The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

1.12. True IT Productivity

Let's back up for a moment and examine the parameters of the challenge I have just described. Your IT team will try desperately not to let you break what is already working—even if it means sacrificing real opportunities for streamlining operations, opening new markets, growing revenue, and increasing profitability.

Faced with this degree of resistance, what are your options? You could fire your IT team and hire new employees—who would quickly become indistinguishable from the old employees.

You could outsource your IT operations—and spend the remaining years of your career worrying about business continuity, security, and a host of other pesky issues that do not vanish merely because your IT department is now spread out over five continents.

Or you could deal with the problem directly at its source: You could improve the efficiency and reliability of your software development process.

If your software development processes were brought into the twenty-first century, there is a good chance that your IT team would lose its fear of change—because they would trust the processes that create or modify software.

When complex software systems can be changed, improved, or modified easily, you have achieved what I call true IT productivity. Anything short of true IT productivity is a sham—an illusion of stability that represents the temporary calm between storms.

True IT productivity enables continuous improvement. It requires a formal, standardized, and largely ...