Architecture, Policy, Governance, Strategy

A theme that runs through several articles this month is the increasing need for IT to work harder than ever before to understand the requirements of business units and individual users. This has always been critical to IT’s success, but the issue continues to arise in new areas.

One reason for this is that IT is getting more tools for implementing business priorities. In this issue, Robin Layland writes about the emerging market for data leakage protection software. These relatively new software packages are designed to let IT be more effective in preventing the loss of personal customer or employee information, or the misappropriation of internal corporate data. But to use these tools to maximum benefit, IT has to have a clear picture of corporate priorities and policies beyond obvious concerns like Social Security numbers and medical records.

Similarly, Peter Sevcik and Rebecca Wetzel report on an end user survey on application performance management. Peter and Rebecca found that implementing some best practices around APM is indeed likely to result in better performance and greater satisfaction for the applications’ end users. And in his column, Peter takes off from these findings, and demonstrates how the Apdex methodology can help you uncover areas of sub-par performance.

Finally, in the second of a two-part article, “Security Architectures And The New IT Organization,” end user Stuart Berman shows how his organization was able to work with the company’s business units to implement strong security systems even in an environment of IT budget cuts. Stuart’s organization used internal chargeback and external outsourced services to provide the needed resources.

Stuart Berman holds up GM’s security groups as a model for the “new IT organization.” He wrote that, “They have no servers, no datacenters and very few security staff. The staff they have are dealing with architecture, policy, governance and strategy development.”

That sounds like a pretty good job description for much of what the IT department is likely to become over the next few years. Not every company will go as far as GM has gone in terms of outsourcing these capabilities; every enterprise will face its own cost/benefit decisions in this area. (Though Stuart Berman concludes, “Let me assure you that our focus is always on cost containment and that we continue to find evidence that we are adopting the inevitable.”)

IT “plumbing” may have become commoditized, leading some to agree with the thesis that “IT doesn’t matter.” But IT does matter, and will always matter, when it’s focused on those four areas—architecture, policy, governance and strategy development.