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Ever wonder what separates successful IT departments from the ones that generate nothing but gripes?

Not what separates star-performing IT from “the pack,” but what separates the competent from the rest?

150 factors make the difference, but they aren’t all created equal. Squint at the list hard and 18 float to the top. (Why 18? Because that’s how many actually floated to the top. I didn’t start with a number in mind.)

Some background: Back in the last century when I wrote the  IS Survival Guide I organized the factors needed for IT to work into four buckets. Over time these evolved into the framework I use today: Business integration, process maturity, technical architecture, and human performance.

The 150 factors on my list of what makes the difference come from drilling down into these four categories. Selecting the 18 “critical success factors” from that list was less than scientific but more than arbitrary — it was the result of experience and lots of correspondence over the years.

This week’s column defines the big four and their overall scope. Starting next week we’ll dig into the critical success factors and what to do about them if your organization comes up short. So without further ado:

Business Integration

Business integration covers everything about how IT fits into the enterprise as a whole. It happens at three levels: strategic (meaning enterprise-scale), tactical (divisional), and business-infrastructural (overall “lifestyle” technologies) integration. And yes, I’m abusing the language using it this way. Live with it.

Those are the whats of business integration. The hows are governance and the business/IT relationship.

Process Maturity

Process … more accurately, processes and practices … are how an organization does its work. IT’s processes and practices fall into five broad categories:

  • Delivery management: Primarily on the applications side of IT, how the organization makes sure IT actually does deliver what it’s supposed to deliver. Delivery management breaks down into three levels: Program management, initiative management, and project management.
  • Application support: This includes everything having to do with designing or selecting; building or installing, configuring and integrating; enhancing; maintaining; and (when the time comes) retiring business applications.
  • Information management: Making sure all structured databases and unstructured data repositories contain what they’re supposed to contain, and are organized so as to maximize their maintainability, integrity, and value.
  • IT Operations: If the systems are down, nothing else matters. If they’re sluggish, something else matters but not much. IT Operations is where IT makes sure the value it’s already delivered is there, ready to use when it’s needed.
  • Personal technologies: The ERP suite is strategic and runs the company. The CRM suite is strategic and drives revenue. But employees live their lives on their PCs, smartphones and tablets, using the office suite, email system, and telephones. Handle these well and employees will forgive a lot. Handle them badly and your reputation is shot.

Technical Architecture

Yes, IT might be “about the business,” but in the end, someone has to make sure the company has the right technologies in place, organized well, and put together to facilitate the company’s next step instead of acting as a barrier or bottleneck. Notwithstanding all that’s written about shadow IT, non-IT IT and so on, when it comes to the stuff that can’t just be a standalone “island of automation,” that someone is IT.

Technical architecture encompasses the applications portfolio, the company’s structured and unstructured data repositories, and all the platforms and technical infrastructure they reside and run on. And how they all fit together.

Human Performance

IT might be “about the business,” and its job might be to provide the technology the company needs (and by the way, its job is now bigger than that, but that’s a different topic for a different column).

IT might get its work done through well-organized processes and practices, but in the end it’s the people who work in IT who make the difference between success and failure.

Human performance isn’t about whether the people who work in IT perform. It’s about everything that has to come together so IT has great people working in it, with as few barriers as possible standing between them and success.

These four factors — business integration, process maturity, technical architecture and human performance — are what IT has to be good at if it’s going to be considered competent.

How does IT become good at them? That’s what the list of critical success factors is for. We’ll start digging into it next week.

Two recent Microsoft communiques have sent my Absurd-O-Meter off the scale.

First there’s the Microsoft ad imploring you to install Windows NT Workstation because it’s faster, more robust, and yada yada yada. What will you be upgrading from? Windows 95, of course, which I guess must be slower and more fragile.

Who writes this copy? News flash to Microsoft: You’re supposed to badmouth your competitors’ products, not your own.

Then there’s the new Palm PC, for which the company that once claimed ownership of the word “windows” borrowed “Palm” from a popular personal digital assistant. It’s going to run — I’m not making this up — a “stripped down version of Windows CE.”

Shows what I know. I thought Windows CE was the stripped down version. WinCE indeed.

To punish the perpetrators of this nonsense, this week we’ll discuss defenestration (OK, I’m reaching) strategies.

We can’t throw out Windows on the desktop. That really is too risky. Instead …

Microsoft has built its Windows NT Server strategy on Moore’s Law (which predicts that the bang-per-buck ratio will double every 18 months) and on the average CIO’s overall nervousness regarding Unix.

In the minds of most CIOs, NT is safer and easier to learn than Unix’s notorious grab-bag of in-joke commands and semi-compatible versions. It’s more versatile than NetWare, since it can act as both file and application server.

And, it doesn’t threaten MVS (now OS/390) because comparatively, it’s still a toy.

That’s fine with Bill Gates. With every iteration of Moore’s Law, NT can take over more of OS/390’s turf, even without Microsoft investing in product improvement.

But NT is, of course, far inferior to many of its head-to-head competitors, at least from the perspectives of performance and stability. Be honest. Isn’t there a part of you that wishes you could use Linux instead? Too bad you can’t take the risk.

Well, you can run part of your business on Linux with no risk at all. All you have to do is break free of the we-gotta-have-a-standard mentality and replace it with a what-standards-do-we-need mentality.

When it comes to Web servers you don’t need a standard operating system, because Web server software shields everyone from the OS. You can run your whole corporate Intranet on Linux (or Netware, or Solaris, or a different OS on every server) with no compatibility or integration worries. And since most of your NT alternatives can handle at least twice the processing load as NT on a given piece of hardware and are more stable besides, there’s a direct business benefit. (Truth in packaging department: In saying this I’m relying on reviews and the opinions of knowledgeable friends, not on direct experience.)

How about the dreaded cost of training? I’ll bet you have a few adventurous employees who’d be absolutely delighted to invest personal time learning Linux on their own, and some Netware hold-outs who’d be thrilled to extend that environment rather than have you phase it out despite its technical superiority.

Cost of administration? C’mon, these are Web servers. You don’t have thousands of logins to administer … and besides, Unix and Netware both have very strong tools for administration.

Okay, I hear you say, but what if Linux (or Netware, or whatever) vanishes from the landscape?

No problem. Simply install Cairo (it should ship by then) and copy the files. Since you’re dealing with true cross-platform standards, you’re safe.

Each platform decision you make has its own risk/reward dynamics. When you enforce a one-size-fits-all strategy you lose your ability to optimize.

The beauty of this defenestration strategy is that while your company benefits, you help preserve a diverse operating system marketplace.

ManagementSpeak: This is not a witch hunt.  We just need transparent and open answers about exactly what happened here.

Translation: This is a witch hunt — if we can’t find a scapegoat, we’ll end up taking the blame ourselves.

Today’s contributor didn’t want to be on the wrong end of a witch hunt, so he asked to remain anonymous.