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IT Department: Eat your Own Dog Food!
There’s no better way to show commitment than eating one’s own dog food, or – as some of my French colleagues would call it – drinking one’s own champagne. I can imagine why that Ford plant manager in Michigan recently announced that only Ford- or subsidiary-built vehicles are allowed to park on the plant premises: it must be discouraging to see the place swarmed every day by Daihatsu’s, Suzuki’s and Toyota’s. If even the creators themselves don’t use their own products, why would customers even consider buying?
In IT, the slogan is probably even more true. And it doesn’t only pertain to software manufacturers (we can safely assume that Microsoft is not using Firefox too much in their offices, nor that SAP uses Oracle Financials for their book keeping, nor that Siebel account managers prefer salesforce.com to keep track of their sales opportunities): every IT department can use the Dog Food Principle to bridge the gap with their clients at the business side of the organisation.
Having trouble explaining to the business what a service oriented enterprise looks like? Become one your self: start redefining the IT department as a collection of coherent, clearly described services that deliver measurable value and performance and that can be orchestrated in flexible ways. Use UDDI to register them and make them available for reference through the Internet.
Convinced that the organisation would benefit from the new generation of business intelligence applications? Apply it first to your own systems development and applications management processes, creating a real time dashboard of all crucial metrics, then use the dashboard to monitor and improve the performance of your IT department.
A true believer of end-to-end transparency? Provide your business users with a portal that gives them up-to-date, deep insight in the status, progress and deliverables of all your projects, no matter on what place in the world they are actually being run. Ask your project leads to use a blog to communicate on a daily base to all of their stakeholders. Give your clients access to forums to discuss the best and worst practices of the project they are involved in.
Excited with the virtues of Web 2.0? Show the business how you use wiki’s, weblogs, search tools and social networks to create an atmosphere of innovation, self-regulation and true collaborative knowledge management within your IT population.
Doing all these things to your self first, creates tangible showcases that surely beat slideware and unproven value cases. And – let’s be honest – the performance of the IT department should improve too.
Sounds like a double-edged sword indeed.
Any other good examples of dog food that IT can eat them selves? Let us know, share your meal.
Posted by Ron Tolido on June 14, 2006 in
Strategy
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Comments
# on June 15, 2006 9:42 AM, Vincent said:
Eating in "you own house" could also be a point to consider. We see an increasing number of workers using external tools (wikis, blogs, or photo sharing sites) to collaborate on INTERNAL projects. Hard time for IT guys...
# on June 15, 2006 11:27 AM, Loek said:
Not at all Vincent... The thing you describe is all part of the consumerization of IT (see http://loekb.blogspot.com/2006/01/2006-prediction-2-consumerization.html). "Eat your own dog food" (EYODF) and "mashup" are also key elements in this consumerization. EYODF does not mean you cannot eat other stuff, it just means that you should at least *also* EYODF.
Nothing to worry about then really, unless you want to be tied to that IT department to regulate everything and bring innovation to you ;-).
# on June 15, 2006 1:30 PM, Jeroen De Cock said:
In our project, we use a wiki from Sourceforge to index all documentation. We also use Team Rooms (Windows SharePoint Services).
For me, use of RSS-feeds and tagging are 2 fields of which the importance can still grow. The use of the RSS-feed of this nice blog is already a good example!
# on June 16, 2006 9:08 AM, metromon said:
Thank you for information. It very helped me.
# on June 16, 2006 10:12 PM, Martin said:
I would argue that the Ford example is not so much a question of EOYDF but more "not made here" (NMH) - one of the principles that led to the downfall of AT&T and others. The danger is that EYODF can quickly mutate into NMH - a sure fire way to stifle any spark of creativity and innovation. An average business user could be forgiven for viewing the outlines of implementing SOE and business intelligence as yet more examples of the IT department indulging themselves while "more important issues" go untreated.
While I agree that demonstrating value in this way is a powerful tool, I would suggest that an IT department following these principles should also hire a professional PR firm to communicate the benefits of what they've done to internal customers. Otherwise they can just be added to an ever increasing list of "best kept secrets"
# on June 23, 2006 7:54 PM, Ron Tolido said:
@Martin: I guess I would explain this strategy ore as 'apply innovations to yourself first' rather than 'only use your own, old stuff'. But yes, any IT department (or IT project for that matter, or IT professional) could use a really good PR service. 'We in IT' seem to be in a difficult business and we are so occupied solving problems that we never tend to communicate what we actually achieved or were aiming for.
# on June 30, 2006 12:25 AM, Phil Ayres said:
EYODF is proving very successful at combating certain negative perceptions of key products within my company.
We now run a limited availability program that ensures that both the company itself and a limited set of its key customers have installed and are running (in production) the next release of every product.
Not only does this ensure that they EYODF, but also SYOB (suffer your own bugs).