IT Challenges: 2009-2010
September 25th, 2009 by Hugh Kennedy
Late this summer, we asked the PJA Global Online IT Panel a simple question: “What’s your biggest IT challenge right now?”
As you might imagine, every member replied, because what is an IT professional’s life if not a shuttling from one challenge to another?
The responses suggested their own taxonomy, but what surprised me was the way that all four categories — applications, integration, financial and cultural challenges — got equal billing. You might think these days that the down economy was all IT was thinking about, but not so. What’s interesting as well is the way that these responses sound similar themes whether they’re coming from a BI architect in a large California company or a local government IT director in La Coruna, Spain.
The Application Challenges
Among the applications that are keeping people late to dinner: Windows 7, SOA, PeopleSoft (“their documentation is not very helpful,” claims one IT information specialist), and SAP, according to a Senior IT Business Analyst in logistics and transportation: “We have a highly customized SAP solution. Keeping it running is always a challenge. Plus, we are planning to implement SCM, and are preparing to try and re-configure our current setup to use more standard SAP functionality.” Keeping up with all of the latest technology that is released on a constant basis is another problem, as is “the lack of vendors embracing open source software, browsers and other applications.”
The Integration Challenges
This sort of reply is common, from a government participant: “We are caught up in a data center migration for all our agencies to move to a centralized data center. We have hundreds of applications on various platforms in various versions of the platforms. It’s a logistical nightmare.” “Consolidating and integrating multiple finance data warehouses into a single, unified data warehouse” is something IT still struggles with (hope they’ve got their metadata in order first), as is streamlining processes.
The Financial Challenges
Money is tight, of course, as we crawl our way out of the Great Recession. For some IT it’s “getting management to fund new projects and technology updates,” for others it’s “maintaining information infrastructure under the current budget pressures.” Short money also wreaks havoc with “project prioritization,” though for companies as a whole, IT’s role in helping to “win business during the recession” is an anxiety, too. Finally, doing more with less continues to be a priority, or as one participant put a fine point on it, “getting more results with a big budget reduction.”
The Cultural Challenges
Finally, there is the undercurrent we all know too well in IT: looking like strategic players in the business while we try to sell the value of “implementing policy and standards, implementing change, keeping up with new developments, moving our enterprise to Agile, creating a reference architecture for the organization, convincing internal clients of best practices,” and perhaps most of all these days, “keeping team morale high.”
Hearing all these responses brought me back to a conversation I had this summer with a recently retired CIO in a farmhouse near St. Gimingnano in Tuscany. When I asked him what his days were like, he responded without hesitation:
“I was just trying to get through each day serving four different audiences:
* The management team, who are only really thinking about one thing, and you’re a fool if you assume they’re thinking about anything else: Will I make my bonus this year?
* The users, who only wonder why things don’t work and assure themselves they can do it better than you at less cost
* The IT staff, who just want to do cool technical shit
* The vendors, who claim they offer service but are usually more concerned with how much money they can extract from you.”
A jaundiced view? Undoubtedly, but it served to remind me that everything old is new in IT, just like it is everywhere else.
