Meet In The Middle: Slow IT and Fast IT

© Copyright Canstock Photo IncI've talked before about the need for Slow IT. Here then is a strategy for IT to address the issue, to make a value proposition for the parent organisation about how Slow IT will deliver benefit, will allow IT to be more response, will enable Fast IT.

Fast IT is all those things you have heard about, from CSI to Agile, Lean, and DevOps. You will struggle to get them in place in a legacy environment without some Slow IT.

We can resolve this conflict between:

  • our desperate need to slow down the demands of the business vs the equally desperate need to deliver change faster
  • our sometimes-incompatible duties to protect and to serve

We need to meet in the middle:
If we can just improve the governance of IT so that a reasonable conversation can be had about the priorities and impacts of new services, and we can slow down the currently unrealistic deluge of demands on IT;
...then we can buy enough breathing space, enough headroom, to make improvements in IT, to adopt new approaches which allow us to deliver faster, such as

  • good old ITSM standard change
  • agile
  • kanban
  • lean IT
  • Devops

...and so on. They are all great ideas for making IT more nimble and responsive, but they ALL require time and energy and resources to implement.

"Hey business! You have to go a little slower or IT is going to break (and maybe the business with it). If you'll just ease up a bit, we'll reciprocate by getting better and faster at what we do. Right now IT is drowning in projects: we're in survival mode and improvement is near impossible".

A presentation...

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