A lot of people have heard of “The Golden Triangle” or the “Technology Triangle.” It is simply the concept that for an group to succeed in having functional IT, three things must be functioning in harmony:People, Process and Technology.
Why is this? People build things, they have manners by which they build things and what they build is technology.
This leads to what amounts to a three legged stool. If one leg is shorter than another, it leans and is awkward. If you have a leg missing, the stool falls over.
People:
People implement technology and create process. They make decisions, even if that decision is to not make a decision. They have needs that IT meets, and they state those needs and plan to meet them if things are functioning correctly.
Key warning signs of people issues include siloing, information hoarding, gate keeping and indecisiveness.
Process:
Process is created by people and based on the technology in use, implemented, or desired to be implemented. It ensures consistently performed work and proper life cycles. It should have “self healing” aspects in the sense that problems should be brought out into the open and addressed. Process goes beyond the technology its self into things like monetary budgeting alignment and the business cases.
Key warning signs of process issues include lack of problem management and follow ups, opaque vendor relationships, quirky procurement procedures, poor communications around incidents, inconsistent implementation, technical debt/incomplete life cycling, unclean decommissioning, poor product alignment, poor integrations of acquired IT products, and general clutter.
Technology:
Technology is ultimately what is implemented via people and process. What technology is can be extremely broad, but in this context it would be computers and any system reliant on those computers. Technology is deterministic based on the people and process. Problems with technology may be alignment, functional, or both.
Warning signs for alignment include poor adoption, shadow IT, user frustration, and implementations of “work arounds.”
Functional warning signs are things like disparate technologies being used, outages, old technologies, and poor performance.
These technology failures are in many cases manifestation of people and process failures. Poor choices can be made in technology choices, the fiscal aspects, or in the life cycles of the technology its self. Poor skill matches can lead to people having difficulty understanding and servicing technology stacks. The methods to avoid these pit falls involve good communications, transparency and decisive decision making.
To conclude, this is a very high level set of thoughts on The Golden Triangle. It’s a critical thing to understand because failure to do such means that problems get shored up instead of actually fixed and technical debt will accumulate over time.