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We judge ourselves by what we feel we are capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done. – Longfellow
In a prior post I introduced the concept of Newtonian physics as it applies to IT organizations. This post continues the examination of one aspect of this, namely mass.
What is the mass of your IT organization?
As discussed in prior posts, Physics of IT – Mass (Applied to People), Physics of IT (Applied to Assets) we can think of mass as the collection of quantitative and qualitative attributes that can describe not only the size of an organization, but also the ability to deliver results to their customers. Mass connotes weight and with it inertia. Those people who have plied their trade in organizational change are all too familiar with the joys and pains of the inertia which allows organizations in motion to stay in motion, and organizations at rest to stay at rest.
Capabilities of the IT Organization.
While certainly not as straight forward as inventorying people or assets, the capabilities of the IT organization provide is another form of mass. Capabilities add process processes to the people and the technology (Vaughan Merlyn has a great post on differentiating capabilities from processes) and in so doing provide a business perspective of the scope of value provided by the IT organization. By cataloguing the capabilities of an IT organization it is possible to assess the mass this set of capabilities provides. For example, asset provisioning, desktop support, system development, system and network management can be considered capabilities. Each of these capabilities can be thought of as carrying a mass, and in aggregate, the profile of capabilities provided by the IT organization can be considered an aggregate mass. As with the view towards mass as applied to people, or assets, there are nuances which are important to consider.
- Alignment with demand. There is and always will be traditional IT support capability required by the business. This would include the application package support, network and system management, help desk types of activities. Recently the movement of newer technologies such as Web 2.0, instant messaging, videoconferencing, weblogs, and the like are pushing the demand from the business to have IT provide these capabilities.
- Effectiveness in delivery. How effective the IT organization is delivering the capabilities in question is best answered by the business units. There are several attributes to effectiveness, including timeliness, completeness, accuracy. In general the IT customer has a pretty good perspective on if the capabilities being provided are effective.
- Consistency and predictability of capability delivery. Capabilities which are considered core are frequently approached with more rigor to produce more consistent results. Investments to produce standardized and accepted processes to produce a high quality results are often undertaken.
Although the measures are not measured in a quantified manner, we can assess each capability along the dimesions noted above, and assess a relative mass to each. In this way we have another view into how we can assign a mass to an IT organization based on the capabilities provided to the business.
