We Want to Believe…But

It’s official.  The Aussies have gotten their ICT standard passed as an ISO/IEC Standard, ISO/IEC 38500:2008 to be exact. I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.

Mark Toomey, project editor for the standard, was quoted at some length here, sounding like a first time dad just out of the delivery room.  I liked his first few bits — about IT falling within the domain of business oversight, and that IT problems were business problems, not just technical ones.  But, as I read on, things got scary.

First:  the inevitable head-butting between the ISO crowd and the COBIT and ITIL crowd.  Toomey says,

Such process improvement frameworks are useful, says Toomey, but they tend to be internally implemented to IT departments and do not embrace wider decision-making as the ISO standard does.

I am no more a fan of COBIT and ITIL than of ISO foo, of course.  But Toomey’s comments seemed to suggest, despite his notion of complimentarity between competing frameworks, that the latest ISO stuff is yet another set of guidelines that will be institutionalized with its own certification authorities, consultancies, training and testing programs, and other money grubbing ruffles and flourishes – competing with the other already institutionalized methodologies out there.  You already have to pay to download the PDF of the new standard.  ITIL hurt, I bet.

The last paragraph of the piece was also a tad alarming, mainly because I wasn’t there to ask the follow-up question.  Here’s the quote:

“We have this long term history of IT going wrong,” he said. “It would be delightful if this standard reversed that trend. There are enormous economic benefits in reducing the rate of failure of IT projects and enormous value in getting more out of the IT we’ve got.”  

In context, he says that IT projects go wrong because IT people run them, rather than business directors.  That may have a kernel of truth in it, but in my experience, it is by no means a blanket axiom.  King Edward Longshanks was wrong; The problem with Scotland wasn’t that it was filled with Scots.  The problem was that Scotland’s managers in England were interfering, meddling, and prima nocturing all the babes.  (Hey, I saw Braveheart.)

You don’t necessarily want decisions best made by technical folk made instead by the Longshanks in the front office (any more than they care to be involved in such decisions as a rule).  I have encountered way too many IT folk of late who have had the making of key decisions about technology – presumably the reason why they were hired — taken out of their hands and placed with bean counters who don’t understand tech and don’t care to.  Instead of being able to purpose build infrastructure to meet the needs of the business, IT guys in Global 2000 are handed a menu of tech product options and told they can only buy from what’s on the list.  The products are NOT appropriate to business process or application requirements and reflect, in far too many cases, deals and bribes made between unscrupulous three letter vendors and non-technical senior managers of the company. 

To management:  If you didn’t want to give IT the authority to go with the responsibility they bear, why did you hire them in the first place?

No airy general principles are going to right this problem.  Even if they are ISO standards. 

I am really close to writing off the Fortune 500 and dancing on their graves when many go belly up or are broken up and sold off in the current economy.  I have seen really good folks at JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, ING, Motorola, and elsewhere get laid off because some bean counting jackass, who has no knowledge or appreciation of the 4 trillion miracles that occur daily in their shops, read “Does IT Matter?”  by that other uberjackass, Nick Carr, and decided to outsource.  

What are the miracles I am on about?  It is estimated that upwards of 4 trillion transactions occur across networked client/server systems in large firms on a daily basis.  Pushing electrons or photons back and forth and completing a series of reads and writes to spindles of spinning rust, cartridges of mylar tape, and platters of glass or plastic with consistent results and timely response is no mean feat.  IT guys are miracle workers. 

But the front office appreciates their efforts in many companies almost as much as my kids appreciate the Apollo moon landing:  their only question is why the photography is so bad and only in black and white.

I wonder if the new standard tackles this set of issues.  The real ones.  If it doesn’t, what good is it?

Then again, it’s just another ISO standard.  I will read it before passing judgement…or sitting for my “black belt.”