Take a pragmatic approach to meet the IT challenge

By Gerrit Bus, Country Manager - Compuware Corporation

Today's IT organisations face a wide array of challenges, from cutting costs to enabling business innovation, executives are asked to do it all yet at the same time be expected to deliver quality results and superior service on a daily basis.

IT is now an integral part of the business, and most businesses cannot run successfully without reliable systems. More than ever, quality must be built into everything IT does and despite the limited resources and directives to make every rand count, IT's mandate is to do it right the first time.

Let's look at some of the obstacles we face:

• 60 to 70 percent of project failures are tied directly to poor requirements gathering, management and analysis - META Group
• This year, 80 percent of development organisations will not follow strict software engineering practices and will fail in 70 percent of their application delivery efforts.
• An alarming 90 percent of IT security breaches are internal.

So where is the solution? It's actually quite simple and Gartner Group puts it very succinctly: "When you have a good process in place, you can decrease the overall time it takes to test an application by as much as 10 percent. More importantly, application enhancement and maintenance test times can be cut by 80 percent".

To successfully improve quality, IT organisations must integrate and manage quality at all stages of an application's life cycle. Managing quality is a continuous process of identifying, defining, measuring, managing and mitigating risks - or failures - to drive greater business value through better performance, lower costs and more predictable delivery.

But quality is often equated to testing after the application code is written. Instead, quality management should be started during the planning and requirements-gathering phase so that issues can be identified and resolved early, resulting in better requirements and design.

At each stage, the techniques to manage cost, time schedules and business results may differ but they are all equally important to the end result: delivering the most effective application with the highest possible ROI.

Essentially it all boils down to being in control of your IT environment with a proper governance structure in place and being able to use a risk based approach to predicting the outcomes you are trying to achieve.

It's about taking a pragmatic view and understanding that when we start instilling best business practises it's not about products or methodologies, processes or process engineering, but a combination of all these. There is little value in accepting or adopting a methodology if the right processes or infrastructures are not in place or if the organisation's people are not prepared to make the cultural change.

The bottom line is to build visibility, but to achieve this, the buy-in of everybody - from top management down - is critical to success. People do not readily take to exposure or visibility because both the good and the bad are defined. Therefore, the luxury of blaming another department or division within the organisation when something goes pear shaped no longer holds water.

Today there are tools available to simulate scenarios comprising hundreds, thousands and even tens of thousands of users. Financial institutions run into millions. We no longer have to work in the dark to determine whether an application will work once it's rolled out into a live environment. It's simply a matter of acting proactively and taking preventative action by pinpointing problem situations in complex infrastructures before they become a problem.

If this can be accomplished, then the building of quality governance can be achieved through establishing a predictable business and adding real value. Only then will IT be seen as a true business partner instead of the hindrance it is often referred to.