When ants forage for food, most search within a safe distance from the nest, while a tapering minority venture further, at greater risk, into unexplored territory. The result is a good overall blend of caution and opportunity, in this case the opportunity to discover better food-sourcing conditions.
Ants are, in effect, practicing superior risk management, with a population that exhibits an optimal distribution in its appetite to risk. Being a mobile, expendable (and unwitting) member of a large homogenous swarm undoubtedly makes this approach easier for the ants to operate.
Perhaps, at some point in our history, people too exhibited this swarm behaviour, with a similarly blended risk profile to those of our ants. Thus equipped, we too could have remained alert to previously undiscovered ways in which to optimise our environment, to the betterment of the colony.
But at some point that tapered approach to explorative risk diminished in our population or, at least, became less balanced. Did our increasing self-awareness and desire for self-preservation lead ever more of us to favour risk taking by others rather than by ourselves? In time perhaps we even developed a resentment of those risk takers because they reminded us of that quality’s absence within us.
Whatever the reason, many societies eventually came to overly-embrace caution. It’s more comforting to believe that our current environment is as good as it could possibly be than to challenge ourselves with the task of changing it, or of finding another. This is especially true for any group that happens to disproportionately benefit from the status quo. Most great societal reformers didn’t find their ideas well received at first, for this reason.
This cautious, static mentality eventually came to dominate the philosophy of some western countries in the 1700s, where it was proposed that we must be living in “the best of all possible worlds” (because God had created it) and that everything that happened must therefore be “for the best”, even if any given individual happening was not necessarily a positive experience (like plague, famine, or disembowelment).
To disagree was to confront the Church and for some, like Voltaire, to invite practical exile. And until those states moved past such modes of thinking, human progress was arguably much reduced. But even nowadays, a related mentality is extant in many aspects of our society, including the area of our interest in this blog; large IT organisations.
In most industry sectors, 20 or 30 applications define an organisation, that is to say, the organisation depends on them for its ongoing delivery of service. If we looked at this set of applications across multiple institutions in the same sector, we would find, not surprisingly, that the same types of applications existed in each company. In banking, for example, these would include workflow management, customer account management, document imaging & storage, and so on. And, of course, we would witness much time, effort and emotion being directed into maintaining these applications, their performance, availability and business effectiveness.
But, significantly, all of this intense activity is measured and considered within the confines - and from the perspective of - the respective individual institutions. To continue the financial services example, there’s no way for an organisation to independently benchmark the effectiveness of its workflow management software or customer account solution.
A compounding force is the surprisingly limited movement of IT staff between companies in a given sector, and the consequently narrow perspective with which many applications are specified and operated – there are too few risk-taking foragers.
Most very large organisations incentivise staff to remain with them for years, even decades. But, as a result, there’s little knowledge or curiosity within any given institution as to how effective its applications are at supporting the business when compared to other similar companies. We don’t carry a notion of an “industry average” with us, because most of us haven’t experienced a sufficient variety of examples across organisations in our sector.
Without that outside knowledge and perspective, application sectors only evolve within the constraints of the institution’s direct knowledge and experience. In effect, the IT team behaves as if it lives in the “best of all possible worlds”; despite the day-to-day trials that may befall it, resulting in the same constrained progress as we saw earlier.
I’d like to see us address the need for an “industry average” for application effectiveness by instituting an application audit across specific industry sectors. In this scenario IT Analytics could be used to assess an organisation’s key IT applications against an anonymised industry benchmark.
What if you could compare the architecture, resilience, performance, availability and usage of your key banking applications confidentially against an anonymised industry average for those applications? How would that change your IT planning and investment decisions?
Maybe then, in our little space, we’d eventually arrive at the best of all possible worlds.
