IT Metaphors

Metaphors are powerful concepts that help organizations understand what they are doing and what they need to do well. The right metaphors can be extremely helpful, but the wrong metaphors can hurt.

IT organizations often use the wrong metaphors. To illustrate, consider the automobile industry. There are manufacturers, dealers, customization shops, repair shops, insurers and many others. On the customer side, there are individual buyers and fleet buyers.

Each of these organizations has a different focus, set of goals and performance measures. Manufacturers, for example, have to deal with challenging design and vehicle construction problems. These require a very complete and disciplined process. On the other hand, a fleet operator is charged with purchasing vehicles from manufacturers and dealers that satisfy the demands of the business users of the fleet. Fleet operators need to manage the fleet to keep the fleet in a good state of repair. Major and minor repairs as well as custom jobs are performed by fleet mechanics in their own repair shops.

Fleet management, is very different from manufacturing. Why then do IT organizations act as if they are in the manufacturing business rather than the fleet management business? IT organizations often have elaborate software development processes, showing how to build systems from start to finish. The processes for purchasing new systems, selecting a technology or keeping existing systems in a good state of repair are seldom as complete.

IT shops need to change their dominant metaphor and act like they are fleet managers, rather than manufacturers of systems. This would help focus on the real problems in IT today, systems which fall into a state of disrepair and don't serve the needs of the business