Metrics

The state of the IT industry is quite sad.  The plight of the IT cost center is that it doesn't have any good way to tie dollars spent to dollars earned.  If I invest $1M in IT, how do I equate that to a business outcome?  I have to wonder, couldn't I have gotten the same business outcome for half a million?

IT managers are desperate for metrics.  They are starving for some way to demonstrably show that they are not squandering money.  It's the old "build things right versus build the right things" argument.  Because IT doesn't have a large stake in determining what the "right" things are, they are left with determining whether or not they did the best they could with what they had.  And anecdata will not do.  We need metrics!  They don't necessarily care if they are meaningful metrics, because it's better to be the guy with bad data than it is to be the guy with no data.

What is our defect rate?  How do we measure quality?  Productivity?  How good are we at onboarding new team members?  Are we up to snuff on all of our compliance concerns?  Let's get some process around this stuff!  That's likely what you will hear after a big company has acquired a few smaller companies.  The smaller companies flew on light (no) process and got by on their skill and being nimble (wanted to use the word agility but the term is too overloaded).  These small companies got to be profitable enough to become acquisition targets.  Then when they get acquired, the new IT manager, who has never built anything from the ground up, surveys his mixed bag of teams with varying degrees of process rigor and maturity, and decrees that we are going to drive consistency. 

The talented developers groan.  The ones who crave a little autonomy are now facing the prospect of becoming a mindless ticket monkey.  But isn't that what it's really about?  Reducing your dependency on skill and talent.  Predictability is now of the utmost importance.  Predictably mediocre is better than sporadically excellent.  And that has to be a conscious choice, doesn't it?  The people pushing this type of process rigor can't really think that they will be breeding a vibrant culture that attracts bright minds, can they?

Keep in mind that I am speaking specifically about the IT Cost Center in the context of a medium sized company pushing to become a big one.  Picture a company inside of the healtcare/insurance/banking/finance space that was recently acquired. 

What is the bright side here if you happen to be one of those knowledge workers who likes to color outside the lines?