It’s Time for CIOs (and McKinsey) to Get a New Playbook

Jeff Hammond at Forrester, an independent technology and market research company, recently wrote an article in Information Week about, ‘What Developers Think’.  The article recapped the results of a survey Forrester did with Dr. Dobb's where they asked ‘more than 1,000 platform-agnostic, programming-language-independent Dr. Dobb's readers’ a lot of things and then identified seven trends that could have major implications for IT strategy. The summary of the survey results says it all:

‘Software developers are adopting new technologies or techniques including RIAs, virtualization and Agile development. They're using and contributing to open source projects, and challenging the conventions that underpin the way enterprise software and tools are built and sold. This transition will accelerate as developer tech populism takes hold and drives the adoption of new development approaches related to cloud computing, scale-out architectures that can accommodate change and mobile Web applications.'

Great stuff! As a manager/director/executive for these kind of folks, your message couldn’t be clearer: you need a different gameplan than the long-term, high-risk approaches you’ve used in the past. 'Scrum' is in, the waterfall model is out.

But just when it seems IT is going to shake off the reputation as a group to work ‘around’ and not ‘with’, the folks at management consulting firm McKinsey go and fumble the ball in ‘Data to Dollars’. To me this advice reads like a ‘How NOT To Guide’ for CIOs.  (You’ll have to register on McKinsey's site to read the entire 8-page paper.)

The intent of this paper is certainly worthy: ‘Chief information officers have a chance to expand their influence as the mediators between business requirements and IT capabilities.’ And, at first glance, I was pretty sure they were going to talk the same talk as Mr. Hammond. You know, replacing the old top-down, big-bang playbook with one that emphasizes speed and agility. Boy, was I sorely disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a McKinsey-hater. I’ve quoted their work before. And in this case McKinsey gives good lip-service to getting the ‘right data to the right people.’ But the core of the paper simply describes a complete top-to-bottom rebuild of your information architecture. In other words, McKinsey believes that if what you have sucks, you should go and re-architect the entire thing AGAIN.  Big bang, big bucks, and most likely another big flop.

In 2 pain-staking pages they describe a model project that is a freakin’ HUGE effort (excuse my hyperbole). It includes, among other things, a new data warehouse, a system-wide data quality effort, new application-to-application integration, interface rebuilds of existing applications and a new highly-structured reporting system. And all of it built by good ole IT for the benefit of the users.  Wow, if I ever longed for the early 90's, this cured me.

I know of a few organizations that might benefit from old-school top-down, big-bang decision-support efforts. But if I were a CIO today, I’d think twice before throwing a Hail Mary pass like that. This isn’t the fast, responsive approach your users want or that your developers are adopting. Today’s IT coaches need to be nimble and quick.