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Interview: Sam Sahana, Director IT and CIO, IATA |
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| In today's environment, it does not matter
whether the economy is growing, stagnant or is in a recession. Each
year the business is asking IT to deliver more for less money. Is
this because business does not see the value of IT? Or is it a fundamental
restructuring of how money gets spent? I believe it is a fundamental rethinking on business investment. Business investment today has to deliver hitherto undiscovered value - what was valuable yesterday is commoditized today. That means continuous innovation and a relentless search for efficiencies in all areas that are commodity- we must keep pushing back the boundaries everyday! Technology leaders always wanted business trust and confidence. We have finally got it - if anything, the business believes IT is the business change enabler that is being challenged to deliver game-changing solutions with less - less money, less resources and less time. In the traditional systems development lifecycle, business gives ‘requirements’ for a system and IT ‘implements the requirements’. Today, business cannot adequately forecast requirements because they cannot always predict everything in a volatile market. Also, they do not know how much IT would be able to implement. How is this problem being addressed by internal IT organizations? In our organization we have tried to address this through upstream engagement with the customers. Our customers have required that we embed ourselves in their business to understand the context of business change ever sooner and in the fullest context. I have created internal account managers as in an IT service provider organization to help foster this embedding. This way I hope we will understand more clearly, and most importantly, "early enough", the business and technology risks and their impact on the sought business reward. I also feel that gone are the days when IT had the luxury of one top-down point of entry into its services. Business demand and network/matrix structure mean we need to open up our IT organizations to improve the speed and quality of IT's response to business needs. I have created functions of enterprise architecture, quality, sourcing and planning through my office to do this at IATA. |
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There are a lot
of organizations that talking about the "3 month iterative development".
That is, they would only approve projects that deliver in three
months. How could one implement dynamic, complex business problems
in three months? |
