Management of Future IT – Squaring the Circle?

Every year I meet more than 50 IT managers, CIOs, divisional managers, senior heads of department and heads of department to discuss the basis of our book Quality, that’s IT, the actual and future significance of the IT production factor, and to identify sensible options and steps for future strategic alignment.

My recommendations to move away from today’s expensive production platforms, to introduce open architecture and to consider including open-source applications for basis software, have often only been acknowledged with a friendly nod. It seems that the ties to old technologies are too strong and the ways forward to the new, are too long to be simply overcome by a simple cost effective solution. One of my last discussions culminated with the statement “Every decision I make today will be wrong tomorrow!”

The fear of making wrong decisions is justified by the conflicting areas in which CIOs have to make decisions. They are influenced by many opposing pairs: there is service delivery versus need for change, standardization versus individualization, own operation/in-house development versus out-sourcing (make or buy), security versus openness, robustness of applications versus flexibility, reaction capability (classic time-to-market) versus desired quality, modularization and re-utilization versus performance and independent components, convergence of technologies versus opportunities from new technologies, technological independence versus maintenance efficiency and last but not least further automation requirements versus cost reduction.

These are not the only opposing pairs and dimensions, the above list is intended to show the complexity of the decision making environment that CIOs have to face today and in which IT management must find its position. Many strategic questions for the future require an answer:

• What does really drive our business forward?
• What added value can IT deliver?
• Which IT technologies can improve an organization’s products and processes?
• Where do we lose competitive advantage through standardization?
• What must be or should be operated internally/externally?
• How can we increase the level of customer services through IT?
• Which IT innovations ensure more business?
• How can we increase product performance by the use of IT?
• How do we make our systems more flexible?
• Despite increasing demands on IT, how can we keep the costs under control or reduce them?
• etc.

To answer these questions and to position one’s organization in these areas of conflict requires a critical assessment and a fine balance. But the speed of competitor innovation and information technology innovation reduces the half-life of strategic IT decisions. We live in a race against time and we need to position ourselves in it. In this race against time, planning and decision replaces chance by error. If this is the case, then the decision I make today will be factually incorrect tomorrow and the statement I quoted from my conversation partner at the beginning, hits the nail on the head. We therefore need a Meta solution-model at all levels of design and use of IT technology that will anticipate the half-life of decisions.

The Speed of Innovation Should Be Anticipated Strategically

The solution-model must turn an “either/or” into an “as well as”. For example, positioning one’s company in the dilemma “robustness or  flexibility” can be avoided through a scalable configuration, so even with higher flexibility, increased robustness can be achieved. The solution-model we have been proposing for years consists of open system architecture, service management, process management, rules engines, product engines, model based development, component design and the re-utilization, encapsulation of middleware and generators.

This would mean for example, that the database technology, transaction monitors, application servers etc. in use, are replaced by newer technologies, without changing the above applications. Model-based developments would mean that target platforms are replaced without changing the applications. Additionally, process management and rules engines mean that legal requirements, organizational changes and responsibilities may be freely configured without having to make major changes in the applications.

Yet, to work, this scenario requires an upstream standardization process that standardizes all elements of system design: information structure, communication structure, functional structure, process structure and module structure. The industrialization process is primarily a standardizing process; outsourcing for example is the second step, although it’s a long way. In the long-term however, there is no alternative if one would like to achieve the same productivity increases in the area of application delivery as seen in the area of hardware i.e. approximately doubling output and halving the costs every 18 months. Once we find ourselves in this situation we really are talking industrial software development.

The Speed of Innovation Can Be Tactically Anticipated

Now the question arises: if the necessary resources are not available in the organization for industrial software development, how can a CIO avoid making wrong decisions and reduce costs? Is this even possible or is it like squaring the circle? Our answer is simple: Yes it is possible!

To do this we have developed technology that we have called Cross Platform Modelling & Transform (CPMT). This technology endeavors to answer the question how our customers can use a cost efficient production platform, middleware components, databases etc. without first having to make substantial investments.

Our solution is based on the concept of platform independent modelling. We work on the premise that every system implemented today is a complete model and that this model is capable of being incorporated into another one. By definition, when Cobol, PL/1 or RPG is implemented in an application it is a platform dependent model. This model will be transferred into a platform independent model by our Parser (PILS – Platform Independent Logic & Semantic). This model can be supplemented when required (PILS Additions). The architectural layer can be laid differently; it can define the integration of new frameworks and specify design elements (PILS Migration Design). This includes the consideration of style guidelines, nomenclatures, source-code structures and superstructures. On the PILS, PILS Additions und PILS Migration Design models, generators set up and write a new system, which will come closer in meeting future demands. So COBOL sources become JAVA statements, DDL for DB2 becomes DDL for MySQL or Posgress SQL, process models become Activiti Statements and Jobcontrol becomes Javascript or another procedural language.

The technology has already had its first tests and the results are a cause for optimism. Clients have assessed the new source code as maintainable because of its construction on templates. It can be profiled and the degree of automation in an implementation scenario is often at 100 %. It is only performance critical application components that must be manually adjusted so that the paradigms of a new platform can be adequately served. The costs incurred will be completely recovered and future IT is no longer a distant future scenario but a tangible reality.

Author: Gerhard Rienecker, President of PASS Consulting