Moving IT from Model-T era to TPS

Apologies if this is a little ‘inside golf’ but I’ve often thought about the state of the IT profession, and our practices...

In terms of a modern professional practice it’s relatively new (mid 19th century, less than 75 years old) – and as a profession it’s in what I’d call the Model T era; moving out of bespoke and unique one-off products, into the beginnings of standardisation, and production lines. This might be a bit confronting to hear considering how closely we work with technology, but I think it is realistic reflection of where we are. 

• How often do we still see hand-built custom software developed and deployed, and a different architecture for each project? Design patterns? What about writing modules from-scratch vs using frameworks?
  

• What types of quality management occurs for development and IT projects generally? Is it baked into the process, or an afterthought?
  

• How many operations teams are afraid to look under the hood at their own Infrastructure for fear of what they’ll find?
  

• How component-ised, product-ised, repeatable, reliable, and boringly predictable is IT?
  

Looking to the automotive industry as metaphor (and benchmark), we could look to the birth of the Toyota Production System as watershed moment and step-change in delivery of car production – the entry into a new era of the industry – increased quality, reduced costs, higher productivity. 

Compare this to the current state of IT - if we honestly look at the delivery of projects, and the ongoing operation of IT, we can see we got a way to go before we reach a TPS level of sophistication – but we are on the way. 

The good news is that a) we have a lot of models and practices that exist in our industry, and others that let us move there, and b) we are right on the cusp of the development of tools which will enable higher quality and more efficiency in the IT world – namely the recent and ongoing development of Large Language Models (LLM) and other AI tooling – the new robots of the production line.

It only took from the 1910’s to the 1970’s-80s to see radical transformation in the automotive industry – I think we could see a much faster transition in IT, if it was prioritised as a profession.

In a later posts I’ll lay out some of the systems, practices, and models I think could move the IT profession forward. In the meantime, please let me know in the comments some practices or frameworks you’ve seen, or implemented that shifted IT forward in terms of professionalism, quality, and efficiency.