In times when populations of entire nations are running away from war and violence, it always strikes me that IT people are often on the run too. I can understand what drives the Syrian, Afghan, or North African refugees, but when it comes to IT people this is still kind of a mystery to me.

Example

When I wrote a blog at LinkedIn, a few months ago, about SIAM (“SIAM is a hoax“) the entire establishment of ITIL experts fell over me and I had to go into hiding for a week to avoid being lynched.

The rationale for the use of the term ‘hoax’ was simple: if you knowingly build on something that is supposedly solid, but it’s not, then you mislead your audience. And the authors of the first SIAM book described as explicitly as the critics of my blog that they built on ITIL – which they all also said you cannot implement. So once again a new eye catcher was created, where we all should spend lots of energy, and that we should all use to solve many of the old problems with. The first SIAM consultants were already born, the first Special Interest Groups and seminars were planned, and a new business model ogled for the experts. My point that you cannot build upon the ruins of your previous non-working solution obviously did not fit that picture.

What actually happened?

Pushing SIAM as the next big thing was an obvious example of running way from an old disaster, creating a new hype, hoping nobody would notice that you hadn’t solved the old issues, and hoping they would just as blindly follow your new business model as they did the last one.
This is what I call ‘the run-away syndrome’.

There can be two reasons for suffering from this run-away syndrome:

1. You have not paid attention for 3 decades so you simply don’t know.
2. You do know, but you choose to ignore it.

If you’re a case of Option 1, I can live with that. It doesn’t make me happy, but hay … you can’t win ‘m all.

But if you’re a case of Option 2, and you know damned well that you are not building on concrete but on quicksand, I reckon it’s imputable behavior. And that’s what I tried to point out to the evangelists of SIAM on a late Sunday evening. Well – the rest is history… Within a week I had 2,000 readers, the LinkedIn and Facebook blogs sparked with hot comments, and Youtube videos testified how deep the blog had hurt some. Apparently I had touched a nerve.

Running away from old problems

The hoax blog exposed a remarkable phenomenon in the IT market: IT people just keep ‘fleeing forward’ towards ‘new solutions’, without having secured the previous solution in a sustainable and manageable way. A recent survey amongst some 2.500 top IT managers from some 1.000 companies revealed one concern that scored as the top IT management concern for 42% of the respondents: ….. yes,… don’t laugh…. “Alignment of IT with the business”. The funny thing is that this very same concern scored nr 1 a decade ago. And in the same decade we have built for trillions of dollars of IT ‘value’ for the same Business. Obviously with little effect in terms of doing the right thing… And indeed, I still rarely run into an SLA, a service catalog, a service, or a report that is expressed in business terms – if you find any at all.

The worst of it all

The worst thing of it all is that the business customer is equally infected with this run-away syndrome. When a new technique hits the market, they immediately want it. They obviously complain consistently about the quality of IT services, but they still buy anything that is offered. So there seems to be little hope of improvement.

And indeed, little has changed since the early nineties, when I observed that a job change from development to maintenance was perceived as a demotion. End of career. No sexy innovations any more, but “minding the store.” Yaw!

The run-away syndrome is a symptom of weak leadership, and the main cause of the number one IT concern of the last decade: ”lack of business IT alignment”.

Will we ever find a cure? Will we ever start managing the IT discipline instead of handling it as the playground of techies?