To break IT bottlenecks, try user-driven innovation

What happens to a machine when you clean out all the sand in the gears? In a hundred different places, it runs just a bit better than it used to.

The same might be said for IT organizations that encourage user-driven innovation (UDI? Why not?) and its close cousins, IT consumerization and BYOT (bring your own tech).

BYOT and the consumerization of IT are fast gaining NBT (next big thing) status among the analyst set. One problem: With few exceptions, the business case for employing a BYOT strategy has thus far been weak, amounting to a combination of social pressure (lots of users want it) and trend-following.

But dig deeper into IT’s overarching mission and the case becomes clear. The UDI/IT consumerization/BYOT trio provide valuable opportunities for businesses to take maximum advantage of what IT has to offer.

What the TSA can teach businesses about information technology

Yes, one of the most aggravating aspects of traveling, airport security, has something to teach us. It’s rooted in the late Eliyahu Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints. TOC, the most important process improvement methodology most people have never heard of, is arguably more useful than either of its better-known competitors, Lean and Six Sigma.

To hopelessly oversimplify it, here’s how TOC works: (1) Focus on a part of your business that isn’t performing as well as you’d like — usually but not necessarily a process; (2) identify its bottleneck — what it is that keeps this part of the business from performing better; (3) increase the capacity of the bottleneck step until it isn’t the bottleneck anymore; and (4) rinse and repeat.

How you increase capacity depends on the situation. TSA’s approach is brute force. It hasn’t developed a more streamlined way of making sure someone isn’t trying to sneak through a weapon. It just opens more processing lines. It isn’t elegant, but it works.

And it’s exactly how you can tap into spare IT capacity hidden in plain sight.

Breaking down IT’s bottlenecks

To understand how this approach will help IT help the business, take a look at IT’s traditional bottlenecks and what we are doing about them.

Broadly speaking, IT has three bottlenecks:

• The big stuff: Supporting strategic business change with large-scale system implementations. We’re a bottleneck here because, for the most part, whether building from scratch or integrating COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) or SaaS (software-as-a-service) solutions, the work is complicated and there’s a lot of it.
• System enhancements: Because we don’t have enough developers to handle the volume of requests we receive, not to mention the volume of requests people don’t bother making because they know we won’t be able to get to them, we’re the bottleneck here as well. The reason we don’t have enough developers is, of course, because most of them are working on the big stuff.
• The small stuff: Somewhere between the big stuff and system enhancements are the projects that would help small departments, individual workgroups, and even single employees streamline their work and otherwise be more effective. These projects tend to fall into the cracks because their impact is too small to matter compared to the big stuff, even when cost/benefit analysis shows an excellent return. In other words, they’re too big to sneak in but too small to staff.

When it comes to addressing these bottlenecks, thus far the big stuff has received the most emphasis. It’s where the agile/waterfall wars rage, and it’s where most of the attention to IT governance has been focused — as it should be. The big stuff is where most of the time, money, and effort go, and it’s where most of the risk lives, too.

System enhancements, on the other hand, have not required much attention. We’re very good at enhancements. If we bothered to construct metrics around such things, most IT shops would have an enhancement success rate of roughly 100 percent. So long as we have some formal process for submitting requests and managing the queue, we’re in fine shape.

But what have we been doing about the small stuff? Bupkis. And here’s where UDI comes in.

Reducing the friction between IT and business

When you encourage UDI, you’re transforming your users into their own processing lines, vastly increasing IT’s throughput — its capacity for deploying technical solutions to business challenges. In particular, UDI can dramatically increase IT’s capacity for the small stuff. In fact, it’s perfect for it. Here’s why:

IT has to handle both the big stuff and most enhancements. It has to be IT, because the big stuff and enhancements both deal with massive, complex systems. Nobody but IT staff should muck around in there. Luckily, nobody other than IT staff will want to do so.

The small stuff is different. While some of it would benefit from interfaces into one or more massive, complex systems, quite a lot of it can be created outside of them.

Small stuff pays off handsomely relative to the investment, too, and with very little risk. And as a lot of supervisors and middle managers want some, IT’s inability to do very much of it is an ongoing source of friction between IT and the rest of the business.

Case study in not sweating the small stuff

Just to create a sense of scale, imagine we’re talking about a company with 1,500 employees, $1 billion in yearly revenue, and $100 million in pre-tax income.

We’ll postulate that a typical “small stuff” effort shaves off five hours a week for each of three workgroup members trying to take care of business. That’s 15 staff hours a week multiplied by an average fully loaded cost per employee of, say, $30 per hour; the project has saved the company close to $25,000 per year.

Imagine this hypothetical project required the efforts of three IT developers for six weeks. Figure each developer costs $50 per hour in fully loaded costs. Do some arithmetic and it turns out the resulting system costs the company $36,000, paying for itself in a year and a half. Or, if you like, imagine the system lasts three years. In round numbers, that means the $36,000 investment has returned $75,000: an ROI of more than 100 percent. Not bad.

All that’s left is to multiply the benefits of handling a single workgroup’s small stuff by the number of workgroups that want said small stuff from IT. If a company that size has 100 workgroups that qualify, the total investment would be $3.6 million, yielding a total three-year pre-tax benefit of $7.5 million, or $2.5 million per year.

For a company with $100 million in pre-tax income, that’s an attention-getting number.

The real benefits of user-driven innovation

The problem with the above case study is that it doesn’t work that way. Unless the workgroups employ hourly workers who go home when they have nothing to do, all that happens is that the company has less work for the same number of employees.

Don’t give up. The small stuff provides very real benefits. They’re just as legitimate, even if they are harder to get a handle on. They include the availability of these employees for other responsibilities or, alternatively, a 12.5 percent increase in workgroup capacity; the company can grow enough to add that much to the group’s workload without having to increase staff. Add to that, almost certainly, fewer errors in the work. Errors, also known as defects, can be terribly expensive, especially if they become visible to paying customers.

These are significant benefits. But they aren’t benefits that can be seen in any of the company’s financial statements.

Here’s what’s particularly beautiful about this: They don’t have to be — user-driven innovation is mostly hidden inside each department or workgroup. All we have to do is (1) allow it; (2) encourage it; and (3) provide a modicum of support in the way of recommended tools and training.

In exchange, company gears will shed lots of sand, and the business as a whole will run that much more smoothly.

This story, “To break IT bottlenecks, try user-driven innovation,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.