Operational Chaos Impacts Business Agility
What can you do when IT becomes unmanageable?
Being agile means you can quickly adapt your business tactics to changes in market conditions. If your operations are in an unmanageable state they act like a rogue ship. Instead of steering your business like a jet boat, you're at the mercy of currents until you fix your operational chaos.
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It all happened very quickly. It was early in the morning of March 26, 2024, when a large ship lost control and crashed against the Baltimore Bridge. No one could control the direction and speed of the 300-meter-long vessel while it approached the metallic viaduct. The Dali cargo ship was now at the mercy of the currents of the Patapsco River. First slowly and then abruptly, the bridge collapsed when the boat touched it. Even though it had traveled across the world multiple times to deliver thousands of containers, its fate was to cause devastation on that grim Tuesday morning.
What this event shows is that a situation of operational chaos can result in a rather dramatic outcome. All because you lose the ability to navigate. What the episode doesn't reveal—at least explicitly—is how people considered the Dali ship agile up until the disastrous incident. Even though cargo ships are some of the largest vessels they need agility to maneuver. Being agile isn't something exclusive to small organizations.
Your business is no different. It needs the agility to be able to quickly respond to changing product requirements, market competition, and even government-issued regulations. Those are the maneuvers your business needs to do to keep navigating. And being agile isn't possible if you don't have sound IT operational foundations.
Especially in Web-related businesses, IT is a fundamental piece of the ability to be agile. What we commonly refer to as IT is the set of practices that facilitate infrastructure, software development, analytics, and communication. IT comprises things like deploying a new version of your Web application or API, increasing the scalability of your systems, understanding how customers interact with your product, and communicating with users.
It shouldn't be a surprise that not having order in IT-related activities can disrupt business agility. To get to the bottom of it, Software AG surveyed 1,500 IT decision-makers from companies with at least 250 employees. The survey was done on November 2023 and the results are now available. Let's look at how these professionals see the relationship between operational chaos and agility.
The first thing to notice is the general sentiment that operational inefficiency diminishes the agility of a business. In fact, that inefficiency is linked to how agile IT operations are. If IT isn't agile it can hardly produce an environment of agility. Almost all respondents mention their technology infrastructure has grown substantially and that growth is making it difficult to adopt an agile business culture. What are the factors contributing to the infrastructure growth?
The thing most surveyed IT decision-makers mentioned (81%) is they don't have a clear view and management capabilities over all their integrated systems. Not knowing how your systems are integrated and how many of those integrations exist is a challenge. And the bulk of the challenge happens not when everything is working fine. It is when there are issues that you'll realize you don't know how to remediate. But even if you do, there are other difficulties.
The second topic respondents mention (81%) is the amount of duplicate integrations. Now, you know what integrations you have running and you realize many of them are duplicated. Why's that? Duplication of work, which leads to duplicated APIs and integrations, happens because teams work in watertight environments. Organizations where information doesn't flow are in danger of duplicating their efforts to generate business success. Unfortunately, fixing duplicated work isn't enough to repel the endangerment of business results.
Conflict is the third theme evident from the survey. Eight out of ten respondents agree there's a conflict between IT and business concerning deploying new applications and building integrations. While this conflict often stems from a misalignment of objectives, looking at the survey as a whole indicates there's something else at play. What seems to be happening is the increased complexity of the existing systems leading to a surge in the difficulty of building new things.
While business objectives try to steer the organization in one direction, IT can't keep pace. The proof is that 80% of respondents agree that the size of the technology infrastructure is an impediment to agility and productivity. Instead of spending time building products, organizations throw all they have at maintaining a large—and often outdated—infrastructure landscape. It's clear to me something has to be fixed. While it's true IT can't neglect the maintenance of existing systems, it's also a fact that the rising business demands need to be fulfilled.
The solution might be to update all parts of the infrastructure considered obsolete. That seems to be a good way out because 80% of survey respondents consider the majority of their organization's systems as legacy. That explains why it's hard to have visibility of those systems, and why it's difficult to manage them. However, it doesn't explain the duplication of efforts and, partially, the conflict between IT and the business.
Altogether, it's clear from the survey that leaving legacy systems unmaintained is a core contributor to reduced agility. Not being agile leads to less productivity and worse alignment with the demands of the market. And, not being productive means you don't have time to properly manage and maintain your existing systems and integrations.