IT and the Operational Plan

What does it mean to operationalize your organization’s infrastructure, systems or tools? When is it enough documentation to effectively plan and budget, and when do you want to collect that information? 

Having been an IT leader for a mid-sized organization, I have watched many heroes work very hard to make the best decisions possible in the moment, only to have those decisions questioned and even reversed because the expected outcome wasn’t achieved. Budget decisions are made that don’t relate the decision to the impacts below the surface. Alignment across the teams within the organization is rarely achieved and outcomes are even more rarely foreseen. When our focus as an IT organization is problem or issue focused, our vision is often myopic and limited to the issue at hand as opposed to the entire organization or even environment. As an Enterprise Architect I believe it is my job to ensure that we don’t choose solutions that are this focused, situational or siloed because many times those solutions are the cause of technical debt. They are built or purchased for a specific reason or purpose, they are put in place to satisfy a short-term need and then simply forgotten or left to self-manage. In response to my organization’s growing technical debt and our lack of visibility into all the undocumented and unmanaged systems that have accumulated over the years, I started the #NoMoreShelfware movement. To ensure it has taken hold, I have implemented a requirement to gather certain information about a system or tool before it is approved for purchase or build that will help define future planning and resource requirements. The following items are to be documented by any vendor or our internal team prior to acceptance of the proposal or charter. By collecting this information prior to acceptance, I force partners and staff alike to consider what the care and feeding requirements of any solution are going to be, both now and in the future. And I give us a fighting chance of creating a realistic budget process that doesn’t have huge system gaps because we deployed a tool and forgot it was there. Please let me know what you think of this and how you would make it better.