Four Phases of Implementation

The evolution of computing can be divided into four distinct phases. These phases are true whether you look at the evolution

of computing over time, or at the evolution of computing within an organization. 

First is the hardware phase. This is the time when the decision on which hardware to buy is the most critical IT decision. In history, this is when the big iron vendors dominated the IT market. The performance you got, the software you could run, all depended on the brand and specs of the hardware you purchased. For organizations in this phase, the most crucial decision is the specs and source of PCs and servers.

Once you cross this, comes the software phase. Here, software comes out of hardware dependence, and so the question of what hardware is not as important as which software. Historically, this is the phase during which software vendors like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP became predominant. Organizations in this phase of IT enablement will spend more time deciding which software to use and not as much on which hardware it should run on. For example, an organization would spend more time deciding which ERP to run, than it would on which hardware to run it on.

The third in the list of phases is the services phase. No, I am not talking about software as service or Web services or some such yet-to-take-off concept. This is the phase where the rest of the organization sees IT as a must-have service from which they have expectations of service levels. This is the state where you would look at issues like whether you want to contract out the running of your IT infrastructure to someone else. You are more concerned with the availability of the service rather than with the discrete elements of software and hardware, which offer the service. So, you would spend less time defining the

software to run than on determining and implementing service-level norms that you would want. The time spent on deciding on hardware would be lesser still.

So far so good. But your organization from the IT perspective is still a group of islands rather than a single whole. You have different systems running at different places to do the same thing, or different copies of applications and data trying to do the same thing. And that brings you to the integration phase. As the name suggests, you combine all the different elements into a single whole. At this stage, your key concerns move towards issues of connectivity and you would spend more time on issues like whether to opt for satellite connectivity, leased line or broadband.

The phase for you to be in is dependent on your needs. The returns from some could well not be worth the investment. Or you could be in more than one phase at the same time. The trick is in choosing where you should be.

Krishan Kumar