the universe is the best model to explain the concept of hyperinflationary growth along multiple dimensions. As we shall see in later chapters, the concept of dimensions has a special significance for Business–IT alignment.

Let’s turn to Information Technology. Unlike the universe, Information Technology did not have very spectacular origins. There was no Big Bang. Information processing systems arrived on the scene around the middle of the twentieth century in successive stages. It was, however, not until the 1980s that computing and networking technology scaled up sufficiently to make computers accessible (easy-to-use) and feasible (fit-to-use) in the business environment. This intersection of technology with business released a continuous wave of evolution and adoption, which drove not just the growth of IT, but created, ultimately, an entirely new paradigm in which IT became inseparable from Business.

We will return to this subject, but for now, let us go back to the origins of IT and the way things were for the Business–IT ecosystem. While the first computer, called ENIAC, arrived in 1946 it would be inaccurate to say that it spawned an IT revolution. Continuous advancements led to computers finally emerging from highly specialized, dedicated, and often secret environments into the public domain on a time-share basis. IBM System 360 mainframe computer was a groundbreaking step in facilitating this movement as it heralded a shift from discrete transistors and relays to integrated circuits and a scalable architecture, forming the foundation for digital computing. CDC, DEC, HP, and others followed with their versions, and by about the early to mid-1970s, several scientific institutions and business corporations were relying on mainframe computers for input, output, storage, and processing of data. The sturdy mainframe remained well entrenched in our business, educational, financial, and research institutions at least up to the mid-1980s. These mainframes were sturdy machines built for bulk processing, but their display, retrieval, and information-sharing capabilities were quite limited, so printing was very central to computing.

The IT story is marked by significant and frequent generational shifts, driven by new technology. With each generation, things became simpler for the user, thus increasing the rate of adoption. Up to about 1980, there was a specialized group of people, notably computer engineers, scientists, and programmers, who alone could lay claim to knowledge of IT and its limited applications. Look where we are now with the adoption of IT. The story of the evolution of technology, helped by Moore’s law, is similar. What took a room full of hardware then, comfortably fits into your pocket now! This steady growth in technological evolution and the rate of adoption thus takes the form of an ice-cream cone when plotted on a timescale (Figure 1.1).

Many of us in our lifetimes have seen IT evolve from Mainframes to Mini-computers (mid-range batch-processing systems) to Client-Server architecture to Internet to Cloud computing. That is five generations of IT in one of ours! With the spawning of each new generation, the realization that IT can play a larger role than “keeping the light-bulb on” became further ingrained.

IT’s potential in the organization enlarged over the generations from an instrument of automation to a tool for productivity, and finally, an enabler of business. We are concerned in this book primarily with the emergence of IT as a business enabler. This happened around the fourth generation of IT.

Figure 1.1 IT evolution and adoption

In the early generations, the picture was starkly different from what we see today. Actually, there was no picture at all, as IT was completely invisible to all but itself. An IT (or EDP, which stands for Electronic Data Processing, as it was then called) department was where data was keyed-in manually from vouchers on to diskettes, which were fed into batch-processing computers running COBOL programs, with programmers within shouting distance always! In the background used to be boisterous line printers, always printing away on reams of lined paper. To this day, I wonder who consumed those reports and why! Then Y2K, the biggest damp squib in recorded history, happened and people woke up to the existence of IT, though no one was quite sure of its role in their lives.

In the above scenario, Business and IT existed in completely different, non-intersecting universes. The advent of PCs and rudimentary LAN made a case for IT to be seen (though still not heard) around the office. Even as IT was gaining some acceptance as an enhancer of office productivity in the early 1980s, it was still not in the realm of being a real business enabler. Business–IT Alignment was beyond even the remote reaches of imagination in those times.

Things started changing rather swiftly with the arrival of the public Internet around 1983. The operating word here is public, for the Internet had existed in a limited way since the late 1960s when the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) interconnected some university computers and created the first-ever network of computers, called ARPANET. The ARPANET served the interests of scientific users only and had limited extent. However, it was the earliest demonstration of packet-based communication, which means sending information in small units over different paths and reconstructing the units at the destination. This formed the basis of the TCP/IP (which is an acronym for the somewhat grandiloquent Transport Control Protocol over Internet Protocol, but you can ignore this. Just call it packet transfer), which allowed for orderly expansion to include more and more computers in the network. TCP/IP became the lifeline of what we now know as the Internet and is still used as the dominant protocol for Internet communication.

Two other things happened in the early 1980s that brought the Internet into the public arena. One, the creation of the World Wide Web enabling sharing of information (pages) over a TCP/IP network and two, the introduction of the web browser.

An understanding of the state of Business–Technology relationship in the pre-Internet era is an integral part of appreciating the power of Business–IT Alignment (BITA). For far too long, IT systems operated invisibly, run by the EDP staff. The other genre associated with IT was the computer scientist—the erudite product of a top technological institute whose work was mostly confined to research on how to build better computers and not on how to make better use of computers for business. Hence, most of these scientists went to work for technology firms, usually manufacturers of computer equipment, and not EDP.

In this scenario, most companies had no means to see beyond the usual invoice printing, management information system (MIS), and other routine batch-processing jobs performed by minicomputers (as per today’s standards they were mini in everything but size!) and there was very little attempt to exploit the power of computers for anything beyond mechanization of existing—mostly financial—processes. The following is an example from that era.

Example 1.1

A former colleague, presently a Vice-President with an IT infrastructure company in the United States, recalled this incident from 1984, when he was an IT maintenance engineer for minicomputer systems in Delhi, India. On getting a call from a customer—a textile yarn mill about 80 km outside Delhi—on a Saturday morning, he rushed to the site by bus. On arriving at the site, he was told by a flustered EDP manager that on the previous day (Friday), an urgent meeting had taken place between the company’s sales managers and the Finance Head, which ended with the decision to implement a new product-coding system for reporting itemized sales. It was further agreed that this would be the high point of the meeting with the managing director during his forthcoming visit next Tuesday (yes, three days later), where the sales based on the new categories would be presented for the first time.

There was no one from IT (EDP) present during that Friday meeting. However, it was cheerily stated by the Finance Head that “we have a computer, so we can easily do it. After all, what are computers for?” Now, these product codes were embedded in a variety of datasets, from material receipt notes to customer invoices. The change would need to be run on volumes of records stored on countless time-consuming tapes. With all the smart scripting that my friend and the EDP team tried, the job could not be done, and the EDP manager had the unpleasant task on Monday evening to ask for an additional 14 days from his boss, the Finance Head. My friend was told later that the meeting with the Managing Director on Tuesday did not go well for the Finance Head and commitments on some new product launches were slipped, which probably affected revenues and disconcerted the sales folks as well. It took days to recover from the effects of one wrong communication that could have been avoided had there been some alignment with IT either before or during a crucial meeting. But such instances were commonplace as IT did not merit a say on critical decisions that it was asked to implement.

As evident ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Abstract
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 01_Chapter 1
• 02_Chapter 2
• 03_Chapter 3
• 04_Chapter 4
• 05_Chapter 5
• 06_Chapter 6
• 07_Chapter 7
• 08_Chapter 8
• 09_Acronyms
• 10_Glossary of Terms
• 11_Reviews
• 12_References
• 13_ATA
• 14_Index
• 15_Adpage