value insights

The quest for ‘fast flow’ in the IT value stream- Valutrics

The risk gap for IT service provision

As senior IT leaders we need to understand the drivers of this radical and rapid change. As I’ve been reflecting on this drastic language shift, it’s become clear to me that we are seeing the collective effect of factors such as the following:

  • a continued and accelerated rate of business demand for IT services, with businesses moving toward service automation and a mobile app economy;
  • consumer-driven expectations for on-demand, streaming and “instant on” access to content, features and services;
  • disruptive competitors that are entering the market with “built on the web” business models that are free of the costs and complexities of legacy applications;
  • the increasing percentage of unplanned work stemming from the growing technical debt and fragility of legacy systems that have been ignored too long;
  • the inability of current, fragmented and silo-oriented departments, processes and systems to keep pace with growing customer demand;
  • the drive to reduce operational “lights-on” costs to free up capacity for innovation; and
  • the growing frustration of customers related to the current speed of delivery of projects.

These factors, as well as many others, represent the perfect storm of growing IT complexity, causing a “speed to market gap” for IT service organizations that need to quickly scale and meet business demands.

This need for increased business velocity is, in my opinion, the primary driver of the radical language shift. The ironic aspect of this shift is that the external market pressures we’re facing are in some sense a phenomenon the IT industry has helped to create.

IT's struggle to keep pace with business demand
Operating as a mature IT service provider requires managing demand and processes/data across silos.

The increasing gap between the speed of demand and supply and the growing trend for business units to fund or purchase their own IT services (aka: shadow IT) are changing the focus on what we do and how we deliver value to the business.

Companies and IT leaders and staff alike are beginning to recognize that it’s time to put away our political agendas and silo-based thinking in order to simplify, standardize, modernize, accelerate and automate our “plan-build-run” IT value streams (a Lean phrase for the concept of turning project requirements into finished products). They are acknowledging the need to “Lean out” the way they get things done, and reduce the complexity of their current processes, architectures, tools and organizational structures. In essence, they’re on a “quest for fast flow” by turning to Lean and Agile frameworks and principles that help to deliver more high-value work faster by reducing waste, minimizing variation and redundancy, and consolidating and simplifying.

These three accelerators — Lean IT, Agile and DevOps — have become the new popular subjects in the IT industry.

However, we have forgotten one important question: What are we accelerating?