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The cost of delayed decisions in Enterprise

Large enterprises have started their IT journey in earnest. However, they are miles behind what is happening. 

Some of them have been trying to learn faster by creating research programs or separate business unites to try out and learn a few exotic ideas that have not yet gained acceptance in the industry or enterprise.

Enterprises have moved record collection and data to IT long back and were pioneers in that. However, since the advent of personal computers, they have been left behind. Internet and mobile have left them far behind.

For example, Network security, big data, mobile apps. social applications are solved problems that the enterprise choose to ignore. 




A different problem space

To be fair, Enterprises are looking at a different problem space. They are looking at how to support business operations - Stable and reliable operations, make data-backed operational decisions. By extension, they are expected to be risk-averse and more inward facing.

They are not encouraged to be linked to the business strategy. This is the structural problem that the enterprise seems to have created. When software was first introduced to enterprise, they saw it as a tool to help make internal decisions and hence, the internal org structure was done accordingly.

Today, in a lot of enterprises, IT is considered as a cost structure and several business units consider them as a part of the operational cost. As an extension, they are not involved in any strategy discussions that happen at the business level.

For example, enterprises do not look at acquiring other companies just because they have better IT or software systems to integrate with. That is not to say enterprises have to do that. It is a sad fact that software systems are always an after thought in most of the acquisitions or mergers at large enterprises.

IT organisations in large enterprises are left burdened with these large system integration projects or existing operational support projects. 

Evolution of the problem space

This was not always how it was in large enterprises. Large enterprises used to be more forward looking in looking at big data and used to be driven by software systems at the centre of operations. 

A lot of what we use today in personal space used to be from the enterprise space. A few examples are the productivity software liked word, excel etc.

What went wrong is difficult to track back. We can hypothesise at best. 

IT organisation seems to have begotten the same ills that plagues every other department in a big enterprise - siloes and lack of decision makers.

Large enterprises would always have siloes. However, the lack of decision makers would plague large enterprises for long. In a way, the existence of siloed departments led to a lack of accountability and hence lack of decision making and decision makers.

The problem with no decision making

With large enterprises, decision making was not easy. There was not much precedent to what was happening with respect to IT organisations in large enterprises.

However, the fact that IT organisations were supposed to be risk averse also led to the fact that decision making was always slow. 

In some cases, there was no decision making or the decision was too late for the specific problem. The lack of decision making was easy since the effects of that was not visible immediately and hence tough to measure.

For example, Why did Walmart take so much time to start e-commerce? - I am obviously taking the easy target. There are several large enterprises all around the world that I can pick at random and ask similar questions.

Conclusion

The large enterprises are coming out of a stupor and are trying to play catch-up with what is happening today, trying to connect to the end customer and also transform what is happening internally.

However , they are all falling prey to a ton of products out there - products built for the large enterprises to use so that they could feel safe and also feel they are progressing, or consulting services that are going to tell them they need to use those kind of products.


What they don’t realise is that along the way, they did something to themselves that they might have to rediscover. This is a catharsis that every large enterprise will have to go through to be successful.
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