The Problem

I have been in the Information Technology (IT) field for a long time and most of that time has been spent in the development space. Each environment different from the previous one and in some cases there were huge gaps in the level of technology that was used and made available in each location. This has stumped me for a long time why this was. You go to a user group meeting and when ever the speaker was speaking about a technology that was current and he would conduct a quick survey around the room how many were using this technology, the results would be very mixed. There would even be lots of users at these meetings where they were still using technologies that were over 10 years old and no sign of moving forward.

Why is this happening?

Good question, and after thinking about this for a long, long time I think I have the answer. It really depends on which aspect of the IT spectrum is controlling the development side. I think it has become quite acceptable to break up the whole IT space into two major groups, the IT Professionals, and the Software Developers. When I first moved to California I worked for a company that was a software developer and they did software development for their clients on a time and materials basis. There was no question as to which wing of IT influenced the company with regards to technology and hardware. The developers in this case were golden, if you needed special tools, you got them. Need a faster computer, more monitors, special machines to run beta versions of the latest OS and development tools, you got it. You were on the bleeding edge and the IT Professionals were there to help you slow down the bleeding when that go out of control. However, this company was always current got the best jobs and in a lot of cases when we deployed our final product to their production systems that would be the point at which their IT department would then be forced to update their systems and move to the new round of technology.

Welcome to the Other Side

What happens when the influence is on the other foot, the IT Professionals. They have a different agenda as their number one goal is stability, security, and easy deployment. However this does come with a cost, especially when the company is heavily relying on technology to push its products. I have heard this from many different companies all with in this same situation, that they are not a technology company, the technology is just the tool or one of the tools to deliver their products. When this group controls the budget and the overall technical agenda things like this will happen. Moving forward will be very, very slow and the focus will be purely on deployment issues and keeping those costs under control and not on the cost of development which could get very expensive as the technology changes and you are not able to take advantage of those opportunities. Over time, the customers that receive your products will start to evaluate your future as not being able to move fast enough for them because they are going to expect you to be out there and fully tested these waters before they move there and if your not it is not going to look favorable in their eyes. This is especially true if you have some completion in your space that are adapting the new technologies faster then your company is.

There is another side to this that I have witnessed which bothers me even more. The decision to move all enterprise applications to the web was never from the development side of IT but came from the IT Professionals. Remember one of their big agendas is the easy, easy deployment and as a result they have made software development so expensive that we have been forced to move as much as we can to off shore development companies. In most cases this hasn’t even come close to a cost savings for the applications as you never seem to get what you thought your were designing and it is not always the fault of the off shore companies, they are giving your exactly what you asked for. In more cases it is the wrong technology for the solution. Most high volume enterprise applications were desktop applications with a lot of state (data that you are working with). The web is stateless and over the years many things have been developed to make the web appear state full but is it not. I have seen projects spend 100 times more time and money into implementing a features on a web to make it appear and feel like a desktop application. Now to be clear this argument started when deployment of desktop applications was hard as in the early days there was no easy way to keep all the desktops up to date except to physically go around and update them as patches and newer versions became available. However, in the last 5 years or more that has totally changed with things like click-once technology you can implement full automatic updates and license enforcement just as easily as web sites and maybe even better. We all know there are new tricks every day to spoof a web site into some new security trick.

What’s the Answer

I don’t really have the answer but I do have a few thoughts that I have been thinking about and I would love to hear about some other ideas that you might have. My thought is that you should separate the IT push down two paths and this advice is for the companies that are currently being held back by the stabilizing IT Professionals. I would even go so far as to keep the developers on a separate network then the rest of the employees this will keep the bleeding on the other side of the fence and not affect your sales and support staff which are there to sell and support products that are stable and need to keep them that way. This will allow the development to improve and expand their technical expertise and provide better and more relevant solutions for your customers, internal and external.