Good governance

It's hard to argue against cost saving on IT centralization. Yet one of favorite CTO's had this saying which I believe. "Managed diversity has great value in the enterprise." His organization which was full of scientists and researchers benefitted greatly from letting those folks pick the right tool for their job and the one which they enjoyed using the most. The increased productivity was well worth the cost of multiple platforms. Since I was Director of Federal Sales for Apple, it certainly made my team's job easier. It was just this decentralization in organizations searching for innovation that allowed Apple to keep a toe hold in federal markets when most enterprises were throwing Apple out.

The one thing which argues against central control and a single platform is the real security advantage of having diverse platforms. While it is hard to quantify the value since few exploits have gone beyond clogging mail servers, many of us believe that it is just a matter of time. Then perhaps the long term view that diversity equals real security might have a shot. Having a different system running another code base which continues to work under a serious attack might look inexpensive some day.

Because of the importance of my internet connectivity, I have both cable modem and DSL. Today a backhoe cut the cable modem line. The backup system looks pretty good today.

The centralized vs decentralized is becoming a bit boring and tends not to push the real debate that needs to happen with IT organizations. The real debate centers around the type of people, leadership styles, innovation capacity, ability to collaborate and other difficult areas for IT to grapple. The discussion is also boring, because most IT senior executives and CxOs in many cases are using references from "past experience" which can be helpful, but only as a context--not what should actually. For example, I am working with a client whose five business units scream and clamor for autonomy and thus would love to have a purely decentralized model. Yet, while the units perform the same operations, these units do not collaborate with each other, they do not share information in an easy to use way if at all. By contrast, due to the low pay for this client's industry, there is no centralized leadership in place to guide a more centralized model. So what is the answer--continuous demands to outsource because of soaring costs; of course this merely treats the symptoms and not the problems.

In sum, the centralized vs decentralized debate tends to not take into account more insight discussions about the type of behaviors the organization wants to promote or the competencies of the people in place. We've all seen the story when the new CEO comes in from a centralized model to lead an organization working just fine within a decentralized model. The response to the media from the CEO is, "we will take advantage of economies of scale" and "release new value" for our shareholders. When the plan does not go as far as she thought it would, a few heads roll then a year or so later, the CEO gets axed. The debate is often predictable and requires more in-depth analysis by consultants and managers to truly understand what is best to capitalize on the strengths and talents of the organization and its people.

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

URL:
Remember me? YesNo

Comments:

Rough Type is:

Written and published by
Nicholas Carr

Designed by

JavaScript must be enabled to display this email address.

What?