Richard Sage

 

Application portfolio management

Application proliferation/sprawl

Application Rationalisation/Reduction

These are phrases that are so often used within IT. The latter normally used in the context of an ill-defined goal that sits on top of an assumption that there are far too many apps and if only we could get the number down everything would be better.

The goal is often talked about and not actioned, when it is actioned it often doesn’t meet the expectations or flimsy, arbitrary targets that have been set.

If you have heard the phrases used above, if they are perhaps phrases that you use yourself then I think its worth asking yourself one question:

 

Do the users who get the value from the information system foot the bill for their use of the information system?

 

If the answer to this question is no (and there are a lot of orgs where it will be) then good luck!

If the answer to the question is no then you have found yourself in a situation where someone (it might even be you) has created and maintained a set of circumstances where there is a fundamental conflict between two actors in your organisation. 1) the users and 2) IT, because the decoupling of the realisation of value and the cost of delivering that value means one party feels only gain whilst the other feels only pain.

You will always have an uphill struggle to rationalise application portfolios as long as your user only experiences the positives of the application. Imagine persuading a drug addict that he needs to reduce his consumption because its really killing your bank balance paying for his habit. 

You need to re-couple the value cost relationship. One way of coupling value and cost back together and removing the conflict from the relationship is chargeback.

An impediment to implementing a chargeback mechanism is that it is often stated that chargeback is difficult. No its not, chances are its probably already happening elsewhere in your organisation and you don’t even know it. And you know what? Chargeback is getting easier and easier. As adoption of cloud services and the associated move to revenue spend increases, understanding the cost of usage gets easy. Even with on-premise applications the level and granularity of monitoring platforms today mean that it is achievable to trace usage back to cost. if you aren’t doing this then you obviously just don’t think its important enough, in which case you should stop whining about application proliferation and go and fight some other battle. 

Another perceived impediment to chargeback is a concern that a lack of ownership of cost will lead to even more applications. The ‘If marketing get to foot the bill for their apps we’ll end up with 5 different CRMs’ scenario.

Er, newsflash, if that was true you wouldn’t be talking about application rationalisation in the first place.

Application proliferation isn’t a symptom of uncontrolled spend.

Application proliferation and duplication of functionality is just a symptom of the fact that IT isn’t doing its job very well.

It is a symptom of:

– Poor engagement with your internal customers

– Lack of understanding of business need and the ability to offer effective solutions.

– Lack of appropriate change and architecture governance

If application proliferation and rationalisation is a hot or recurring topic then start by looking within, look at the type of relationships you perpetuate through inaction and challenge your assumptions about what might be the impediments to change. The biggest impediment to solving the problem will be your willingness to change the way you think of the problem.

Governance, the word that makes me think of the colour Grey. The thoughts below have been buzzing around my head for a while, so i thought i’d try and get the thoughts out of my head and into my blog.

Governance, the etymology comes from a greek word meaning “to steer or pilot a ship”.  

A lot of organisations spend a lot of time, effort, money and goodwill trying to do governance. Any sort of governance (project, corporate, architecture, risk, whatever), in my mind boils down to trying to achieve to things

1) Ensuring that what actors within the organisation are trying to achieve aligns with what the organisation wants to achieve.

2) Ensuring that how the actors within the organisation are achieving what they want to achieve aligns with how the organisation (as a collection of values and culture) want it to be achieved

In trying to achieve these two goals the governance framework (or frameworks) that an organisation puts in place should support the actors in achieving them. 

However, Governance is often seen as a hurdle, an impediment, a box ticking exercise, bureaucracy or a annoying delay, whether that’s a change board, project board, architecture board, release board, etc etc. This is because, in a lot of organisations governance is about control. Its about desperately trying to herd cats, jumping on in-flight projects and saying ‘nooo, you don’t want to do it like that’.

This happens because in my opinion and experience the Governance (with a big G) framework and governance bodies are often addressing a symptom rather than the root cause.

Why do you need control?

Why do you need oversight?

Change doesn’t misalign itself, risks don’t realise themselves. It is the results of actors acting that governance attempts to steer.

But why would the actors in your organisation do something that doesn’t align to the organisations goals? 

The symptom that a lot of governance efforts try to address is control of divergence in the what and the how of the organisation.

The real problem is about poor communication. Poor communication of vision (what we want to achieve) and principles (How we choose to go about achieving it).

The real solution is openness

Share vision

Share principles

Share expectations

Share risk

Share culture

Share concerns

Share arguments

Share events

Openness lived within an organisation leads to the above things being embedded within actors which leads to ownership, empowerment and self organisation. Agile teams have known this for a long time, communication through openness being a key enabler for self organisation. I’m not clear as to why that message hasn’t permeated to the areas of organisations that deal with governance?

What it comes down to is, there is no need ‘to steer’ if your ships are already being piloted in the right direction.

This week I worked with a team who were wrestling with how to make decisions about what they do as a team and what they want to delegate or outsource. The discussion went on for a while and started talking about where the team could add value as opposed to the delivery of commodity services where no value was added.

This was great and at least gave the team one criteria to talk around, but in  itself wasn’t enabling decision making.

I decided to introduce another criteria into the discussion, is it Fun?

Fun might seem like a flippant word in a business scenario, but it bloody well isn’t its absolutely key because fun = motivation.

Adding the criteria of Fun vs Boring into the debate enables decision making. I sketched up the quadrant below on a whiteboard and we could immediately start putting things into boxes. All of a sudden we had a way of placing our problem within a space that gave us an idea of the action the team should take:

Fun is a pretty loose term, what might be fun to some people would be boring to others, e.g. some people like to perform repetitive tasks.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a valid concern for your team, it just means you need to be clear what fun is for your team and if you find that the definition of what constitutes fun for your team is difficult or so diverse as to be irreconcilable then maybe the real problem is that you don’t have a team, you just have a collection of people who happen to work together

and that is a more fundamental problem that you need to solve.

Once upon a time long, long ago, in the Dark Ages, people would identify the need to undertake a significant activity within their business they would call this thing a project

The project was in essence a rallying call for resource and money and executive sponsorship.

Once kicked off the project would make sure it postponed the delivery of value into the organisation (or for its customers) until the last possible moment, or sometimes never.

Then there was a period of enlightenment, people realised they could structure projects in a different way, to deliver value early and often.To test assumptions about projects early so that if they fail they fail early and at a lower cost.

The Enlightenment, what a wonderful time. Wow! lucky we wised up, what were we thinking about in the dark ages!?

Er…except for some the Dark Ages isn’t ancient history. In some organisations the unenlightened approach to change still exists.

Why is that? Why is there often inertia to enlightenment within the business function that should most readily accept change?

Have you experienced an organisation that is still in the Dark Ages? Get in touch on Twitter