The next frontier of enterprise automation

This site is dedicated to the emerging subject of enterprise IT automation, otherwise called Enterprise Resource Planning for IT. This is not the automation of the business by IT; rather it is IT automating itself...

Why Do We Need ERP for IT?
The modern enterprise is built on the following resources:

Financial capital (money)
Productive capital (land, machinery)
Human capital (people)
Stock of goods (inventory)
Information

Enterprise resource planning software is software that can comprehensively manage the needs of a major enterprise resource area. And of the major resource areas, only information (i.e., IT) lacks integrated vendor solutions such as those offered by SAP, Oracle, and PeopleSoft for the other resource areas.

What Makes Managing IT So Hard?
Consider this old chestnut.
A scientist gave a lecture on basic cosmology at a local library. Afterwards, an elderly woman came up and asserted,
"You know, the world is really just sitting on the back of a gigantic turtle."
"But what is that turtle standing on?"
"Another turtle."
"And what is that turtle standing on?"
"You can't fool me, young man; it's turtles all the way down!"

The enterprise IT problem - it's a stack of turtles. A hall of mirrors. We are seeking data about the data and process to manage the processing. The work becomes highly leveraged; small errors can have large consequences. It also makes the brain hurt at times.

The current state of affairs in most enterprise IT shops is painfully fragmented. No major system of record exists for the resource. Analysts, support personnel, developers, and executives rely on personal connections, Excel spreadsheets, and a host of un-integrated point solutions to manage the business of enterprise IT. This irony has been observed by many; see Chris Murphy's excellent article The Cobbler's Kid: Why Isn't There ERP To Run IT?

How can ERP for IT Help?
First, I need to strongly emphasize that I am not looking for IBM, HP, or CA to become the "SAP of IT." Using the ERP term is simply evocative, and meant to imply the kind of comprehensive integration that ERP systems provide -- sometimes, at their best.

There have been many, many proprietary attempts to solve various pieces of the IT puzzle. But no comprehensive, integrated solution exists, nor will any one vendor be able to supply it given the complexity of the domains involved. However, with the right foundation on industry standards, a de facto, federated, ERP for IT solution could start to emerge that would radically improve the efficiency of enterprise IT.

For a deeper discussion, see my BI Journal article.

Comments

[Ron Haefner]

Hi,

I bumped into your website via TDN and believe 100% in what you are touting. We in IT are definitely suffering from the cobbler's children syndrome. In fact yesterday, as I was describing a new project (for our Enterprise Architecture group), the listener said - Oh, you mean a repository. I said, no, it is the start of the IT database.

In the early 80's I worked at Ralston Purina and engaged in a "Problem Management" project. As part of that, the IBM rep brought me a series of books that IBM published - I called them the Yellow books. These were published as the result of IBM's center in Raleigh that helped IT organizations address their needs. After a few attempts to understand that company's organizational verbiage and then trying to decompose that into IT business functions, they decided to create a generic model of the IT business. There were 42 business processes. I cannot recall the number of data entities. They used this generic model as a means to matchup each companies IT org chart with their business function definitions and then they were able to help them plan for the future based on the IT generic model definitions.

I will go home tonight to see if I can still dig out that stuff, or at least get some names and numbers. If you or anyone else knows of this information, please let me know.

Thanks,
Ron

[Gerard Duggan]

.
Followup to Ron Haefner, Jan 7...The generic model of 42 processes was called the Information Systems Management Architecture and the "yellow books" were the detailed documentation supporting each of the 42 processes. I too am looking for a copy of the yellow books...cheers, Gerard

[Ron Haefner]

Was not able to locate my copies of the "yellow books". I know that there were 50 or so "data classes" defined there for the entire IT organization. This would have provided a great start on a Conceptual Data Model for IT. I will continue to locate a copy via IBM.
Ron

[DemianE]

Does IT need an ERP or does IT need systems and processes to better manage its resources relative to it's expectations?

Running the thought forward a bit, what, then, are the expectations of IT and what are its resources?

I suggest an outside in viewpoint might be more helpful than an inside out viewpoint. What does an organization need from IT? What does IT need from the organization? How do we know if IT is performing well? I suggest that what is needed is an IT peformance scale, and here is what I propose:

................Organization Performance
.............Product Line Performance
..........Department Performance
.......Resource Performance
....Project Performance
.Base Services Performance