3 Big Questions
Action - What to do?
By tackling Questions 1 and 2, you have, to put it in medical terms, found out the extent of symptoms and have reached a diagnosis. Now you and your leadership have to decide if this new data matters enough to consider remedial action.
This is an important step, because many organisations ignore ETD and so never try to find an answer - just by discussing them you are already ahead. Now you must decide on remediation - and schedule this alongside other work.
For many, it is obvious how to progress from here. If not, there is a more comprehensive discussion of how to deal with complicated ETD state in the Remedy section.
For now, though, lets concentrate on the most immediate obstacle. Chances are high that internal priorities have already been set and it can be difficult to suddenly change these to address ETD issues, even if your leaders agree they need acting on. Many of the challenges that arise will be to do with the way your organisation runs and the behaviours of people working in it. Much of the rest of this site explains what these behaviours are and how to go about introducing ETD practices so that it becomes business as usual.
Let's start by looking at 3 of the most common mistakes Executive leaders make on reaching the point of accepting that there is an ETD issue to address.
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Mistake No 1 - Its IT 's fault, let them fix it.
Well of course, you will need IT's advice and effort to fix ETD. The mistake comes when the problem is lobbed entirely over the fence for them to deal with and ignored by the rest of the organisation.
When this happens, it's not long before their planned work conflicts with priorities, staff assignments and budgets which belong to the various operating units that compose your enterprise.
Pretty soon, things come to a head and the ETD projects get pushed back or even canned altogether. There is little IT can say because usually, they are the slaves and your operating colleagues are the masters and can count on executives backing their decisions. IT win the odd battle but the war generally is lost, because senior managers do not see the value in the initiatives.
Mistake No 2 - Delegate it without the Authority
Usually these legacy systems are still functional so colleagues in junior or middle management positions often do not feel empowered to make sweeping, expensive decisions to decommission or replace entire platforms. It can be inconvenient, costly or even just plain difficult to replace them. In these circumstances it is easier focus on incremental adjustments and so such systems gradually become part of the woodwork.
For their part senior management tend to focus on new initiatives supporting advancement rather than on replacing ageing components which are inevitably, a less glamorous, mundane story. This vibe is part of the culture of many organisations, move forward and invest in newer technologies. Staff pick up on it and inevitably want to tell the executives what they want to hear to get on.
It makes sense, up to a point, but often results in a growing technical debt mountain pushing up expenses and complexity, eating away at the benefits technology brings.
Mistake No 3 - Trial by Combat
Think for the moment of the annual spending round, when the clans gather to bid for money to support the next round of initiatives.
These gatherings generally work on a survival of the fittest principle ( Darwin would be proud)where proposals with the strongest case and most support are approved and the rest are rejected.
ETD cases generally fare poorly in these exercises, as on the whole they are replacing something that is already present and therefore their "business case" is unattractive. In the budget arena, they are Christians surrounded by Gladiators and Lions.
The problem here is not the ETD proposals themselves; it is instead the process of reporting and selection around them is weak - which is a failing in corporate governance.
All these mistakes are examples of "slopey shoulders " syndrome of the most senior ranks of an organisation not taking responsibility for providing the right guidance and frameworks for decision making.
For sure, there is a finite amount of resource available to be allocated across all demands, so leadership's job is to decide whether ETD risks warrant priority or not.
This decision making process is known as "Setting Risk Appetite" and is intended to act as a check and balance on the allocation of resources and add transparency about what risks will be carried, for how long and equally, expose those that can not be tolerated. Once leadership make their priorities and risk decisions clear the rest of the organisation can get on with putting these into action.
If you want to know how this might work in practice, check out the case study CrashesRUS , details of an approach are explained in the Remedy section.
