Can constraints on IT lead to bottlenecks?
Member Board of Directors in Finance (non-banking), 201 - 500 employees
I spent 30 years in IT, and now being on boards and working with technology executives from the board perspective, I see it a bit differently. Some constraints are necessary. You really can't do everything that people envision they need to be doing. It's very important to have a setup within the company, and it’s what distinguishes well-run companies from chaotic ones—they have very well-established, critical objectives (OKRs).And those company objectives all need to be cascading through the entire organization, whether it's IT, finance, customer service, or engineering. All organizations need to be supporting those key objectives. You need to make sure that you have the resources to support those main objectives and everything else goes in a different bucket.
CEO in Software, 11 - 50 employees
Constraints when applied properly are the "mother of invention" and they are best applied strategically. Example: If today we deploy 40 servers a week and we believe we're likely to be at 400 servers a week in 12 months, constraints on hiring can be strategic. The potential negative result of no constraints would be at 12 months we've hired 10X the staff we had at week one. Imagine if Google continued to have the same server to admin ratio from 2000 to 2010. They would be a company of server admins now.
Constraints because of a lack of future vision or that are applied without connection to an improvement goal will more likely end up frustrating employees and causing customer disaffection.
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I worked for one organization where we had more money than we could spend, and that was a hard job because I'd get in these situations where I'd say, "Hold on. We need to be thinking about how we're spending this money and make sure that we're making the right choices for the organization, shareholders, stock, etc." And they'd say, "No. We've got the money. Just go and do it." It got to a point where it was almost a sad joke. The problem with that is that it starts to make people complacent; they just go ahead and do something without thinking.
I think that lack of constraint is a more dangerous situation than being constrained. I've seen the other extreme too, where organizations are absolutely starved, and that's not a great place to be. But a healthy amount of constraint is good because it makes you think: what are we doing here? What do we stand for? How are we doing this? Who is involved? What is the role we play to check those comments about the role that IT plays in the organization? All of those questions come into play. When you don't have to think, it becomes dangerous on a number of levels. So I would lean more towards being a bottleneck, but bottleneck is just a bad word. It has a negative connotation. It's really a constraint, which is a good thing when used appropriately.