Suburban Flight, Technology Sprawl, and Garage IT

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Suburban flight is a term describing the migration of people away from an urban center into its surrounding, less-populated, residential communities, aka suburbs.  The urban center is a large city or metropolitan area providing a source of employment and other professional opportunities, whereas suburbs provide a sense of community and other personal opportunities.  Despite their strong economic ties to the urban center, most suburbs have political autonomy and remain focused on internal matters.

Historically, the IT department has been a technological urban center providing and managing the technology used by all of the people within a large organization.  However, in his blog post Has your IT department died yet?, John Dodge pondered whether this notion of “the IT department as a single and centralized organization is on the way out at many enterprises.”

David Heinemeier Hansson raised similar points in his recent blog post The end of the IT department, explaining “the problem with IT departments seems to be that they’re set up as a forced internal vendor.  But change is coming.  Dealing with technology has gone from something only for the techy geeks to something more mainstream.”

Nicholas Carr, author of the infamous 2004 book Does IT Matter?, expanded on his perspective in his 2009 book The Big Switch, which uses the history of electric grid power utilities as a backdrop and analogy for Internet-based utility (i.e., cloud) computing:

“In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form.  IT will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud.  Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical people.”

Cloud computing, as well as software-as-a-service (SaaS), open source software, and the rise of mobile computing have all been contributing factors to the technology sprawl that has begun within many large organizations, which, similar to suburban flight, is causing a migration of people and business units away from an IT-centric approach to providing for their technology needs.

We are all familiar with the stories of how some of the world’s largest technology companies were started in a garage, including Google, Apple, and Hewlett-Packard (HP), which William Hewlett and David Packard started in a garage in Palo Alto, California.

However, in this new era of the consumerization of IT, new information technology projects may start—and stay—in the garage, where in the organizational suburbs, most business units, and some individual users, will run their own Garage IT department.

Although decentralizing IT is a net positive for better servicing the technology needs of the organization, will Garage IT stop large organizations from carpooling together toward the business-driven success of the corporate urban center?  In other words, will the technological autonomy of the consumerization of IT help or hinder enterprise-wide communication and collaboration?

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

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Comments

[Steve Putman]

Hey Jim -

It just so happens that I was going through some old links this morning, and just read Michael Lang's article:
Using Semantic Technology Standards to Federate Information and to Enable Emergent Analytics

Having read that article and then this one, I have to say that the people quoted here that say that central IT departments are "dead" are missing the point - I submit that central IT will just change focus, but not disappear altogether.

I look at the centralized/decentralized IT argument in the same way as the in-house/outsourced development argument - as a pendulum, over time. Right now, the pendulum is swinging toward the decentralized end, but when people realize the need for collaboration and enterprise-wide communication* (dare I say, "federalization"), the need for a centralized organization will be better realized. I think smart centralized IT departments will realize this, and shift focus to facilitating collaboration.

The monolith is indeed dead, but that doesn't mean the structure is unusable.

- Steve

* Yes, you pointed this out, but I wanted to emphasize it.

[Jim Harris]

Thanks for your great comment, Steve! (And for the link to Michael's article).

And thanks especially for running with my closing question, since I agree with you that although the IT Pendulum is currently swinging toward the decentralized end, once large organizations realize the increased communication and collaboration challenges it will bring, the IT Pendulum will start swinging back (and hopefully before people within the organization start taking swings at each other).

A federated approach combining centralized IT control over core areas (including, but not necessarily limited to facilitating collaboration) with business unit and individual user autonomy over areas where centralization would disrupt efficiency and effectiveness, may ultimately be what many large organizations will have to adopt for long-term success.

Best Regards,

Jim

[Paul Calento]

Here's a wrinkle to the centralized vs. non-centralized arguments . . .

Most large organizations have an IT infrastructure that has been pieced together from a lot of locations and companies, due in part to business expansion and M&A. What appears IT driven, is largely IT serving as a medic . . . rather than a doctor/specialist. By giving up the appearance of control, through IT delivery via cloud, IT (the CIO especially) may be more relevant and impactful than ever before. Agree that the federated approach makes sense.

Most importantly, the case for NOT dealing with the trend has the greatest ramifications. Now, there's an urgency to embrace or be left behind (interesting perspective from John Gallant on Enterprise CIO Forum) . The ability of a line of business executive to circumvent IT has already spread the adoption of SaaS (like Salesforce.com) and has also been a factor in the BYOC (bring your own computer) and tablets in the enterprise trends. While counter-intuitive, the democratizing influence of decentralizing IT may actually elevate IT.

--Paul Calento
(note: I work on projects sponsored by Enterprise CIO Forum and HP)