The Return of the CIO Prerogative: A Best-of-Breed IT Landscape
When it comes to technology industry trends, pendulums swing back and forth with steady frequency. Numerous examples abound but two will suffice here: a) the shift from on-premesis to cloud and then a good bit back to edge again, and b) the move from green screens to native PC apps then to the browser. Now when it comes to the way IT is acquired and situated in the enterprise today IT, the pendulum is now swinging quickly back to a highly-valued old position that will very likely separate leading IT organizations from the also-rans.
Years ago, when IT was much less pervasive, corporate uptake of technology was more varied, and the giant enterprise suites hadn’t yet become the all-consuming platforms they’ve become, it was a simpler time. Back then the CIO put all the strategically differentiating IT into one bucket, and all the commodity IT that didn’t move the needle much for the business into another. Then IT took the applications and systems in the differentiating bucket — the ones that could break the business if done poorly, or would make/keep the business an industry-leader if done right — were carefully selected, acquired, and customized to fit the special way the business carried out that function, integrated with key systems and then brought online.
As history is such a good teacher, particularly in the IT world, it’s easy to look back to see that there were several problems that emerged from this approach.
First, integration was often the most time-consuming and expensive of all of these processes. The best IT systems don’t create new data silos when that information already exists in other systems. But for most of the history of IT, integration was hard. It often delayed or even put the whole project at risk entirely through intractable integration issues discovered too late in the game. It wasn’t until quite recently that lightweight integration approaches including open APIs, microservices, and now the giant new vendor graph APIs such as Microsoft Graph and SAP Graph emerged, which when combined with integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) like Dell Boomi, Jitterbit, Zapier, and Integromat (to name just a few) that made integration an order of magnitude less costly and time-consuming.
The second problem was IT customization. In the days before cloud, vendors allowed on-premises IT systems to be customized because that’s what CIOs wanted, for the differentiating reasons cited above. Though customization was often overdone, the argument itself was sound: Differentiating can really matter, especially around the systems that drive the core value proposition of the business. Yet the IT customizations of yesteryear were frequently stranded as the vendor upgraded the product, which often made the old customizations outdated or incompatible. This required expensive redevelopment and testing for each upgrade cycle. As we now know, it’s much better to quickly iterate IT systems to keep up with the market and changing business needs. Yet customizations had the opposite effect, leaving most organizations trapped on rapidly aging versions of products. So customization as often abandoned. As much as it brought strategic value, it also required organizations to take on too much risk and cost, at least with the state of technology back then.
Then cloud arrived, along with software-as-a-service (SaaS.) Now IT had competition, and real competition it was too. Apps could be quickly procured and deployed in weeks at lower price points, integrations were easier with standard, simple APIs via REST, and most vendors now have a growing directory of off-the-shelf integrations to make it easier and less costly. Even the entire data center could be made someone else’s capital investment issue and maintenance headache.
