[ 36 ]
Information Management &
Computer Security
4/4 [
1996
] 36–38
© MCB University Press
[
ISSN 0968-5227
]
The Thornton May Files
Thornton A. May
Vice-President, Research and Education, The Management Lab, Cambridge
Technology Partners, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Pulls from extensive research
and experience to provide
commentary and insight on a
range of management issues
in the information technology
world. Draws a picture of the
issues associated with suc-
cessful management of the
distributed systems environ-
ment, and waxes literary
about management behav-
iours around electronic com-
merce.
Distributed systems management
Senior management at Cambridge Technol-
ogy Partners, and the Meta Group undertook
the labour-intensive exercise of doing a six
month, multi-client study of the dark side of
distributed computing, not because the world
needed more white papers, but because the
traditional channels of thought leadership/
knowledge transfer (e.g. academia, market
research, industry analysts and consultants)
have failed to “smarten” up the industry
with regard to what constitutes appropriate
practice in the new world of distributed com-
puting. This article shares findings regard-
ing the heroes of the new computing para-
digm, isolating those practices, methodolo-
gies and mindsets which unambiguously add
credibility to the I/T organization and value
to the enterprise in an age of distributed
computing.
The environment screams for thought
leadership
Research in both the Cambridge Technology
Partners group and in a similar undertaking
at the John E. Anderson Graduate School of
Management at UCLA uncovered a frighten-
ing tripartite distribution of client/server
capabilities in the market today.
The ballistically ignorant
Fully 77 per cent of the organizations we
talked to “don’t know what they don’t know”
with regard to the costs, skill sets, organiza-
tional structures and management method-
ologies required to manage the entire life
cycle of industrial-strength, enterprise-wide
client/server applications. Many of these
organizations’ client/server initiatives are
trainwrecks waiting to happen.
The informed but exploited
Twenty-one per cent of the companies we
talked to had identified “what they did not
know” and were moving forward trying to
patch the potholes in the client/server
knowledge set. While knowledgeable about
what they needed to know, this group of orga-
nizations was noticeably inexperienced
regarding the economics of knowledge cre-
ation, transfer and distribution (i.e. they
were paying top dollar to all parties
concerned to get up the distributed comput-
ing learning curve).
Knowledge masters/brokers
Only 2 per cent of the population fell into the
leadership category of “knowledge masters/
brokers”. These organizations have part-
nered with external sources of “smarts” on a
case-by-case basis to accelerate the process
and reduce the cost of getting “smart” about
client/server.
A set of heroes did emerge
Organizations that were succeeding with
distributed computing exhibited markedly
different I/T behaviours along four critical
dimensions:
1 time frames in which value is delivered;
2 processes whereby consensus and busi-
ness case are created;
3 frameworks employed for creating and
distributing knowledge;
4 structures whereby I/T resources are
deployed.
Time frame In which value Is delivered
We live in a world where overnight is not fast
enough. Computer processing speed has expe-
rienced an improvement of roughly 30 orders
of magnitude. Such a change is equal to the
jump from the diameter of a single atom to
that of the Milky Way galaxy. And yet, infor-
mation technology organizations are consis-
tently viewed as the bottleneck to reinvention
and re-engineering initiatives.
Successful organizations are increasingly
turning to time-based metrics and time-
sensitive development practices to erase the
taint of past tardiness and non-responsiveness.
No consensus, no business case – no
system
The first global need in I/T is the ability to get
the organization to focus and form consensus
regarding what to do. Too frequently, I/T exec-
utives wait for consensus to form on its own,
hoping that the market will create vision.
Vision needs a helping hand. Men and women
managed to live full and happy lives before
Nick Otto delivered his four-stroke internal
combustion engine in 1876. The automobile