I had lunch today with an old friend who last year sold the company that he and a few partners built up over the past ten years to a big corporate. They are now experiencing what it is like to with in a big corporate after years of being an SME.
One of the things that has been an eye-opener it seems is that big corporates tend to be very fragmented on the inside, and that decisions that are good for the corporation as a whole can be difficult to get actioned if they don't meet with the objectives of individual business units.
This is one of the most frustrating aspects of big firm IT management. IT is pretty unique in most organisations in that it has a whole view of the company in a way that few others do. Planning for services to benefit the enterprise as a whole makes absolute sense from this holistic perspective, but implementing across the organisation can be of major challenge when business units have often competing objectives.
This corporate fragmentation is probably only going to increase as we see the increasing availability of enterprise-class services without need for major capital investment for the IT infrastructure. It was a "renegade" business unit going for Salesforce that saw my first exposure to the challenge that cloud poses for traditional IT management.
One of the positive benefits of this increasing fragmentation is that it might serve to keep commercial enterprises from becoming too powerful. Joel Bakan's book (and film) The Corporation paints a terrifying portrait of the incorporated company as psychopath. Infighting and political decision making that prevent large firms from doing things that serve the overall corporate interest might be a great blessing for us all.
mmitII 