IT spending - ~70% to keep the lights on
IT spending - ~70% to keep the lights on
What do organizations spend their IT dollars on? Mostly what you’d expect, but you can see one trend relevant to my interests: a 37.5% jump in spending on application development from 2014 to 2018:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/48742100791/This is from “IT Key Metrics Data 2019: Executive Summary,” Dec, 2018, Gartner.
The nature of that spend shows that, like, 70% of budget is spent on “run the business,” that is “just keeping the lights on”:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/48742269957/With “grow,” you’re seeing incremental improvements to existing businesses, growing them! Transform is doing something dramatically new.
So, in the context of The Business Bottleneck, this is a sort of baseline for IT spend: is it good, bad? We can’t tell from these charts.
It matches well with the “moderate ambitions” take from that digital transformation survey I wrote-up.
And, please, Dude, the preferred nomenclature is “digital transformation”
Speaking of, also in that survey, it looks like we’re stuck with the term “digital transformation.”
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/48742708693/Like I said in the intro to Monolithic Transformation, sure, whatever: let’s do this!
The Business Bottleneck, THE WEBINAR
Next month (October) I’m doing a two part webinar with Rick Clark. It’s an overview of The Business Bottleneck concept and what to do about it:
For the most part, we know what IT needs to do become a “tech company”: move to a more frequent, usually weekly release cycle, focus on customer-centric design, and rely on cloud platforms to automate infrastructure toil. What does the rest of your organization, outside of IT, need to do?
They’re October 3rd (part 1) and Oct 16th (part 2) at 3pm Amsterdam time. Don’t worry though, there’s of course a recording. If you’re interested either way, sign up for it and you can attend while we DO IT LIVE or get notified when the recording is up.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion’s style in her first book of essays is flat, almost noir. It’s easy and pleasant to read, with deadpan, insights here and there: “I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.”
Recently, I’ve been paying attention to how authors tighten up there prose. Not how, but what it looks like. I have fatty, juicy writing, encrusted with words, asides, jokes, links, and footnotes. This is not considered good, but I indulge myself.
Her book is a good collection, and the atmosphere is great.
Relevant to your interests
DevOps is rarely about developers, but operators using developer-think like version control and build pipelines…most oriented around supporting custom written software, the stuff developers produce. Read this excerpt from Jia Tolentino’s book. “Volkswagen’s in-house tech development will rise to at least 60% by 2025 from less than 10% now, the carmaker said earlier this year.” I’ve been that guy trying to balance a suitcase on a scooter, in Lisbon of all places.
While you were out
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