Thursday, October 9, 2008

Forging a New Alliance

At ThoughtWorks quarterly conference, Scott Shaw and Martin Fowler discussed the communication gap that exists between IT and the business side. Originally, IT department was created to centralize desktop administration and to gather MIS data. IT managed billing systems, accounting system or data processing on a centralized computer system. Things changed with the introduction of the PC. A broader range of business functionality came under IT functionality. Martin predicts that custom application provision will see IT department effectively disappear. Commodity standard stuff will move to the cloud and get hosted in a data center while custom software will move closer to the business side and the way to thrive in the IT world is to move closer to the business people.

Next they discuss some disturbing trends in IT that result in this communication divide between business and IT.

1. Slow to market: They note statistics that show about 34% of IT projects are successful. Here success is defined as on time and on budget. Martin notes that success should really be measured as providing value. They also show an input value stream that shows a typical example in which out of 90 days, 18 days are spent adding value and 70 days are spent in waste (waiting for handoffs). To have a successful rapid feedback loop, you need to have minimal latency.

2. Bloatware: This investment in large software platform that is intended to make it more responsive to the business. They give examples showing the same platforms growing to 200x their original size over the past 15 years, yet they mostly still provide the same business value.

3. War for talent: People fleeing the industry. The job is really boring. We took thinking and the design part away from people writing the code. There is no sense of ownership or context around what they are doing.

Next they cover some encouraging trends:

Collaborative team: Face to face communication, joint ownership of outcome, multi skilled people where developers can code and learn business domain (Make jog more interesting because of variety of task), and continuous improvements (plan, do, check). This results in better responsiveness, richer communication, higher quality, and improved staff retention.

Rise of craftsmanship: Master apprentice relationship. Attention to tools and quality and simplicity. Polyglot programmers. Software is all about design. Design is important because of its role in the long term of things. We should not see software as a cycle of building something and then it is delivered and we do not see it again. There should not be a disconnect between building and supporting something. Looking at long term brings out importance of design. It is important to have a code base that can absorb changes and gives the right degree of long term horizon to think of investments.

Perpetual beta: get software out there for people to try, fund things incrementally. Get away from project mentality and move towards product support mentality.

User experience design: 65% of features are rarely or never used Standish group. Bring user experience design into the iterative cycle of user needs analysis, collaborative design with users, design refinements, and test with users.

Domain Driven Design: enhance communication of internals of software. Use same language between business people and developers.

Domain Specific languages: makes the code readable to the business side making it easier for them to understand the code and improves communication.

They also gave several examples of case studies where these trends have helped out. They conclude that today business and IT are separate. In 2020 business and IT will come much closer to together. How are we going to survive the post IT world? What techniques and approaches are we going to use?

This presentation is available on InfoQ at  http://www.infoq.com/presentations/New-Alliance-Shaw-Fowler