The IT Factor

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Most of my posts lately have centered on the design of agricultural and biological systems and have not had a technological focus but this has been by design, no pun intended.  Personally, this has been a great exercise for me to hone my thought process and further create the identity of my own personal design methodology which calls upon a multitude of disciplines.  I believe that the design philosophy and methodologies that I have laid out in my previous posts have set the groundwork for future discussions about the fundamentals of design, see my previous post “What is Design?“.

How can design methodologies from other disciplines relate to designing IT/IS systems?  Simple.  Since I have defined and referred to design in my previous posts as,

the management of energy in a system

The energy present in a system can be manifested in different forms.  When discussing business, the energy of a system can be thought of as the resources available such as cash flow, revenue, market share, etc and restricting elements such as capital expenditures, operational expenditures, liabilities, etc., all of which are metrics and key indicators for the health of a business system.  Good design will manage these different resources and restricting elements effectively and efficiently by planning with the idea of “source” and “sink” in mind.  Maximizing inputs into the system and minimizing losses out of the system.

When planning to meet the technology needs and desires of a small business or even an enterprise a good IT/IS system design will consider the business needs along with the resources and restricting elements at play.  IT/IS systems are in place to support the ever changing technological needs of a business.  Good design can reduce costs, power consumption, capital expenditure, man hours, staffing requirements, etc. just by being thoughtful of the different design elements such as, resources and restricting elements, and the interactions between them.

If we can find connections between our design elements we can create robustness, see my previous post “Missed Connections“.  Robustness in a business IT/IS system can take different forms depending on budget allocation.  For example, a business with unlimited amounts of money could create the most robust, highly available, fault tolerant, disaster recoverable system ever created by investing in many, many, many dedicated data centers located all throughout the world but such robustness is overkill and wasteful in so many ways.  The needs, abilities and available resources at play in a business system need to be managed thoughtfully, just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should.

I believe that it is most beneficial for a business to focus primarily on their core business and partner with or outsource/in-source ancillary business functions to specialists.  Email, data archiving and telephony functions are examples of specialties that can easily be managed by a trusted partner.  By focusing on the core business processes you are creating a highly efficient design that is tailored to your individual business ecosystem and reduces the amount of internal resources needed to support the system.  By working with a trusted partner you can focus on your core business and scale as necessary and you can always internalize the duties of a trusted partner in the future if it makes sense to.

If you are a small business do you really need a dedicated IT department to manage your systems?  Probably not, depending on needs.  I think that most businesses under 100 employees do not require a dedicated email solution such as Microsoft Exchange, gmail for business seems like a great alternative compared to having dedicated hardware, software and staff to run the email system.  Also by focusing on the core functions a business can really specialize and zero in on their target market instead of being distracted by ancillary business tasks.  We want to leverage our own business strengths and minimize our weaknesses by working with trusted specialized partners who can fill the gaps and work with us until the size of the business demands internalizing the specialized needs.  Take a phased approach and don’t go all in from the get go, its important to create sustainable design and manage resources effectively.  Crawl.  Walk.  Run.

Image: Map of the Internet 2005