Have you ever put your hand into a fish tank filled with guppies? They nibble on your fingers, but they are so small that their bites don’t hurt. Leave your hand in the tank long enough for your skin to get soft, though, and the guppies can begin to inflict damage.

Naturally, this leads me to an analogy with IT. In it, the guppies are small inefficiencies, and the hand is the IT organization itself. When an IT organization doesn’t correct the large number of small inefficiencies that inevitably creep in, the inefficiencies kill productivity over time. When productivity declines, the IT organization may feel the need to request additional staff or funding. But it will be better off if instead it can manage to eliminate these common inefficiencies:

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here