Recently two IT buddies and I were playing golf (between the three of us we have 80+ years of IT experience…we’re all under the age of 60). The topic of discussion: ITIL, SOA and other related issues.
What struck us all as funny: Most large firms had or were implementing these practices 20 years ago. These and other “programs” were born out of the mainframe era. Funnier still: while technology has advanced, the problems and challenges faced by IT Management have not changed significantly. The world of IT seems to re-invent the wheel each generation.
Three lessons learned:
1) IT Best practices are useless if they are not tied to and do not further the business strategy.
2) Benchmarking of costs or performance against other organizations is pretty much irrelevant if the other organizations don’t share your goals or business strategy.
3) You can spend a lot of money implementing what is now called ITIL and SOA…and in the end, it won’t save you a lot if you don’t change the culture of the business and/or the IS organization first.
Any other lessons learned out there?
