In reinventing itself to
become a business the IT department doesn’t have to suffer abrupt
culture shock: CIOs can read this and turn the experience into mild
surprise. Because as IT begins to listen to its customers within the
enterprise it will also become challenged to REVERSE its traditional way of building the organization’s computing capacity.
”’Business users need [new services] now. I.T. in
many cases cannot start projects for six months. They need it for a
small period of time and they want to service to be disposable,’ said
Smith.
”’It is just the opposite of the requirements that
I.T. has always been told to meet: build it once, build it resilient,
build it to last forever. That is why the cost of doing these
applications has always been so high.’” – IBM: Web 2.0 for Biz Ready for Takeoff
That was an explanation from Rod Smith, research fellow and vice president of emerging Internet technologies at IBM, of what users need, taken from an article today in CRM Daily.
Most
of a company’s workers have a wishlist of operations to streamline
their daily workload, if only they had the way to perform these
operations. They rarely think that IT could give them this capability.
And IT, in its turn, is rarely familiar with every worker’s little
wishlist.
One of the hallmarks of great software is
bringing to the users functions and features they might have
half-wished for, in a grumbling kind of way, but never really thought
they could get. As the comment goes, “We never knew it was missing
until it was here!”
We will take a brief moment here to call Dovetail CRM great software, on that foregoing hallmark. As we’ve often pointed out, we’ve always tended to give users of Clarify systems greater functionality with our enhanced applications than they really ever expected to find at their fingertips.
As might be expected, IBM
has thought a lot about the future of services within the enterprise,
and is working on a service that allows mashups of corporate data, at
the instigation of the user, and rapidly.
The service in part will offer asynchronous Java and XML
developer tools: the purpose is not so much to create services as to
achieve resulting datasets, allowing the user to build throwaway or
reusable data compositions; the application aspect is incidental.
As the article states, IBM
realizes that much work remains yet in security and copyright
protocols. This is very much the province and work of IT to secure.
IBM
is showing that there are ways for IT to accept the challenges that
will come out of its two-way conversations with its customers. IT in
fact is required to build the infrastructure that allows the users to
get what they want with an apparent freedom they’ve never before
experienced inside the firewall. The role of IT, as we’ve pointed out
before, is more crucial to the success of the enterprise than ever, but
cultures are being challenged to change in all layers across the entire
enterprise.
Collaboration is the modus of innovation.
Collaboration brings the information that challenges the traditional
structure, but that also supplies the direction for its replacement. IT
is the enabler. There is an element of trial and error in these new,
uncharted waters. A culture of experimentation, and forgiveness, will be useful.
As collaboration evangelist Luis Suarez says:
“Firstly, just as communities are very good at
capturing good practices, they are equally impressive at collecting
lessons learned on what may have gone wrong and, as a result of it,
become much more knowledgeable for the next time. Because after all,
whether we like it or not, we have a tendency to learn a whole lot more
from what goes wrong than from what goes right. That is just how our
brain works. And, like I said, communities seem to be very good at
handling those painful experiences, get the most out of them and re-use
those knowledge snippets for a later time to help address similar
situations and overcome them successfully next time around. And they
will always do.” – The Role of Knowledge Management in Innovation
