New innovative products and business models, IT Consumerization, and re-emergent influx of venture capital are accelerating industry and business velocity.

[warning: this is a Public Service Announcement: The following paragraph is a huge run-on sentence to incorporate every major IT trend in recent times]

In response to business pressures to move more quickly, we are using agile teams and techniques to shorten development cycles, automating more and more of our regression test cases, incorporating DevOps methodologies and tools to deploy faster, building private clouds to speed infrastructure delivery  (or integrating hybrid clouds or fully executing in the public cloud for speed, cost and scale)  and rapidly deploying mobile apps and devices  so decision makers, wherever they are and whenever they want, can access the answers  coming from Big Data and Analytics CRM platforms predicting what should you sell to whom  given what they just bought or are likely to buy.

Are you keeping up?

While I enjoy the AT&T commercials with the kindergarten kids answering questions that start  “Which is better…” the obvious simple answer is not always the best answer. For every simplification, there is a contrarian point of view that often has merit.

More is better than Less   —- vs.—  Less is More

Cheaper is better than More Expensive  —vs.— “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get” – Warren Buffett

Better is better than Worse —vs.— “Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.” – Salvador Dali

Faster is better than Slower — vs. — Speed Kills

Regardless, faster (time to market/value), better (customer/user experience, quality), cheaper (ROI, FPV, unit cost reduction) are always desirable  up to the point of diminishing returns. As the top Technology Operations Executive (aka the Big TOE) you should always be assessing if you are directionally pointed true north and if not, why not? What are the factors impacting the company or your organizations ability to be nimble? What is under your span of influence or direct span of control?

A key set of questions around nimbleness and time to value are:

1. What are your delivery times today? (e.g. 95% of the time we deliver X in under Y time where X=servers, storage, PCs, business projects, support requests, enhancements, account requests, network requests and Y=minutes, hours, days, weeks or months). Most of this should be known if you have a Service Catalog and a way to measure delivery against it…
2. What is the business need / expectation for those delivery times? With what scope and quality?
3. What could be your delivery times? Given what changes / investments? What is best in class?
4. What should be your delivery times as you balance 2 & 3?

With a few Warren Buffett quotes sprinkled in for color and perspective, implementation of trendy or revolutionary concepts and tools  may not help if you have barriers or lack of understanding as to other factors impacting your ability to be nimble and effective. Some of these are in your control, some of these you can only partially influence and some are immutable realities or just sheer political suicide.

Company / Business Organizational Wherewithal (Big TOE needs to understand and influence where possible)

• Practical Constraints
  • Funding & Purchasing Policy / Bureaucracy / Approvals
  • Regulatory, Legal and Contract Compliance
  • Deployment (Sales Teams, Channels, Customer/Account Types, Care/Contact/Support Centers)
• Cultural
  • Corporate Risk Tolerance (“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing” Warren Buffett)
  • Organizational Change Management (“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.” – Warren Buffett)
  • Corporate Organizational Structure and/or Culture around Decision Making (Trust, Collaboration)
• Strategy Business Alignment and Prioritization
  • Revenue Cannibalization (Sales / CFO / Wall St.) Fears
  • Business Process and Complex Business Rules
  • Scale Challenges e.g. Too big, Too many, Too Far # SKUs, Stores/Locations, Customer Options
  • Skills & Resources & Priority Choices

Technology Organization Delivery Challenges (Big TOE needs to support, manage and execute)

• Platforms (single purpose or multi-purpose, scalable and extensible)
  • Legacy Applications “Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.” – Warren Buffett
  • Technology / Operations Architecture and Infrastructure (compute, Tools, Capacity, Data Center strategy, Network, Storage, cloud, desktop, mobility).
  • Tools (bears repeating as standalone item from above) [See earlier post on Automate (Wisely) or Die ]
  • Enterprise Architecture (Billing Systems, Web, Payment, Product Catalogs, 3^rd Party providers, Network, development, databases, middleware)

• Processes (Adaptable? Flexible? Capacity? Built for Speed or CYA?)
  • Development Processes (Waterfall and Agile)
  • National / Global Delivery (time zone, languages) Constraints
  • Release / Change Packaging and Deployment Methodology
  • Technical Complexity
    • Business Rules & Process Exceptions
    • Testing Permutations – transaction types, products, platforms, customer types, integration points, partner ecosystem)
    • Too tightly coupled integration (can’t operate on the knee without impacting the arm)
  • Transaction throughput constraints due to people, process or systems
  • Operational Processes (DevOps, ITIL core)
  • Internal Ordering / Procurement Processes

• People
  • Management (Executive – Supervisor) healthy sense of urgency or just too methodical
  • Process and Rule bound or empowered / flexible with guidelines?
  • Skills, Training
  • Employee and Stakeholder Alignment, Buy-In, Prioritization
  • # of resources and planned/unplanned work time allocation
  • Vendors & Partner Dependencies

Of course, this is not the exhaustive list of anchors potentially slowing you down, but the process of evaluating your organization and your company’s speed bumps and figuring out a plan to address helps you from preparing three envelopes for your successor.