By Ed Finegold
IT stinks and we need to do it better. After 12 years following IT markets, and the OSS/BSS sector in particular, this is the one observation that has remained clear. Software development and deployment are inexact sciences. IT projects are too risky. There are too many ghosts in the machine. Compared with hardware, IT is inelegant, inflexible, and unreliable. For all of the new technologies that have promised simplification and risk reduction, maturity just never arrives. IT seems forever stuck in its adolescence. For an IT-intensive business like telecom, which depends on IT-intensive billing to generate revenue, this is a festering problem.
Dick LeFave, president of D&L Partners LLC, a 30 year veteran of the telecom industry, and former longtime CIO of one of the largest multiservice providers in North America, says that the beauty of dealing with hardware is that the light is either green or red – the box either works or it doesn’t. And if the box breaks, you swap it out for a new one. Software is almost always reading some shade of yellow. Even when it’s working, it’s teetering on the edge of failure. When something breaks, fixing it requires a process akin to a forensic post-mortem examination. Unlike CSI, Law and Order, and NCIS however, too many cases remain unsolved. The important question is how do we move telecom IT out of the realm of black magic and into a reliable, empirical, and successful science? An afternoon chat with Mr. LeFave sheds some light on the answers.
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Compared with hardware, IT is inelegant, inflexible, and unreliable. |
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incremental change get in and it changes the infrastructure. Are there some advancements coming that will make it all work better? Absolutely, but until that happens the focus has to be on simplification. There are very few people, even among the major suppliers and service providers, who really understand how it all works.
You also need to have governance. If you have a good strategy that’s clear, then chances are you’ll have a good IT operation. But if the strategy is not clear and you have a lot of different people who feel empowered to make change happen, then you’ll have problems. Running a good business is about making people understand what we’re trying to accomplish. Then it’s about how you incent people and reward them. Good
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Finegold: Dick, what do you think it will take to make IT as a discipline more flexible, predictable and mature, and perhaps more like hardware in those areas?
LeFave: I think it goes back to simplification. IT will always be like black magic as long as it remains complicated. If you want to make software more reliable, have it do less. Companies don’t start out saying they want to be sloppy and inefficient, but they let
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companies are good at setting that definition and bad companies just aren’t.
Finegold: When it comes to billing, which depends almost entirely on IT, what should be a CIO’s #1 priority?
LeFave: One of the major problems is time to market, another is scale, a third is predictability, and a fourth is economy. Can
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