Coca-Cola and Big Bangs
I must be one of the few people in the world who can’t stand the taste of Coke. Certain developers where I work could potentially survive only on Coke but that’s just not me.
However, I don’t hold a grudge against any organisation just because I don’t like their main product. So I was pleased and impressed to read CIO Interview: Big changes come from small steps in this week’s UK Computer Weekly where the interviewee was Tania Howarth, CIO of Coca-Cola Europe.
I found myself nodding along to many of her points regarding the role of the IT function. Amongst my favourite nuggets were:
- Changing the focus from transformational change to continuous improvement.
- Everyone in the (IT) team must understand the business.
- Even junior technical managers have “client” responsibility.
I really like all this customer focus and the appreciation that the IT function is no longer the tail wagging the organisational dog but an integral part of the business - an enabler.
However, the most interesting message that came out of the interview for me, is the focus on incremental progress rather than a big bang approach. This is a trend I am seeing in many enterprise sized organisations.
If you take an incremental “bite sized chunks” approach and ensure that you are delivering real business benefits each time a project is delivered, it’s amazing how quickly a few small improvements add up to a large hill of beans.
In fact, if you then look back at the costs versus the benefits, typically the total costs are lower and the total benefits are higher than a big bang project.
Is this just a fashionable trend in enterprise IT, or is it the beginning of the end for uber-big bang IT projects?