What is happenning .... part 1

For the first time, during my professional life, I find that the IT world is changing (not only the technology), it’s a really different environment to be working in. 

 

My clients are behaving differently and many of them are changing their IT management.

 

Let’s start with some of what is happening.................. (will continue next time)

 

First:I have to remind people that we will all have to work together at the end of the crisis and so we should think twice or maybe three times before we do drastic moves that will hurt our employees, our partners and our suppliers. We are all in this together.

 

Second: when IT management and procurement take decisions on "one sided cuts" in their relationship to contractor vendors they should make sure that part of the cut comes from the vendor and not only from the vendor employees.

 

Third: IT shops are budgeting mostly from operational budgets (minimum capex) in other words "cash flow" and trying to move more and more of their budgets from nondiscretionary to discretionary budgets. New models like subscription instead of licenses are being mentioned. More and more open source software is being considered. Cloud computing is being considered even in financial institutions.

 

Fourth: IT shops are looking into new and different ways of being able to scale and innovate without scaling labor costs and by using existing “assets”. Most of them are realizing that they have written/bought many systems that do the same function (last 20 years). Now they want to do an assessment of what they can re-use (SOA) and those for which they can retrain users (to get to use them effectively).

 

 

For this last point I have to introduce a hebrew term that has no english translation: HATMAA (also Chutzpa has no translation). Training, assimilation, implementation, etc: are IT change management processes. HATMAA is the measurement of the change process success. An assessment will show what applications have high HATMAA and which do not. LOW HATMAA need special tools and re-training. HIGH HATMAA need tool for constant reinforcement