CIO (Australia) Magazine had an interesting article last month by Sue Bushell on Information Technology (IT) organizations and their spectacular failure to the business [“Just Deserts”, 2005 May 5]. Bushell quoted Kathryn Cason of Requisite Organization International Institute on the problems of IT being caused by the organizational structure itself:
The fact that IT has primarily been pushed into a project management corner has proved disastrous, and the tendency to transfer that format to the rest of the corporation has created even more disasters, Cason says. Why is it disastrous? Because project management does not integrate the whole system, she says. The only way to integrate all the systems of the corporation is through the managerial model. “And if there is a break in any of that vertical or horizontal basic structure you create a friction that can seriously eat away at the effectiveness of everybody in the organization,” she says.
Information Technology’s total replacement of managment with project management has been so thorough that most of us in the field don’t question it. How else would work get done? Many of the new posting for IT managers require the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. We cannot imagine doing work without using project methodologies.
The article is an interesting read on the problems of IT within the business.
Image Credit: Traffic signal at Tamil Nadu. © 2011 Thamizhpparithi Maari (CC BY-SA 3.0). Via Wikimedia Commons.
