What IT Leadership Can Learn From Manufacturing.

So many IT leaders realize their world is becoming a different place, and fast.  You can see it in their faces, hear it in the tone of their voices — almost feel the anxiety.

Like most leaders, they often go looking for examples from others who are adjusting well to their new realities. 

While there is plenty to learn from their peers, I usually counsel that understanding how modern manufacturing has changed (and continues to change!) provides ample lessons and tools about how to think about the modern IT organization.

One things for sure, there’s no going back to Kansas anytime soon …

A Wealth Of Parallels

At a fundamental level, manufacturing is about creating value-add around physical goods.  One could make an argument that IT (and computing in general) is about creating value-add around information.

Both manufacturing and IT face somewhat similar constraints: the cost of capital, labor, limits in technology, unpredictable demand, long supply chains, and much more.

Both find themselves aggressively competing for their customers. 

Both are continually figuring out their unique value-add: what things do we do for ourselves, and what things do we leave to others to do more efficiently? 

Both have to continually re-invent their model, otherwise risk falling behind.

For those of you who work at companies with a strong manufacturing component, there’s a wealth of experience and perspective waiting to be tapped by the IT team.  For the rest of you, there is plenty of material readily available on how modern manufacturing is practiced.

I’d encourage you to invest the time.

A Brief History?

Thanks to Wikipedia, it’s not hard to get a sense of how manufacturing evolved.  It started with individual artisans — craftspeople — and then evolved into highly structured guilds.

Remember that “guild” concept the next time you interact with your database, network or security team :)

The advent of better power sources and transportation changed manufacturing from a local industry to a global one where scale mattered.  Human hands gave way to increasing levels of automation.  The traditional guilds were replaced new models, and new skills.

All somewhat reminiscent of what the microprocessor, the internet and “cloud” is doing to enterprise IT.

Over the last few decades, the pendulum in some manufacturing sectors appears to have swung from mass efficiencies to mass customization: valuing flexibility, agility and responsiveness over ultimate efficiency.

If you’re curious, check out this short piece on Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems, circa 1999.  The idea is simple: physical manufacturing assets should be under software control, and completely reconfigurable based on changing demands.

This should sound vaguely familiar to many of you …

No discussion would be complete without acknowledging the advent of 3D printing — transforming yet another labor and capital intensive component of manufacturing into something that is entirely under software control.

One could justifiably say that — when it comes to modern manufacturing — it’s quickly becoming all about the know-how that’s implemented in software.

Back To IT

Recently, I was reading an analyst’s survey finding that SDDC concepts— software-defined data center - had been strongly adopted by about a third of the participants.  The remainder either weren’t quite sure or saw themselves going in a different direction.   I'm not exactly sure what that different direction might be …

As a VMware employee, you might think I would see the findings as potentially negative news.  Quite the opposite, I was gratified to see that a third of the participating senior IT leaders understood SDDC concepts and saw themselves moving in that direction.

To be fair, the concepts have only been around for a relatively short period, and the supporting technologies (beyond compute, that is) are now just entering the marketplace. 

Combine that reality that with the unavoidable fact that the entire IT (manufacturing?) organization has to be re-envisioned around how information services are sourced, produced and consumed in an SDDC model — and I’m impressed.

A Bigger Picture

I’ve often argued that our society is quickly evolving to an information economy.  All businesses will be information businesses before long — if they’re not today.

Just as manufacturing played a central role in previous business models (and still does today), information and the supporting IT functions will continue to increase in prominence.

These IT factories will need new technology blueprints to be efficient, agile and responsive.  That’s what I see in SDDC — and I guess I’m not alone.

And there is plenty to be learned from how it’s done in the physical world.