Minimal IT newsletters - complete listing
Though it sounds unlikely, it is possible to cut IT costs by up to 90%. The key to this is managing IT demand. This isn't simply a matter of saying "no", but requires a reappraisal of the nature and value of IT.
Computers remember, calculate and communicate. They are valuable because they are quicker, more accurate or cheaper than people. Sometimes they even make the infeasible possible. But people often claim computers can do things they can't. We need a simple way of analysing claimed benefits to see if they are real.
Computers add value because they help you remember, calculate or communicate. But there are some problems that constantly get in the way of achieving this value. Often the real challenge and real benefit is in fixing these problems, and not in the computer system itself.
Alignment of IT and business is misunderstood. To achieve alignment, businesses should fit IT around their organisational structures, and avoid enterprise IT systems that cut across them.
We often define IT projects before we really understand what benefit they will bring. This makes projects both impossible and unstoppable. To avoid this, you have to fully understand business benefits and change before you think about IT.
The science-fiction staple of the superhuman half-man half-computer cyborg is a good model for our use of computers. But to grasp this power, we need to learn more about the true nature of our computers, take more responsibility for them, and apply some common sense to their use.
To fully realise IT's potential, you need to apply skills of delegation, definition and instruction. These are not specialist IT skills, but the sort of skills you use every day at work or at home.
There are few words in the English language more boring than "filing" and "administration". Tedious though they are, you need to apply these basic office skills if you want to truly master your IT.
IT often tries, and fails, to treat people and computers as if they were the same. This does not give people the flexibility they need, nor computers the definition and proving they need.
50% to 90% of IT costs can be saved by managing IT demand. Nearly all excess demand stems from simple human over-enthusiasm, self-advancement, self-protection and peer pressure. We need to redirect our perception of IT so that our human nature drives us to an ever more efficient use of IT.
IT is full of overused phrases like "alignment" and "demand management". If we really want to reduce IT costs, we have to be crystal clear about our meaning, and avoid ambiguous phrases like these.
Words control how we think. The builder metaphor is appropriate for IT supply, but not for IT demand. IT needs new metaphors, like surgeon, which emphasise responsibility for outcome and not just delivery.
Like any mature political system, the IT industry under represents minority interests and allows only very limited debate. Unorthodox viewpoints, like those of Minimal IT, are crucial as a counterbalance to force debate and keep our use of IT healthy.
Achieving simplicity requires more than wishful thinking. To really keep things simple, you need to deeply understand how IT delivers value.
Most predictions of the future of IT are based on the extrapolation of technological capability or the hopeful self-interest of IT specialists. Predicting the future based on profitability and the self-interest of the majority provides a more realistic view.
Our current idea of IT literacy amounts to little more than being able to use office applications. True IT literacy involves understanding what IT is and how it adds value, and getting computers to work on your behalf.
The first PC revolution provided personal productivity tools to replace the typewriter, calculating machine, fax machine and drawing board. The second PC revolution will let anyone build outward-facing services to present their interests and responsibilities to the outside world.
Outsourcing and decentralisation are often predicted as the cause of death of the IT department as we know it. But the real threat, or opportunity, comes from merging IT into general business management and operation.
Businesses are caught in a tarpit of excessive IT staff costs. The way to escape is to ignore staffing issues and concentrate on the underlying value of IT.
To be valuable, IT change must be linked to business change. To be doable, it must be kept separate. Navigating this paradox requires education, awareness, respect, and a dose of suspicion.
You can only make order-of-magnitude savings in IT costs by reducing demand for IT. You need to focus less on what changes are required and how they will be carried out; and concentrate more on why you believe the changes are necessary.
Identifying which requirements are really driving IT change gives the clarity needed to define small, simple projects that focus on meeting true business need.
IT projects are typically defined to support business change. We need a simple way of checking that the proposed IT changes really will make a positive contribution to the business change.
IT projects fail when systems are not accepted by the business. You can reduce this risk by writing job descriptions to explain what the system will do.
Business alignment is not a vague management aspiration. It is a practical principle for designing systems.
Project management and architecture will not lead to breakthroughs in the use of IT. Like Harry Potter, we have to learn to visualise, strongly desire and confidently grasp where we want to go.
Strong business ownership is critical to the success of IT. But IT has made meaningful ownership impossible. To make ownership possible we need to stop sharing systems and data, and restructure systems so that they align to the structure of the business organisation.
A lot of what we think of as good practice in IT has no benefit, but just adds cost. For example, the dream of an enterprise-wide shared database has caused massive cost and waste over the years.
Test-driven development cuts costs and improves quality, but can be difficult to understand and justify. Thinking of testing as the formwork into which code concrete is poured can help you understand test-driven development and justify its adoption.
Designing systems to meet the needs of your consumers is critical to keeping systems simple and effective. Sometimes this means ignoring the advice of your suppliers.
If we want to reduce costs, we need to improve business' understanding and control of IT. Online games provide some fascinating insights into how we might do this.
System integration is not just about connecting systems, and has nothing to do with networks. It is about balancing the need to get systems to work together with the need to change them independently.
We can use integration to help us change systems independently, but we need to define what we should treat as separate systems. This can be done pragmatically based on technical differences, or more rigorously by looking at how systems support different management responsibilities.
Integration projects struggle because they send the wrong information between systems. Adopting simple rules for data content and structure can greatly simplify integration.
XML is a way of structuring data that works very well with integration. XML is simpler than many people imagine.
Extensible markup language (XML) is ideal as an interface data format. To keep it simple, you need to adopt some simple rules which ignore many of its advanced features.
"We like standards - we've got lots of them" is a good description of most businesses' approach to transferring data between systems. If you want any-to-any integration, you need to reduce the number of different data transfer technologies.
Integration architecture is referred to as point-to-point, as a bus, or as a hub. These are not mutually exclusive architectures, but complementary approaches for different aspects of integration.
Before buying an integration tool, do not just ask "Is this the best?", but "Do I really need it?"
You can document interfaces easily and effectively if you are not too formal, and if you yourself rely on the documentation you have written.
To make integration code simple, flexible and fast, you need to separate technical code from business code, use integration layers wisely, and be aware of different ways of processing XML.
Integrating software packages is easy if you have a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve and if you ask the right questions. But you will have problems if you abdicate integration to the package vendor.
Effective systems integration requires a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve and an awareness of the common problems to avoid.
In IT we are obsessed with projects. Focusing your effort on the systems themselves, not just on projects, can deliver significant tangible benefits.
Many persistent IT problems relate to the qualities of the systems themselves. Tackling these is not a technical problem, but a management problem of communication, justification, control and accountability.
We apply governance to IT investments, change projects and service delivery. Extending governance to include the systems themselves can give us the management tool we need to overcome many persistent problems in IT.
Project management and architecture are two of the main tools we use to manage IT. To manage systems better, we need another tool that is simpler and more direct.
System governance is not an expensive new bureaucracy to be imposed on IT. It is a way of cutting costs on work you would do anyway.
System governance does not need heavyweight methodologies. It needs a lightweight framework of guidance, processes, materials and tools.
Defining criteria for system governance involves looking widely to get a long list of possible criteria, and then filtering to focus on what is really important to your organisation.
Criteria used for system governance must be defined in detail. This includes their business significance, what questions you would ask, and model answers.
There are a lot of problems in IT that we find really hard to fix. You can make a huge improvement just by measuring how well systems fit your standards.
You can use system governance to identify and prioritise improvements to your systems, and justify your improvements. Automating this helps you tackle all of the problems, not just the obvious ones.
Free and open source software is a viable alternative to commercial products. Once you have switched to free software, you are unlikely ever to switch back.
Cheap IT helps small companies compete on a technologically equal basis with large companies. As well as cutting costs, cheap IT helps you beat your competition with innovative products.
I have an admission to make. I tried to fix a system assessment so that I would look good. But in the end I had to accept and act on the recommendations.
There are surprising similarities between system governance and agile methods. Although they address different problems, they share many core values.
To get closer to the business, IT must recognise and promote its role as stewards of the business' IT systems.
To gain the benefits of system governance, you only need simple materials, processes and tools. Anything more complicated would get in the way.
System governance solves problems that affect everyone in IT. But it is hard to position system governance because few people are directly responsible for solving the problems.
Writing a single, definitive list of the IT systems within your organisation is a simple task that can deliver significant long term benefits.
IT risk management overlooks critical long-term risks. With system governance, you can identify and manage these risks.
Current IT governance frameworks such as COBIT focus on IT's internal processes. Governance can be made even more effective by including metrics structured around systems.
To govern outsourcing you need to establish service levels, check the supplier's development skills, and negotiate costs. But how can you make sure that the supplier will maintain and improve the systems?
Simple, direct websites work. Complicated, vague websites fail.
To make your website simple and direct you have to focus on a simple message. You can't be all things to all people. You have to make hard choices about what to leave out.
Lead your readers on a path through your website. Follow them to make sure they don't get lost.
If you want a website for your young company, do not waste money on elaborate design. A simple design will be more effective. And cheaper.
Web accessibility is not an expensive imposition just to make your website usable by a few visitors with special needs. It makes your website more effective for all your visitors, and pays for itself.
We think of governance as a long-term strategic initiative. But governance of IT systems also delivers short-term tactical benefits.
An effective system review reduces risk and cost in your project, and helps you make the best use of scarce technical staff.
When you are selecting a new software package, do not rush the preparation of your vendor questionnaire. A well-prepared questionnaire helps you review the impact of each option easily and effectively, and saves you time in the long run.
There's no such thing as a future proof IT system. Good design can prolong the life of your systems, but what's really important is that you care and know about the state of your systems.
Projects are not investments, and "project portfolio management" is nonsense. Misunderstanding this leads to serious problems.
IT managers are often enthusiastic for a broader business role. But this can undermine the value that IT can bring.
We find it hard to save money in IT because big cost savings threaten our jobs. But if we want long-term job security we must reduce costs, even if it means we lose out in the short term.
There are six ways to cut IT costs. Two of them are well known. The other four are yours for the taking.
If you want to cut costs, you have to be prepared to descope and cancel projects. You have to avoid heroic project management that battles on against all odds.
If you want to cut costs, you need to make your IT easy to understand. You need to think of your IT as a collection of business systems, not a collection of technologies.
IT needs clear and strong business ownership. We must structure IT so that ownership is possible, and avoid IT structures that weaken ownership.
If you want to increase IT value and reduce IT cost, be realistic about what IT can do. Limiting your view of IT to automation helps you spot unrealistic requirements that IT can never deliver.
IT departments waste money by running themselves as a business within a business, selling IT to their business "customers". You can slash costs by turning this around, and seeing the IT department as customers, who buy IT on behalf of their colleagues.
If you are starting a project, or even if you are part way through, try some simple checks to see if you can cut out costs. If you have not got time, or think they are not relevant, the checks will bring you even more value.
You will achieve significant long-term IT cost reduction when you can see the essence of your IT, not its complexities.
We can build a future with deep and effective use of IT that is much simpler and cheaper than today's IT. We don't need new technology to get there, but we do need to let go of our view of IT organisations.
Walking home one evening, I found a man crawling about under a street lamp. "Are you OK," I asked. "I've losht my key," he replied, obviously worse for a few drinks. "Where did you drop it?" "Over there," he replied, pointing to a dark patch of bushes nearby. "Then why are you looking over here?" "I can't see over there. It's too dark."
The Minimal IT cost model shows you where to look for IT cost savings. You can try it for yourself for free.
We need a new word - stupidclever - to describe stupid things that clever people do. There is a lot of stupidclever in IT.
StupidClever is something that starts off clever, but ends up stupid. IT design methods and working methods become stupidclever when they are applied on too large a scale.
We can get carried away with clever ideas for design and technology. So often this ends up as stupidclever.
We use the phrase "islands of automation" to describe systems that are not connected. We all know that islands of automation are a bad thing. Or are they?
Some of the best programmers seem to do the least testing. Rather than criticise them, we should learn from them.
Politics, bureaucracy, unrealistic projects and over engineering are all blamed for IT's problems. But these problems can not be solved, and we have to learn to work with them.
Are you stuck for ideas for presents this year? Give your loved ones Linux!
Influence gives the IT organisation the freedom to act and to deliver value. To win real influence, the IT organisation must go beyond excellent service and project delivery.
We can not make the IT investments that we need to make because we can not calculate the return on investment (ROI). Using a basket of management objectives lets us estimate ROI, and can justify the investment we need.
We can model the financial benefit of any IT investment by using a handful of simple calculations.
To calculate a financial benefit for any IT investment, we have to put a value on meeting our own objectives.
You can justify any IT investment by measuring where you are now, modelling the benefits of making improvements, and putting an overall value on running your IT well. This seemingly simplistic approach is an effective IT management tool.
The top five hot topics in IT are: systems integration, databases, IT governance, cost reduction, and delegating work to IT. At least that's what my readers think.
Vista is a great improvement on earlier Windows versions, but it does little to protect your investment in learning, in software, and in data.
Defined, repeatable processes are a major focus of the IT industry. But there are limits to what can be achieved by process management alone.
IT process management initiatives like CMMI and ITIL can be made easier and more effective by including formal reviews of system quality.
Sometimes we need to ignore the sophisticated and specialist skills that we pride ourselves on having, and use simple techniques instead.
How long should IT systems last? There is no wrong answer. Whatever answer you give is self-fulfilling.
If you want to increase the life span of your systems, you have to clearly define your systems so that you can manage them effectively.
Effective owners are vital for long-lived systems. Without effective owners, systems fall off the management agenda and quickly decline into unsupportable legacy.
Systems that are clearly separated from each other live longer than systems that are coupled.
Long-lived systems need to be based on long-lived technology. This often means picking less fashionable options.
Long-lived systems do not just happen, they are designed that way. Long-lived design involves keeping things simple, and being risk-averse to the point of paranoia.
Change is inevitable. Long-lived systems must be insulated from change, but must embrace change when the time is right.
If you do not monitor your systems, they will die.
You can extend the life of your IT systems indefinitely, but you do have to DO SOMETHING about it.
Portable applications free us from many of the restrictions of the personal computer. But are they practical?
What do Ozzy Osbourne and Tim Berners-Lee have in common? Whatever it is, it could be disrupting your IT department very soon.
Big documents like user manuals are really hard to write using Microsoft Word. DocBook is a well-established standard that makes writing big documents much easier.
Inkscape and The Gimp are full-featured open source graphics programs. Even if you are not a professional artist or designer, they have plenty of features that you will find useful.
I use free and open source software all the time, but I have not open sourced my own products. Am I an open source hypocrite?
We can reduce risks by shifting our management of risk to earlier in the system life cycle
IT is getting smaller, faster and cheaper all the time. The effects on enterprise IT will be profound.
Application Portfolio Management (APM) is set to become the next big thing in IT. But different vendors have a very different view of what it is.
We make IT hard because we get into too much detail too soon. We need a broad but shallow approach to IT management.
Defining processes makes new ideas, techniques and products much more credible, and forces you to think through practicalities.
System governance can be summarised in just three pictures.
Is the Windows registry a bad design? Judge for yourself.
IT has a rich ecosystem of service providers. They are critical to bringing new products to market.
It is practical to run a PC environment from a flash drive. Additional work is required to make the environment really flexible and easy to use.
There is an alternative view of IT that challenges nearly everything that we believe. Although we may not like its conclusions, it is difficult to see where this alternative view is wrong.
IT architecture, organisation and decision making are a by-product of engineering necessity, not a conscious design to best serve the needs of business.
The structures of IT - architecture, organisation, decision making - form an alternative reality which has no meaning across the broader business.
One of the main roles of IT management is to help business navigate the alternative realities of IT. But the way we do this makes IT more complicated and more misaligned.
The major problems in IT all have roots in the technical structures upon which we base IT solutions.
We can break free from the major management problems of IT by designing systems differently.
A simplification of IT architecture would have far-reaching impacts across the whole of IT.
eBusiness is not about selling products on the Internet or automating supplier links. True eBusiness goes much deeper and can only occur when the paraphernalia of IT is swept away.
Although we aspire to build simple IT solutions, many arguments suggest that this may not be possible.
The strongest arguments against simplifying IT architecture involve the role of IT in the organisation. We have to decide whether the arguments for simplification or the arguments for complexity will win.
In IT we need to achieve three things: delivery of service today; change for tomorrow; and fitness for the future. Each requires a different management approach.
Management control should focus on listening to and acting on the recommendations of staff, not checking that they are doing their job properly.
You need a simple, shared view of your IT to create joined-up solutions to IT problems.
Testing is an increasingly important part of IT. We face serious problems with the long-term management and support of systems because testing tools are not based on standards.
Management controls in IT overlook many important aspects. To be more effective, we need to do more than just borrow control methods from other areas.
Reading the websites of similar businesses can be a great way of recognising the weaknesses in your own.
Offline electronic forms are a useful part of many IT solutions. The XForms standard meets requirements that many commercial products do not meet.
If you develop or manage web sites or IT systems, you need to know about XForms.
We assume that IT should be based on a detailed model of the real world. But the best IT is simpler and focuses on the areas of greatest value.
If you think of testing and documentation as just tasks on your plan, they will be near worthless. If you rely on them as the authoritative specification of your system, they will be near perfect.
Don't work harder. Don't even work smarter. Work less.
The concept of systemhood makes IT easy to understand. It helps us see how to do less work.
Systemhood could challenge project management and service delivery as the basis for managing IT.
What do "governance" and "portfolio management" mean, and which should we use when?
Standards are too important to be monopolies. We need to introduce more competition into standards so that they can be adopted more widely.
Defining "IT system" creates a powerful tool for IT management.
Portfolio management is so strongly associated with projects that it can not be applied to other types of portfolio.
If you do not use a password manager like KeePass, you should.
Building an IT business from scratch is a long and challenging process. Seeing your products come to market and succeed is the most exciting and most rewarding part of all.
To manage quality for the long term, you need a system quality management process that takes quality management off the critical path of business change projects.
IT cost reduction methods fall into ten categories. Some have much more potential than others.
If project management never existed, we would have to invent it. For the same reasons, we have to invent system quality management.
You can cut IT costs and still deliver IT change and services if you can stop IT itself being so demanding.
We have all seen projects and systems treated as special cases, but in many ways all projects and all systems need to be managed the same.
In the past, major shifts in IT architecture have hidden weak long-term management. With no prospect of a similar shift in the near future, it's time to tighten up our act.
Can the principles that underpin test-driven development be applied to the definition and execution of IS strategy?
IS strategy is much more practical when it is based on a description of what good IS looks like.
You can achieve a test-driven IS strategy by implementing a simple, high-level evaluation process.
Test-driven strategy is easier to communicate and more flexible. It provides a clear mechanism for ongoing improvement.
Mobile computing has become an everyday reality. But we have further to go.
You can achieve high levels of reuse if you focus on reusing big things, like whole systems and frameworks. This is much more efficient than assembling from components.
We can learn a lot by looking at excellent examples of long-term maintenance outside IT.
To solve problems of IT ownership, we need to make IT ownable.
Most technical evaluations are unnecessarily difficult and do not deliver good results. Making evaluation easier and more effective is common sense.
We need a way of managing things that do not sit comfortably under our project management and service delivery umbrellas.
Quality management is only effective when it is linked to decision making. To link it, you need to clarify your IT objectives and your decision-making processes, and build a balanced body of information about your IT.
You can achieve the alignment and flexibility of departmental IT, and still keep control and co-ordination at the centre.
To stop standards becoming a bureaucratic monster, spend at least 10% of standards effort on reviewing and changing the standards themselves.
It is hard to measure the business value of IT. But there are a few simple things you can do to make measurement easier.
If you believe and act on business estimates of the value of IT, organisational pressures will drive the figures to be accurate.
The latest formats make it much easier to export data and reports to Excel, even if you do not use Microsoft technology and do not have the latest versions of Microsoft Office.
To manage technology effectively, you need methods that let you manage at different levels of detail at different times and across different subjects.
No IT objective, such as cost reduction, can be managed in isolation. You need to adopt methods that let you manage a basket of competing objectives.
To successfully navigate the IT of mergers, acquisitions and reorganisations you need to quickly establish high-level visibility, direction and control across the new structure. Here's how.
Here in the UK there is a constant stream of scandal as sensitive data is lost by banks, the police, the government, and pretty much everyone else. Rather than being a failure of "procedures", I see this as inevitable because of fundamental problems with the security of PCs and portable media.
Fungibility is a critical concept for managing long-term costs and risk in IT.
Like every profession, IT is driven by the passion and eccentricity of the people who work in it.
The XML processing language XSLT is a powerful and flexible solution to many development needs.
Should we design IT so that every system is entirely independent of every other system?
If we want our IT to consist only of strictly independent systems, what would our design principles be?
What would be the impact on data and database management if we based IT architecture on the principles of strictly independent systems?
System-oriented architecture (SYSOA), which splits IT into strictly independent systems, provides a very effective basis for systems integration.
System-oriented architecture gives clarity and discipline to the management of PCs and web-based systems.
System-oriented architecture could help organisations build effective IT infrastructure by clarifying business requirements and making infrastructure easier to justify.
System-oriented architecture is valuable because it provides a common point of reference between business owners, users, IT management and technical specialists.
Writing regularly makes writing much easier, helps you think more clearly, and helps you get your ideas across more effectively.
You can measure the strategic contribution of an IT system by thinking about two separate things: the strategic contribution of the work supported by the system, and the contribution of the system to the work.
Although it is still early days for cloud computing, offerings such as Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) are becoming viable for mainstream use.
Programmers beware - you will suffer serious performance problems if you ignore the database and do too much data manipulation in the code.
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Don't ignore your database, use it
Programmers beware - you will suffer serious performance problems if you ignore the database and do too much data manipulation in the code.
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