he rapidly emerging picture of IT and the modern enterprise is that
disruption is here now, and must be dealt with. If IT can’t handle it,
technologies are developing that allow the business side to make
systematic end-runs around IT, bringing closer the day to scrap the
whole legacy. This is not necessary. IT can lead.
“CIO Leadership means knowing what the number one problem of the CEO
today is and solving it. Today that number one problem is predicting
the next big thing that customers will buy. When it comes to the market
value of a company in this economy, it’s all about new customer
revenues. But how could that be the CIO’s problem? Isn’t that marketing’s job?” – The Naked Truth: It’s Time To STOP Educating The CEO About Technology
This quote from a compelling article by CEO Jackie Bassett at CIO.com
tells a portion of her larger story that IT has to lead in ways that
used to be the province of marketing. This mirrors our own writing (see
The Marketing-Savvy CIO),
and this is so because economic opportunity on today’s global network
is primarily technological opportunity. Only IT understands the
technology, but if business executives are the ones forced to respond
to the opportunities it’s likely they will scrap IT in the process.
Gartner forecasts
a coming IT skills shortage, and minimalized-IT evangelist Andrew
Clifford at ITtoolbox offers a cold look at the fundamentals of the
issue:
“Shortage of skills is partly rooted in the other
problems. Huge projects and a growing burden of legacy soak up good
people. The way that we structure IT exposes a lot of the underlying
technology, and encourages ambitious technical solutions, which
increases our need for skills.” – The root of all evil
Trapped between the hammer of agile
opportunity and the anvil of legacy complexity, how then can the IT
culture adapt itself to the onrush of change engulfing the modern
enterprise? How can IT actually save the day and play a leading role in
the evolution and safety of its organization?
Yesterday we
repeated our often-stated conviction that easing some of the Web 2.0
tools into the workplace is the softest way for IT to plant the seeds
of evolution, both for itself and for all stakeholders. Web 2.0 in the
enterprise develops a rising-tide consensus across all parties that
shows the optimal way forward. So, how to make it work?
We turn to ITtoolbox again as Dan Morrill suggests some institutional human architecture that may ease the transitions:
“Going around the IT department is not optimal, but
building a core group between the IT department and the business
department to test, try, and see how new technologies work, ones that
the business group is looking at would be a good solution” – IT holding you back from web 2.0
The technology is only part of any
deployment, as every IT department has learned the hard way. The people
have to buy in to make it work. Wikis are a good case in point. Their
value is undoubted, but what they’re actually good for is still
filtering into the planning discussions.
“Similarly, one of the reasons the L.A. Times
collaboration space failed because it was trying to create
collaborative opinion, rather than collaborative fact. While opinions
can be popular or unpopular, it’s very difficult to categorize someone
else’s opinion as just plain wrong.” – When wikis won’t work: 5 questions to ask.
This quote exemplifies the confusion, and
Lucas McDonnell in this article has offered a useful pre-deployment
checklist for the wiki in the organization. Doug Cornelius, building on
the work of Chris Taylor, offers a tighter focus to cut through the fog
of wikis, suggesting that – aimed as they are towards the single view
of truth – wikis work best for specific communities of practice (about
which we have written):
“Mr. Taylor concludes that ‘People need a common
focus, a shared obsession, to be productive as a crowd.’ Wikis need
direction [...] A community of practice is more likely to contribute to
wiki that is its own rather than firm-wide wiki. I see much more of a
sense of ownership.” – Getting Wikis to Work
Wikis matter as a tool for collaboration and
the organizing of knowledge. Fueled by the energy of the crowd, a wiki
can turn chaos into order by processing unstructured data into codified
form, suitable for a knowledge base, reusable infinitely.
