Agile IT

Any new IT project has to be up and running quickly, yet offer potent business benefits. Gartner`s survey last year found speed and agility emerging among CIOs` top ten concerns for the first time. This agility doesn`t just imply that the IT solutions need to be flexible and fast - the IT department itself must have the agility to come up with solutions that don`t require massive new packages to meet a business need.

SPEED OF THE ESSENCE

First National Bank CIO Yatin Narsai feels speed is of the essence in today`s IT implementations: "When we launched cellphone banking, we could have taken an 18-month approach. Instead, we took three months. The efficiency of the project was incredible. It is probably a record. But in terms of capability, I don`t think we are struggling. We can implement change at a frantic pace, that`s why we are enjoying such a leadership position."

Narsai, who has been vocal about the benefits of open source to help contain costs and get the job done efficiently, feels that the days of ponderous, lengthy implementations are over.

"Gone are the days of mega IT projects," he says. "There is no place for that. The reason is that very few business leaders can tell you what the business environment will be [in the long term]. Their predictability horizon is at best 12 months away - that`s a budget year." Narsai says the days when businesses could make predictions about the business environment two or three years ahead are long gone.

Things aren`t much easier in the public sector. Kugan Soobramani, senior IT manager for the Limpopo Department of Agriculture, says that while the provincial department has a five-year IT strategy, deliverables are worked out on a 12-month basis.

"Like the private sector, our department has an annual implementation plan with key deliverables that must be produced by the end of the 12-month period. Non-delivery is not an option and pressure builds on the team to ensure these projects are successfully completed within the documented parameters," he explains.

SEEKING FLEXIBILITY

Edcon CIO Henri Slabbert says he looks for technology that will "give us flexibility". This encompasses everything from flexibility in back office processes to SOA to give Edcon the flexibility to buy products from different vendors while still exploiting legacy systems.

In addition to flexibility, he wants excellence, and he wants it fast. "Threats in the IT world have always been things like service issues, cost overruns, projects being late and quality problems. If I look at my profession, the average for projects being on time is 27%, although we sit at 80%. I think if I look around the industry, we need to look at quality, cost efficiencies and delivering on promises. If you promise to deliver on time, you must deliver on time," he says.

And while global studies have found that CIOs are being expected to do more with less, this doesn`t mean they have no IT budget. In fact, IT spend is growing. However, CIOs seem to be understandably more cautious about what they buy into these days.

Slabbert says: "IT must be more than just being as cheap as possible. IT is core to business. For that reason we must make sure we have the best. The best does not mean `Rolls Royce`. It means the most appropriate, cost-effective and efficient."

TRIMMING DOWN

When CIOs look to streamline their operations and make them as cost-effective as possible, one option is to cut back on staff and outsource operations. Tom Fowler, CIO of gold-mining house Gold Fields, has a partnership relationship with IBM as its predominant outsourcer, with commercial services managed and supported by IBM. Mining applications are outsourced to GijimaAST.

Says Fowler: "We`re a mining company, so we get the experts to run our IT systems for us." He says this ensures they have all the support they need without having to worry over skills.

And IT costs are kept streamlined, too. "One of the things you need to do is control cost," he says. "Historically, 1% to 3% of turnover is spent on IT." But Fowler says Gold Fields` spend is nowhere near that high. "We`ve done some amazing things - reducing our cost while improving our capability."

This has allowed him to trim the department down to a point that Fowler says, "many people say we have become too light" - a view he does not share, although his department consists of himself and one other. "We use what Gartner calls a `CIO lite` model. But bear in mind that I said there is a shared services division that contains the operational side of IT, which includes managing the IBM account."

Government has also taken to outsourcing some of its projects or functions. Besides the obvious benefits to be had from outsourcing to specialists, Limpopo`s Soobramani adds that the burden of delivery moves to the company providing the service, thereby reducing pressure on the team.

At the end of the day, some projects just don`t make it to the finish line in the allotted time and government IT management is not without its frustrations. "Our department has some key projects under way which require infrastructure roll-out in rural and semi-urban areas. Unfortunately for aspects like communication infrastructure, we are at the mercy of outside providers and sometimes these parties don`t deliver. Accordingly, we aim to over-deliver on projects so that those occasions where we are unable to deliver our performance history supports our contention that we did whatever was possible," says Soobramani.

PUTTING MANAGEMENT BACK IN CHARGE

Much of Slabbert`s effort at Edcon is aimed at putting management back in charge of the business - much of the literature on the subject suggests situational awareness precedes agility. With over 1 000 stores, it is impossible for senior management to walk through the business the way the owner of a corner takeaway shop can.

"We are trying to put a more scientific approach down so that first of all we know that everybody is following at least the minimum good practices on the one side but it also helps us learn from each other if we have a fairly standardised working environ," Slabbert says. This, he says, gives Edcon the flexibility it needs in its milieu as well as the agility to rapidly improve process.

As someone well placed to look into companies, Manfred Gramlich of Sun Microsystems says most CIOs sit on company boards today and are part of strategic and business decisions. Yet, as Storage Practice Lead for sub-Saharan Africa, he still finds a huge disconnect between what the back office is doing and what front end is trying to achieve.

"Ops people are there to ensure IT is up 24/7. This leaves them little time to think how to run more efficiently and encourages them to throw money at problems such as data storage," he says. "Meanwhile, CIOs share the front office concern for efficiency and effectiveness." It is a case of stability over agility. The solution may lie in CIOs spending more time producing "strategic technicians", who are alive to the strategic impact of their decisions, especially on the company`s ability towards agility.

The quest for agility does carry risks other than tension with stability. Writing in ebizQ, David Arbeitel, CTO at Lumeta Corporation, warns that in delivering agility, CIOs must "not compromise existing network performance, introduce new security risks, or cause their organisation to fall out of compliance with industry regulations". He adds: "Even a single breach can be devastating, both to reputation and revenue."

WRAPPING UP

Asking if business agility is an oxymoron, Fair Isaac, VP Product marketing, says for the CIO agility is a balance between clearing IT bottlenecks and managing the attendant risks. He believes "those who are equipped with an agile business rules-driven enterprise will have greater ability to focus on strategic business decisions rather than be constricted by regulatory compliance headaches" and other factors that conspire to make companies hidebound bureaucracies. In an era of doing more with less, this is imperative.