There’s a sense of despair these days in the boardrooms of companies struggling with IT. They are all too aware that information technology is vital to strategic success. Yet their application portfolios are inflexible and difficult to maintain. Their technology infrastructures are complex and hard to reconcile. And their IT organizations are overburdened, overstretched, and overwhelmed.
While these companies continue to grapple with IT, others have avoided or managed to climb out of the "IT abyss" that has swallowed up so many of their peers. In recent research,1 we looked at companies that have prospered by applying principles that drive simplicity and flexibility throughout the technology environment, while allowing rapid development efforts and sane investment decisions.2 These principles can help senior executives work out how to improve their company’s IT performance—but first, they must determine what that performance is today. The factors underlying IT success are so closely interwoven that to pull just one lever without a holistic understanding of overall performance may simply make matters worse.
Performing a proper diagnosis is no easy task, however. Even quantitative measurements can be difficult to determine, particularly as companies move from the old certainties of automation-oriented cost reduction into...