We need a change in attitude

One of the challenges for developers of public sector IT systems is the vagaries of governments changing requirements to meet the needs of political expediency. If a minister decides on a policy change to take place on a certain date, the IT has to find a way to accommodate it.

Equally for the private sector, the demands of competition and globalisation ensure that few critical IT systems will ever be static. The favoured management-speak buzzword of the moment to describe this is ‘agility’.

Admittedly, in the case of Jobcentre Plus, which found itself introducing a revision to the criteria for benefits applications before its IT system has been suitably updated, we can only speculate as to why an apparently simple change will take 15 months to implement.

But it does provide a glaring example of the new reality for systems development, showing the importance of designing-in change from the start.

Many IT leaders at large companies say their hardest task is delivering technology-enabled change in an environment where corporate systems are huge, monolithic applications designed several years ago. Try delivering web-enabled, easy-to-use, flexible, graphical software systems to several thousand users on five-year-old PCs running Windows 98 to access a 10-year old mainframe. It will not happen overnight, and is certainly not agile.

We cannot undo the hard-coded applications of the past, but we can undo hard-coded attitudes. Be honest, how often does the very human tendency to fear change become a major factor in hindering change?

Once again, the rise of what we used to call dot coms is showing the way forward. Imagine how large and complex the software is behind Amazon or eBay. And you cannot imagine that a change in a process or the rules underpinning either system will for a moment be considered unfeasible.

For any IT organisation, whether driven by politics or competition, the cliché that says ‘the only constant is change’ has never been more true.