The Pebble and I work well together.
But he is an Arts graduate, so I have to humour him from time to time.
This entails having to listen every so often to one of his “stories” about history or politics.
Today, for some reason, he decided to explain why the Red Army initially collapsed during the German invasion of Russia during 1941.
“Barbarossa”, “Lebensraum”, “OKW”, “Timoshenko”, “Smolensk”, “Stavka”…
The Pebble often talks about interesting things but occasionally he uses too much terminology. As is sometimes the case, after a few minutes I felt my eyes glazing over. My mind started to drift into that strange state where you feel conscious and unconscious at the same time. The lights were on, but there was definitely nobody home.
His talk about matters military must have had some impact though. Through the haze I began asking myself - when did IT last go into battle with a genuine understanding of what the business was trying to do?
When did Business and IT last plan together strategically, agree tactics, and march together with clear objectives?
How about ten years ago...?
If we think back, the strategic objective was to locate and destroy all of those date fields containing only two year digits which would cause mayhem and havoc if they weren’t fixed as the calendars changed to the Year 2000. In most large organisations this was done with the kind of precision you usually find only on the parade ground.
But the “War on Y2K” didn’t just consist of programmers fighting on the front line to remediate code. Business Continuity and Contingency Planning were used as a rear guard action to ensure that if any of those little bugs made it across No Man’s Land there was a mechanism in place to neutralise their effect on the business.
The often forgotten skills of the Systems Analyst were called upon once more. They became the “embedded journalists” within the business, reporting back in meticulous detail the inputs and outputs to the systems.
The Analysts mapped out how IT systems were used throughout all parts of the business, and how information was passed from department to department. (What I call the flow of data ).
New systems were developed, old systems were remediated, command and control buildings were established, and paper based systems were put in place just in-case the worst should happen. This was achievable only because, for the first time and at considerable expense, the relationships between business processes and the portfolio of deployed assets were investigated, catalogued and analysed. Capturing these relationships was key to planning disaster recovery, business continuity, contingency planning et al.
The current talk in ITIL v3 about maintaining similar catalogues of business services and technology assets will go some way to enabling business processes optimisation, enterprise architecture, governance, SOX, compliance and alignment, to name just a few. The problem faced by business, however, is how to achieve this with the minimum number of casualties – that is, at a reasonable cost.
Y2K still divides opinion. Some people say that resources were sacrificed needlessly and it was another huge waste of money by the IT department to fix a non-existent problem of their own making. Others feel that it was unprecedented hype and scare-mongering by the media to fill column inches and TV schedules. Many who worked on the problems, however, believe the operation was a success and the lack of system failures was testament to them doing a fine job and fixing all of the problems.
We’ll never know.
What is definite, however, is that for the majority of organisations, Y2K was the last real opportunity IT was given to interact with the business to fully understand how IT assets supported the business.
Although at its core Y2K was an IT issue, board members became acutely aware of the potential risks should any of the widely reported problems manifest themselves in any of their companies systems. They understood that IT was a pervasive enabler throughout every part of their organisations, governing every aspect from order placement, through receipt of component parts, to invoices and product shipments – throughout the whole supply chain.
It was this realisation which caused the business to engage with IT, and it acted as an enabler for communication. For the first time IT was invited into the boardroom and given a platform to speak and be heard.
Unfortunately, the information which had been gathered became obsolete and outdated. IT’s close strategic relationship with the business was never nurtured and it became a casualty of the Y2K war.
In the 21st century IT has become even more pervasive within the business, which means understanding and optimising data flows is even more critical.
The risk to the business of system failure causing financial loss is greater than ever – a point which is still understood by the board. However, until this is expressed in a clear way showing the services provided to the business and the financial consequence of system failure, IT's journey back to the boardroom will involve a long and arduous campaign.
“…so the harsh winter was a critical factor that helped the Russians begin to turn the tide.”
There were a few moments of silence.
I snapped back to reality. Thankfully my eyes had been open the whole time.
“You are a font of wisdom”, I said, in as comradely a manner as I could muster. With a smile, The Pebble took a sip of his coffee and sat down again.
“Do you remember the fuss about Y2K?”, I asked, quickly changing the subject. There was a danger the Pebble could go off again at any moment.
“All that hype about 99 and 00?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say it was all hype exactly. Within the process control systems we had some DCS concerns over the Y2K compliance of microchips in embedded systems which fed RS232 data through 4-20mA DACs and directly into the loops which ramped the set points, so we had to establish inter-company resource sharing across the industry to share information as and when it became available by manufacturers or by test programmes to ....”
It may just have been the way the light was shining, but I could have sworn The Pebble’s eyes began to glaze over.
© Paul Wallis 2007. All rights reserved.
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