Yesterday we took up a concept introduced by CIO magazine executive editor Elana Varon, the idea that every organization has its “meta-story” that describes its purpose to all its people, and that saturates its culture.
As
Varon describes it in her story about Wal-Mart, even though analysts
are focusing on the IT choices made by the giant retailer, these
measures are all subservient to the larger drama playing inside the
corporate mind. Wal-Mart’s apparent change in IT strategy obscures the
fact that its original IT path came out of its meta-story, not from a
love of IT itself.
“it’s pretty clear that almost every major
breakthrough Wal-Mart made with IT supported who they believed they
were. I think you can trace its recent problems to the persistence of
that vision despite massive changes in the retail industry in the past
10 years.” – IT and Wal-Mart’s Meta-Story
Varon’s point is an acute one, that the
company’s sense of direction needs to change, and is overdue in fact.
This speaks of a great change in culture needed, to overturn
yesterday’s picture, and replace it with a contemporary view..
But
this is not to say that it will be purely the business side of Wal-Mart
that makes this change in culture. As we promote here continually, in
any company IT can lead. And we’ve noted on numerous occasions that a
company is ruled by its culture more than by any material constraint.
See Making Web 2.0 Work in the Enterprise for suggestions as to how IT can actually take the lead in changing its company’s culture.
Elana
Varon feels the same way about the ability of IT to lead a company. She
quotes from her interview with innovation evangelist Gary Hamel:
“IT organizations will play a critical role in two
ways: first, by building systems that companies will use internally to
facilitate innovation and second, by identifying how companies can use
new technologies to upend established business models and deliver new
products and services.” – Can’t Innovate? It’s Management’s Fault (Really!)
You’ll find us in full agreement with all
these points. The challenge for every company is to maintain a culture
that allows it to acknowledge the realities it operates in. This
challenge applies equally to business and technical side alike. We’ll
take the last word here:
“But as we’ve said a time or two
before, IT’s task goes far beyond technical implementation, and
embraces its own and its organization’s change of culture: IT becomes a
business, enterprise processes become driven by technology.” – The Visionary CIO
