The Three Factories of the IT Department

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From the course by CentraleSupélec

Two Speed IT: How Companies Can Surf the Digital Wave, a BCG Perspective

126 ratings

CentraleSupélec

Two Speed IT: How Companies Can Surf the Digital Wave, a BCG Perspective

126 ratings

Transform or disappear, the Darwinism of IT: In order to adapt to a digital world, a two-speed IT is needed. Despite the importance of IT in today’s digital world, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) often struggle to get their voices heard by executive committees. Faced with this challenge, IT departments are being forced to reinvent themselves to adapt their companies to the fast paced evolution of technology. The Boston Consulting Group has developed a business approach that allows IT to shed off its appearance of a heavy cost center and to adopt a new, more realistic persona as a quality service provider, partnering with users and the management. Would you be a professional, a student in engineering, a student in a business schools or would you just be interested in digital transformation and its implications on IT, Learn with three BCG experts why and how to manage an IT department as a business in order to transform a company and adapt it to a digital world. Join the conversation: #2SpeedIT

From the lesson

Run the Factories

Building applications and running operations require the adoption of a "factory mind-set."

Introduction 0:59

The Three Factories of the IT Department3:47

What Is an Efficient Factory?5:36

Two-Speed IT6:20

Project Management11:10

Manage the Infrastructure6:45

Key Takeaways1:45

Meet the Instructors

Antoine Gourévitch
Senior Partner and Managing Director at The Boston Consulting Group
Vanessa Lyon
Partner and Managing Director at The Boston Consulting Group
Eric Baudson
Managing Director at The Boston Consulting Group

[MUSIC]

Why three factories? Lots of people think in IT that there's

only one factory.

The factory that is developing project.

This is what counts for the business.

And when I was myself a project manager, it was for

me the only thing that was worth it.

I remember I was very proud of running a project

to develop a new e-commerce platform for a travel and tourism company.

It was state-of-the-art.

It was new and innovative.

So, platform would have mobile components, would have direct customer access,

it will have everything.

A new CIO came from China to run the platform with me,

and the appointed CIO Of the new website, of the new company.

And when he came, he asked for a review of the project.

And I was very proud.

I would come to him and say, look the project is well organized.

We know exactly what we want to do.

We have business requirements.

We have been doing the right tradeoffs.

Look at the team.

We have a mix, the right mix of people on the team.

I was very happy.

He looked at me and said, I understand you are a consultant.

And it was not told in a very flattery way.

I was a bit taken aback.

And I said to him, what do you mean?

Well he said, that's very simple.

You come, you do a project, you leave.

And you forget the most important part.

And I said what is the most important part?

Project will be delivered on time.

It's exactly what the business wants and what the customer wants.

And he said but when you will be leaving the project will go infrastructure and

the way you've set up the architecture is the wrong one.

It will cost a lot of money for infrastructure people and

we won't have the right quality of service.

Then you didn't even think about user support.

You will have to support the users.

I begin to see the light.

He was right.

I didn't do a good job.

So in IT, you have three factories.

The first one, of course, is project and is very important.

It's where we change things.

But if projects are not well designed,

they will have a bad influence on the tools and factories.

The second factory is infrastructure.

Infrastructure is about sellers, data centers,

mainframes and team of people who are looking after these machines.

What are their goals?

Their goal is to make sure they operate at a good quality of service, with low cost.

And they can only do that if the people on the project side have thought about them.

The third factory is about user support.

There again, you will have people who will be looking at what's

happening on application and on infrastructure.

And they are there to answer the question, to prevent, to maintain and

to be the ones who are ultimately making sure that they can repair things.

This is also very important.

So, what is a good IT?

A good IT is an IT where you optimize the three factories at the same time.

There is no privilege for the project.

Everything should be looked at the same times, optimized, and noticed of you.

If you do that, then you will be a CIO with happy IT people and happy end users.

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