From Strategy to Delivery

Making Decisions Count

Culture does not create behavior

BEHAVIOR CREATES THE CULTURE

By Managing Behavior, you Create a Performance Culture

Executive

Intent

Eliminate Application Development

Application development is like accounting - a necessary evil that adds nothing to the bottom line - at least in many cases. 

IT is made up of 2 major areas - application development and operations. Operations delivers the applications and infrastructure to enable the business to operate. They are the factory and the foundation that the business relies on.

But in the realm of application development, there are distinctions that can make or break an IT budget, and even a company. 

Application development is geek toyland - a place to play with the latest technologies, and live in a world so foreign to the outside world, that no one can question what they are doing. OK, so most companies have a need for at least some application development. The packaged, commercial-off-the-shelf software may not meet their needs, or necessarily provide the competitive advantage required. Add to this, that many CIOs are not business people, but techno-geeks that have grown up the management chain, and want to continue with what they are familiar with and enjoy - and think that they are adding value by doing.

NOT the CIO success path of today’s day and age......

With most software packages today, these software companies have learned the best practices from hundreds or thousands of customers, or competitors products, and applied this to their off-the-shelf application. It stands to reason that the way their application works, may be better than the way you currently work today.

If you find these products, minimize your application development - you’ll save lots of money, and have a vendor to point the finger at when bugs arise. Take it on yourself, and you become the fall guy. On the other hand, technology can provide competitive advantage and market differentiation - in those code functions that provide the unique value to the operation of the business. You need to move IT development into the arena of making the business more effective at everything they do, whether that is with a commodity off-the-shelf product (for those things that do not necessarily provide unique value), to rapid time-to-value development of tools to make the business run “cheaper, better, and faster”. 

Now if we could only eliminate the accounting department….   :-)

Contact us - we can help with product selection, and refocusing your IT organization on providing real value.