I can't remember where I first heard the phrase 'Death Star IT' but I've always rather liked it. It appositely describes how, when technology is seen in companies as the solution to a business need, the answer can often look like a large, expensive, proprietary software system. Big businesses ironically feel more comfortable making big decisions about big spends on big solutions than they do about adopting a more open approach that can lead to greater flexibility in the future. Yet tying yourself in to a multi-year, single-solution IT programme creates far greater long-term risk than creating more malleable technology stack solutions that can adapt to changing contexts over time. Dan Sheldon has done an excellent job of detailing an A-Z 'playbook' of 'Government IT self-harm' which summarises all the traps that many large organisations fall into.
As the antithesis to this (and staying with our Star Wars analogy), rather than 'Death Star IT' we might consider the 'X-wing fighter' approach to technology. I think this was best captured by GDS back in 2013 when they were asked by the Cabinet Office to run a technology transformation programme, and in the process set out a broad set of guiding principles:
- Start with user needs
- Design with choice and flexibility in mind
- Be transparent throughout
- Architect loosely coupled services, not a single system
- Favour short contracts
- Bring the best of consumer technology to the enterprise
- Make security as invisible as possible
- Build a long-term capability
It's so common for systems to be endlessly patched up and adapted for jobs that they were not really designed to do and over time that simply serves to build up operational risk. Flexibility, adaptability and scalability have never been more important in technology and sometimes the answer to that is to go small rather than big.
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