Link: https://genehughson.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/is-2016-the-year-for-customer-focused-it/
Maybe it’s a sign.
Although I haven’t made New Year’s predictions in the past, this year I took part in a panel discussion with Jeremy Berriault, Steve Tendon, Kim Pries, hosted by Tom Cagley for his SPaMCast podcast (it should be posted this weekend, I’ll link to it when it does). As Tom described it in the show notes for Sunday’s episode, we “…prognosticated a bit on the topics that will motivate software development and process improvement in 2016”. One of the things I mentioned, more as a wish than a prediction, was for more customer-centricity in IT.
Then, one of the first tweets I read this morning is:
The gist of the article Christian referenced was that IT needs to apply the same principles to enterprise and software as a service (SaaS) applications that DevOps brings to custom-developed applications. The aim being to “…become faster, more nimble, and more flexible and responsive to the demands of business managers”.
The Customer-centricity tag has been applied to a lot of posts on this blog, going back to the earliest days. In my opinion, removing the divide between IT and the organization it serves is the most critical issue for IT today. Without bridging this gap, it’s unlikely that progress will be made on other issues that might come to mind first, such as information security and shadow IT. A siloed IT organization that fails to focus on meeting the needs of its customers is unlikely to be seen as a source for innovation. It’s more likely to be seen as an obstacle to be worked around.
If 2016 isn’t the year for customer-focused IT, I wonder just what kind of year it will be for IT?
