Systemic Management of IT Functionality
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The document discusses the systemic management of IT functionality in business, contrasting management, which applies constraints and guidance, with engineering, which builds. It highlights the importance of enterprise service management (ESM) as a competency in IT management and addresses the influence of risk and benefits in decision-making processes. Furthermore, it emphasizes the need for collaboration across management concentrations while acknowledging the inherent systemic interactions within these areas.
Systemic Management of IT Functionality
- 1. Systemic Management Of I.T. Functionality for Business
- 2. Crossing the chasms Lean, DevOps, Agile and all other managerial concentrations in “I.T.” share the intent to produce usable IT functionality for business operations. The difference between that and engineering is that engineering builds, while management applies. The business management of IT functionality has been modeled in the paradigm of providing Service. Business itself was also conceptually formulated as an Actor, in the paradigm of the Enterprise. As a result, Enterprise Service Management has labelled the top-line business competency of IT management practitioners. But in between a top line business competency and bottom line technology expertise, management fragmented into silos of marketing, religion, or other special interest communities looking for “solutions” to their respective exposures to high pressure. Successful solutions breed paradigms, and paradigms, through proof of concept, like to gather staying power. ESM is no exception. Although it is fundamentally old, and nearly hiding in plain sight (ESM is to activity as Finance is to currency), it has periodic episodes of becoming “new” again, this time due to the interest in “crossing” silos.
- 3. Managed versus Not Managed This “crossing” has bred numerous points of view, in effect more reference-grade explanations such as integration, convergence, holism, and synergy. But in normal communication with management practitioners, the only reason to move "beyond" the Service paradigm is to directly address the management discipline itself instead of the deliverable – first per se regardless of IT, and then in the terms of accountability and responsibility particularly for producing IT-based functionality. The difference between "managed" and "not managed" is, simply, that the former is the continual enforcement of constraints in order to exert guidance towards intended outcomes. This is entirely separate from systems engineering, but the commonality of engineering and management is in the strategy that the sustainable behaviors needed for balancing risk and benefit are systemically associated. Systemic dynamics mean in all cases that a behavior change in one factor can alter the behavior of other factors.
- 4. Management as systemic Production The factors of IT-based functionality include scope, availability, and reliability, and management must attend to risks and impacts that account for those factors. The affect of impact on a factor is to increase the likelihood of that factor’s influence on the risks and impacts on certain other factors. The affect of risk on a factor is, likewise, to increase the likelihood of that factor’s influence the risks and impacts on certain other factors. Systemic management applies constraints and guidance within the expected tolerances and preferences of pre-existing (but negotiable) intentions about outcomes. It understands, by definition, that decisions made in one management concentration include decisions in other concentrations as influential factors.
- 5. optimization mis-use sourcing mis-allocation obsolescence development Capability ProvisionUtility Preference ProbabilityPossibility CREATEOFFER INTEND Management accepts the psychology of the business, which is the virtual equivalency of business requirements and business opportunity. That equivalency is a mindset of expectations, affecting what decisions are deemed necessary. The constraints and guidance of management always attend to attaining an acceptable balance of benefits and risks. That must include understanding how differing efforts (behaviors) can leverage or counteract each other both within and across areas, at macro or micro levels. ©2019 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research
- 6. Systemically influential conditions Possibility Probability Preference ProvisionCapability Utility Viability Option Relevance Access Feasibility Agreement Fitness Type Demand Systemic conditions are mutually influential. A shift the overall balance of obtainable benefit occurs when one of the conditions goes into a deficient or advantaged state versus its norm, causing logically contiguous conditions to react or lose stability themselves. ©2019MalcolmRyder/ArchestraResearch
- 7. Systemic Management of Production Values in IT Functionality release deployment design development quality compatibility implementation capacity compliance manageability requirements resources rules contingency performance objective purpose scale Impacts On Risks To Priority of OPPORTUNITYASSESSMENT Possibility Probability Preference AvailabilityScope Reliability ProvisionCapability Utility RETURN ON INVESTMENT ASSESSMENT Deeper levels of granularity do not change the mutuality of influence across areas of concentration. ©2019MalcolmRyder/ArchestraResearch
- 8. Co-production by systemic management Management evolves to address (“cover”) the myriad issues identifiable in the big picture. Coverage varies and overlaps among co-existent concentrations The main observation about evolving management concentrations is that they most often derive from a principle that represents the favored solution path discovered for the current key problem in the concentration. Whether that principle is then propagated as a manifesto, a method, or a model, it can become insistent. Its insistence can range from being locally restrictive (resisting dependency on external connections or influence) to broadly transformative (being applied as a new perspective in solving problems of other areas). The recognition of any boundaries built or breached “on principle” suggests that “interfaces” are needed between management concentrations to co-ordinate them. This in turn encourages our view of them to be about “collaboration”; but the reality is that systemic interaction occurs whether by desired agreement or not, and the responsibility of management is to bring that dynamic within the tolerances of the business.
- 9. Archestra notebooks compile and organize decades of in-the-field and ongoing empirical findings. All presented findings are derived exclusively from original research. Archestra notebooks carry no prescriptive warranty. As ongoing research, all notebooks are subject to change at any time. ©2019 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research www.archestra.com mryder@archestra.com Archestra research is done from the perspective of strategy and architecture. With all subject matter and topics, the purpose of the notes is analytic, primarily to: * explore, expose and model why things are included, excluded, or can happen in given ways and/or to certain effects. * comment on, and navigate between, motives and potentials that predetermine decisions about, and shapings of, the observed activity.