Loosening Control – Increasing the Grey

Gartner’s High-Performance Workplace Blog highlights a voice I am seeing grow around IT: IT Must Loosen Control Without Loosing Control:

When I talk with customers about how to achieve a high-performance workplace (HPW), one of the hardest things for them to deal with is the need to loosen up on some control issues, and how to do that without losing control completely. This is natural. For the past several years, CEOs and CFOs have been asking CIOs to reduce costs, reduce risk, ensure compliance and generally take tighter control of users. This has resulted in locked-down desktops, strict TCO and ROI procedures, and tight IT procedures all around. The result is that IT has collectively become “The Abominable No Man”’ in many organizations, better at refusing or blocking any initiative than facilitating it.

We cannot stay on this trajectory. The complexity of the business and IT environments is too overwhelming to pursue the myth of total control. There are too many variables and influences to permit anyone to control all inputs. Even if we could, that would be a bad thing. Real innovation is coming from unexpected and not totally understood areas, such as Web 2.0 and consumer-oriented collaboration facilities. To block access to these is counterproductive and, ultimately, futile. Increasingly, many users see access restrictions as similar to network faults: a minor irritation to route around.

I love the phrase “The Abominable No Man”.

So many IT environments are stuck between major refresh and transformation programmes. No change can occur without the large scale testing and control of a large programme, but the environment has to be in a real mess before the pain of a large programme outweighs the pain of keeping things as they are.

When the large programmes does get initiated is does a good job of delivering generic capabilities. Anything that is innovative or complicated will be squeezed out by the needs of the generic.

However hard the corporate IT environment runs it can never deliver the same breadth of capabilities as the Internet. One of the major drivers for adoption of Web 2.0 type services is not that they are better than what the corporate IT organisation could provide, it’s simply that they are available.

The problem for IT organisations is that they are stuck between reducing costs and be innovative. in my experience it never works when conflicting requirements are placed on an organisation – one will always win. In my experience it’s always cost reduction that wins. That why I think that the really smart organisations will not place the conflicting requirements into one organisation, they will run an IT organisation and an innovation organisation (that may well also deliver IT). I’ve written about this previously in the context of CIO’s delivering value rather than just reducing cost. I just don’t see it myself. Engineering organisations don’t have the operation organisation design the new product. The operational organisation are involved but they aren’t setting the agenda that’s the job of the product development organisation.

The problem with loosening control is that IT organisations are generally not good at dealing with grey, they like things to be black and white. They have to deal with grey every day, but they are never comfortable with it. Loosening control requires the addition of a whole load more grey. Perhaps that’s where the versatilists come in .