Revolutionizing IT

Soundview Executive Book Summaries

Why is it so hard to gain concrete business benefits from Information Technology (IT)? Why do so many IT projects overrun budgets, miss schedule and fail to meet expectations? How can your organization ensure the success of its next IT undertaking? The authors of Revolutionizing IT, two information systems development experts, provide a simple yet profound set of management principles that will completely change the way you think about the management of technology. Most managers instinctively know that IT projects shouldn't be as complex as they always seem to become. This summary will help guide you through your next IT project, showing you how to Revolutionize IT Effectively — the RITE Way.

The pace of technology-driven change is not likely to slow. Each innovation cycle opens up opportunities for improving existing products or services or inventing new ones. Putting technology to use is an important management challenge. Managers must pay attention to information technology. Web sites must be created and updated, data must be collected and analyzed and software must be built linking it all together.

Unfortunately, advancing technology is creating opportunities at a faster rate than businesses can recognize and exploit them. This is because there is a large gap between recognizing an opportunity and taking advantage of it. The bridge across that gap is a project. And that project is most likely to succeed if you take the RITE (Revolutionizing IT Effectively) approach. The RITE approach is a collection of observations and principles designed to provide guidelines to those who make decisions regarding IT projects. Some of the most powerful principles of the RITE approach are:

1. Let time determine the scope of your project. Setting a time limit early on will save the project from becoming bloated and irrelevant.
2. Succeed through continual incremental improvements by letting projects mimic evolution. Change is evolutionary, and trying to make too large a leap into the future at once is doomed to failure. Improving parts of the system quickly is often better than overhauling the entire system at once.
3. Recycle proven concepts instead of reinventing them. Borrowing from others who have successfully solved a problem is often better than developing the same or another solution yourself.
4. Demand progress, not perfection. There are no perfect solutions but all good solutions bring progress.
5. Make end users fully accountable. It does no good to make consultants or the IT staff accountable for the success of a project. It is the end users who should be responsible since it is their problem that is presumably being solved by the project.

Before you embark on a major IT project, you must learn to guard against five unrealistic assumptions. These are:

• The environment will remain stable during the project. Unfortunately, long periods of stability are a thing of the past. Change is a constant. The organization will experience management turnover, product introduction, new competition, government regulation, lawsuits, natural disasters, and even terrorism. Technology will change. The longer the project, the more likely instability will enter the picture.
• End users can define in advance exactly what will be needed. This, too, is untrue. The first attempt to design anything complex is rarely very good, even when done by experts. And end-users aren't experts with the ability to design complex systems. Design engineers don't ask users to create and approve the technical specifications for cars and airplanes. Prototypes are built and tested instead. The people currently using the system may not be capable of defining appropriate requirements for a better business process.
• Complex problems can be solved completely on the first attempt. It's not that simple. Most plans are imperfect.
• Requirements can be precisely defined before packaged software is selected. This, too, is untrue. This expectation arose in a time when most software was custom-designed by in-house programmers. Better to select a package faster than to spend time and money trying to define the exact requirements — a futile task at this point.
• Users will cheerfully accept changes in their work environment. This, too, isn't the case. People fear and resist change.

The way that projects proceed under the RITE approach includes the following steps:

• Create a long-term vision. But don't spend a lot of time making it perfect. Expect that no vision is flawless.
• Evaluate the environment. Estimate how much time will pass before the next major environmental change will occur.
• Break down the problem. What are the most important goals of the effort. Are there opportunities to quickly make high-impact near-term improvements.
• Plan the first step.
• Iterate activities as needed.Build and test anything new in manageable increments.
• Make it happen! The first operational deployment needs to arrive quickly and create positive momentum.
• Evaluate and adjust. Once an increment of the ultimate solution is operational, reevaluate.
• Update the vision. See how it stacks up to what has happened and update as needed.
• Plan the next phase.

Using the RITE approach, the first step is to assign a task force to examine the issue and formulate a high-level view of the issue and how it might be solved. The RITE approach is based on the principle that the best plans are made rapidly by a small group of people. Less than five is ideal, fewer than 10 is essential. They should understand that plans will be imperfect regardless of how much time or resources are invested. The task force should be encouraged to come up with solutions that can be put into place immediately. They need to know that a project isn't the only possible outcome. If they do conclude a project is needed, they must first develop a broad view of the ultimate solution — the long-term vision. Then they decide what the first steps toward that vision will be. Copyright © 2003 Soundview Executive Book Summaries