The Agile Executive

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ross/3055802287/

Figure 1: Consumerization of IT

The devastation in traditional Publishing needs precious little mentioning. Just think about a brand like BusinessWeek selling for a meager cash offer in the $2 million to $5 million range, McGraw Hill getting into interactive text books through Inkling or Flipboard delivering “… your personalized social magazine” to your iPad. This devastation might not have gotten the attention that the plight of the ‘big three’ automobile manufacturers got, but in its own way it is as shocking as a visit to the abandoned properties in Detroit is.

As most of my clients do enterprise software, many of my discussions with them is about the consumerization of IT. From a day-to-day perspective this consumerization is primarily about six aspects:

• Use of less expensive/consumer-focused components as infrastructure
• ‘Pay as you go’ pricing (through Cloud pricing mechanisms/policies)
• Use of web application interfaces to monitor IT infrastructure
• Use of mobile and consumer based devices for accessing IT alerts and interfacing with systems
• Use of the fast growing number of mobile applications to enhance productivity
• Application of enterprise social networks and social software in the data center

From a strategic perspective, IT consumerization IMHO is all about the transformation toward “everything as a service” [1]. The virtuous cycle driven by Cloud, Mobile and Social manifests itself at three levels:

• It obviously affects the IT folks with whom I discuss the subject. Immense changes are already taking place in many IT departments.
• It affects their company. For example, the company might need to change the business design in order to optimize its supply chain.
• It affects the clients of their company. Their definition of value changes these days faster than the time it takes the CIO I speak with to say “value.”

© Copyright 2010 Israel Gat

Figure 2: The Virtuous Cycle of Cloud, Mobile and Social

Sometimes I get a push-back from my clients on this topic. The push-back is usually rooted in the immense complexity (and fragility) of the enterprise software systems that had been built over the past ten, twenty or thirty years. The folks who push back on me point out that consumerization of IT will not scale big time until enterprise software gets “consumerized” or at least modernized.

I agree with this good counter-point but only up to a point. I believe two factors are likely to accelerate the pace toward “consumerization” of enterprise software:

1. Any department/business unit that can get a service in entirety from an outside source is likely to do so without worrying about enterprise software and/or data center considerations. This is already happening in Marketing. As other functions start doing so, more and more links in the value chain of enterprise software will be “consumerized.” In other words, these services will be carried out without the involvement of the IT department.
2. Once the switch-over costs from legacy code to state-of-the-art code are less than the steady state costs (to maintain and update legacy code), the “consumerization” of enterprise software is going to happen with ferocious urgency.

If you are in enterprise software you need to start modernizing your applications today. The reason is the imperative need to mitigate risk prior to reaching the end-point, almost irrespective of how far down the road the end-point might be.  See Llewellyn Falco‘s excellent video clip Rewriting Vs Refactoring for a crisp articulation of the risk involved in rewriting and why starting to refactor now is the best way to mitigate the risk.

Footnotes:

[1] The phrase “Everything as a Service” has been coined by Russ Daniels.