Unplanned Work Is Silently Killing IT Departments

Computerworld - You can't see it. You can't smell it. But it's deadly, and it may be in your IT organization's basement, silently killing your company. It's called unplanned work, and CIOs and chief information security officers are losing their jobs because of it. This silent killer is so hard to recognize that many IT professionals don't even realize it exists.

Some will challenge, "If unplanned work is so deadly, where are all of the dead bodies?" The answer is that they're everywhere. Once you see them, you'll see that they are one step removed from the root of virtually all IT problems.

It's difficult to overestimate the effect of unplanned work on an IT organization. Here's a back-of-napkin calculation. According to a Forrester Research estimate from 2002, 10% of the U.S. gross domestic product is spent on IT, comprising 50% of corporate capital expenditures. But IT projects are like a free puppy -- the capital cost of the puppy is dominated by the "operate/maintain" costs, not the initial acquisition costs. The U.S. GDP in 2004 was approximately $10 trillion; if 10% of that is spent on IT, and if we estimate that 50% of that IT spending is on "operate/maintain" activities, and if at least 35% of that work is unplanned, that's $350 billion. That's a lot of dead bodies. For many companies, the IT controls work for Sarbanes-Oxley Act Section 404, which AMR Research estimates will exceed $6 billion in 2006, is an unplanned activity. More dead bodies.

Unplanned work is any activity in the IT organization that can't be mapped to an authorized project, procedure or change request. Any service interruption, failed change, emergency change, or patch or security incident creates unplanned work.

The amount of unplanned work in your IT organization is a remarkably accurate indicator and predictor of IT effectiveness. In 2002, early in my firm's research on high-performing IT organizations, we developed a 75-question assessment to determine whether or not an organization is high-performing. We look back at this assessment now with some embarrassment, because now we believe we can make conclusions about an organization's maturity and needed prescriptive steps by asking just one question: What percentage of your IT organization's work is unplanned? Those organizations that spend less than 10% of their time on urgent and unplanned work also usually have extremely high levels of operational excellence, compliance and security and have good working relationships with auditors.

While CIOs aspire to focus on strategic issues, they must first master the tactical, because unplanned work comes at the expense of strategic planned work.