Reflections to the present challenges using IT systems

The summer vacation period has started here in Europe, so it is my wish for you to prioritize spending time with your family and friends in relaxed surroundings without Internet access.

With this in mind I intend to share some reflections made on the situation regarding Information Technology (IT) in the shadow of the threats of today.

Working with data in various business environments cross organizations for more than 20 years have given me some insight in both technology and human behaviour when dealing with IT in general – an insight used in these reflections.

We have implemented over the past decade – without any concern – so many new IT solutions that the data complexity have exploded. In many cases even the documentation of the full solution will have gaps as the Quality Assurance process have been given low if any priority.

On top of this then our governments have increased the number of legal requirements, so we now are at a level, where not even the advisors have a clear understanding of the big picture – you need today a huge team of various advisors in order cover all aspects.

I will forward use end-user as the individual using a desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile phone or notepad – no matter whether it is a Windows/ MAC/ Android/ Linux device. I will also use my customer as the organization/ end-user – internal or external – receiving my services.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused by using old terms instead of the newest buzz words – however with this analogy: “Why pour the good old wine in to a new bottle?” I will continue doing so.

Time consuming? Yes, but when you have an issue in making a simple sketch of your data flow, how are you then going to secure your assets?

Why did we end up in the present situation? Well, there is no simple or just one answer to this question, as the answer would deal with reasons like lack of awareness, lack of knowledge, lack of competences or lack of technology.

As a young engineer I was taught; “You can delegate a task with the responsibility to act, make decisions or allocate resources on your behalf. Regardless of who has the responsibility for a task or function in your business, you are ultimately accountable for the outcome” – which also happens to be valid for the manager role.

In short, this meant that you should clearly specify the expected results of the delegated task. Give information on what, why, when, who, where and how – and secure an open communication line.

In this article, I will focus on the human factor, as I am tempted to claim, that it all started at management level. , where decisions were made focusing only on financial performance targets, i.e. increased revenue and reduced costs.

Other requirements as “time to market”, “the customers want to…” or “the vendor claims their product can improve… within this financial year” have played their part too.

One of my observations when implementing IT solutions has been a management focus on cost reduction (primary head count) rather than a focus on effectiveness and rationale a focus that often will lead to a reduction of the operative cost per sold unit/ service.

In many of my projects my customer have actually managed to handle an increased production rate without having to employee extra administrative staff members – but this fact often vanished as it was not given any priority.

It is a fact, that a management team cannot have the full picture of every detail, which is why we have groups of people with the detailed knowledge. However the management team are required to know the consequences of their decisions not only on a short time line, but especially in relation to the strategic time line.

This is why I have the opinion of the urgent need for a Time-Out when dealing with the company IT solution.

When the focus was trimming of the organization in order to reduce cost, the first easy choice was to stop the on-going (maintenance) training of the staff members. Next to this would be reducing the staff members taking care of the back office processes – often with an “unofficial” excuse of that there was an IT solution in place handling their work.

All companies do have a Business Process and a Data Process that should be compliant with the legal requirements associated to the business, however not everyone have formalized them.

In some situations then even the relation between the business process and the data process have not been maintained properly, so shortcuts are established without being given a proper risk analysis, i.e. what is/ has been the consequence of implementing this short cut.

Some companies has chosen an IT solution to handle this exercise, but how is this solution quality assured within the company?

I have earlier this year seen an IT solution that could manage almost all business processes within a company. The user interface was very simple – you configured your business process using “drag-and-drop” icons.

Very handy … except for one critical topic: it was not possible to generate one all-inclusive document of the configured business processes. The only way of executing a Quality Assurance would be to have two persons sitting in front of the monitor and then keep track of and by screen dumps document the configuration.

Will this be enough to get on top of the present issues? – not necessarily, but it will be a good start for the next steps to go.

Why is this a top priority? – because today each employee represents an important asset of knowledge, that could vanish due to a number of reasons of which some gives you no opportunity of asking for help ….

There are other activities of strategic value that I will reflect on in my next article, not to mention the reflections about how the technology used in many organizations.

This article was published initially on LinkedIn on 26 July 2017. I have made some adjustments to the content in this version.

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