Jon Collins, Neil Macehiter - The Technology Garden: Cultivating Sustainable IT-Business Alignment

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Jon Collins, Neil Macehiter - The Technology Garden: Cultivating Sustainable IT-Business Alignment

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What is it about Information Technology (IT) that makes it so difficult to deliver? Of
course, technology can be difficult and complex, but then, so can be engineering, genetics
or any number of other disciplines. As we started developing the ideas in this book, we
spent some time thinking about what was going wrong. Indeed, the entire volume could
have been about war stories, tales from the front lines of IT failure, but that wouldn’t be
too helpful. Instead, we turned our cogitations to the causes of that failure and what could
be done to address them.
There is frequent talk in computing circles that the mainframe guys had it right in terms
of computer design and that very little has been invented since then. While plenty of
good might have come out of the 1970s, perhaps one less-than-positive legacy is the
notion that computers and other technologies can, in some way, be built to last: Once
deployed, they can be left well alone. The last couple of decades have shown us that
nothing could be further from the truth; however, many organisations still act as if it
were so.
Even the failings of IT are generally bounded within discrete projects – like medieval
cathedral builders or motorcar manufacturers, the suggestion is that the end result will
somehow be fixed in time. The computing press is full of examples of projects that
have failed to deliver, but this attention masks the bigger problem: Even projects
delivered to time and to budget deliver a disappointing service and poor returns on the
original investment. Perhaps it is a psychological trait, a combination of denial and
making do, which leads to the belief that things will be different this time, and that
somehow, IT will start to fit the definition of what it should be, rather than what it is
known to be.