I tend to have very spirited philosophical discussions with Jon Sapir from Power in the Cloud / SilverTree Systems, and as much as he tries to get me to blog about some of this stuff, I tend to put it off indefinitely. Just came across this thread and thought there were some important thoughts to build off of:
The old / traditional approach had a lot more players involved…I always envision enterprise IT as two funnels connected at the most narrow point, with one funnel being IT and the other being “the business.” On the IT side, the fat part of the funnel is web programmers, platform programmers, DBA’s, etc.; the connection to the business side is the program manager, who takes specs from the business program manager and hands it off to a lead architect, who then disseminates pieces to platform / application / database architects, who then give specs to the relevant coders, who are then checked by a parallel QA organization that is segmented similarly by function. On the business side, the program manager is connected with a business process architect who assembles requirements from lead business analysts representing the business functions involved with the system, who then fan out to all of the end users of the specific functions / departments to gather feature / function / interface requirements / feedback. And scattered throughout is about a dozen project managers, each running their own project schedule for their piece of the world.
Force.com disconnects the business users from the stack, eliminating the direct involvement of IT and changing IT’s role to one of data / process governance + management. In some organizations IT may still provide the programmer, but in many cases the business architect will directly design the system, and the analysts will configure the system to the specific needs of their constituents.
The future piece further abstracts the business from IT, pushing governance to the periphery of the business where it is managed by analysts and designed by the business architect to overlay horizontal, end-to-end processes rather than a vertical / function-driven organizational structure. IT may provide technical services, but the internal IT organization, for all intents and purposes, is just one of many service providers that the business provisions IT services from. In the most likely scenario, IT manages the connectivity to the cloud, data/information security policies and overall governance, and potentially manages the service delivery / financial relationships with cloud providers.
Does this sound like a reasonable description of most enterprise service delivery processes? Is management and governance the role that IT will take on? Will IT simply become a service provisioned directly by business process owners? Does SaaS / PaaS / cloud computing really make such a significant impact on organizational and business process structure? For every answer we come up with, there are about five new questions.
