The Biggest Hurdle In Improving IT Productivity

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When author and IT consultant Gary Gruver spoke at a recent XebiaLabs event on IT transformation, he promised the possibility of a business becoming two to three times more productive.

’Two to three times more productive -- that sounds like a pretty outrageous claim, doesn’t it?’ Gruver said.

Of course, those kinds of results come only from hard work. Gruver, who worked as director of engineering for HP LaserJet Enterprise group, said the most important and most challenging change to make is a major shift in company culture.

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’The cultural changes are going to be some of your biggest challenges,’ Gruver said. "You’re going to be able to bring the technology in, you’re going to be able to implement it with a lot of really good tools out there that can do this stuff."

Cultural change can come through something as small as asking developers to check in on a daily basis on the progress of projects. But the big shifts come from changing the way separate business groups operate.

’You need to get development and operation teams working on the same tools,’ Gruver said.

’You want to have them using the same environment definitions, the same deployment definitions, the same orchestrators, [and] the same processes,’ he said.

Asking managers and employees to adhere to different processes and even speak a different sort of company language can be daunting, but Gruver said it’s crucial to success.

’If you can’t make that shift happen, you’re going to see limited improvements with the tools,’ he said.

PUBLISHED JULY 30, 2015