If, at the beginning of the year, I had said that the release of information via wikileaks and protests organized via Twitter and Facebook would topple dictatorships, I’d have been laughed off this blog. But these things have happened. We are living in a period of unprecedented change and this change is enabled at the most basic level by fundamental changes in the technology landscape. As organizational leaders, it’s vital that we seek to understand these shifts, so that we better predict their effects on our organizations and so that we can use them to create new forms of business value.
The first shift is the emergence of the Cloud. Today, a start-up business can buy hosting online, and get CRM and financials for free. Instant, free (or very cheap), messaging to any endpoint is available to the consumer. Publishing photos, thoughts or videos is as simple as point and click. Web applications are emerging which challenge the dominance of incumbent vendors in every space. The emergence of cloud platforms such as Salesforce.com, which carry minimal capital investment costs, has started to free organizations from the obsessive and destructive focus on technology cost typical of the last decade. The old IT department dominated by TCO concerns is dying and the technological barriers to entry of testing a new idea have never been lower.
A second change is the Consumerization of IT. A decade ago a new employee at a company, would have been impressed by the laptop they received on their first day at work. Today, people complain to IT departments that they can’t use their iPads to access corporate resources. Sometime during the last decade we passed an inflection point. Today, the average person has access to consumer hardware and web applications which offer them vastly more control and utility than the applications and technologies that the typical IT department approves for use within the firewall. Increasingly, with or without the permission of IT or organizations, these technologies are finding their way into the enterprise. These shifts are irreversible. The standard corporate IT department simply does not have the capability to provide an equivalent experience to Facebook and it never will. The gap between the enterprise and consumer worlds will continue to widen and the user experience inside the firewall will become increasingly dated.
In parallel with these trends of Cloud and Consumerization, there has been a content explosion. Traditionally our companies have been the only trusted source of information and messaging about the products and services we offer: the canonical source of content. Today, no more. An explosion of online content, much of it generated externally, is available via the web. Everything we say or produce is discussed, analyzed, sliced and dissected by the crowd. Communities and expertise on products emerges completely outside the traditional channels and completely outside the normal mechanisms of control. Break a guitar on a flight? Expect a song on YouTube. Produce a particularly good TV set? 492 positive reviews on Amazon.
These trends are not be feared, but rather should be embraced. We must recognize that technology is not an end in itself. In fact, all technology exists only to augment human potential, and that value inherent in providing a limited set of prescribed tools to users unfamiliar with computers evaporates when everyone has a smartphone, when everyone is a technology expert simply by being a consumer. Accordingly, we must learn to cede control of portions of the corporate technology roadmap to non-IT staff. The users must be allowed to set the portions of the technology agenda that affect them most profoundly: the corporate IT mandated not-so-smart phone must be consigned to the dustbin of history. Our colleagues must be encouraged to experiment with new devices and experiences, and to share their learnings and knowledge with their peers. IT’s role must shift from detailing to the nth degree to ONLY acceptable technology, to defining the standards by which ANY device can connect to corporate content or workflows. It’s clear that this implies radical changes in both the mission and the focus of IT departments. nder this new model people can no longer expect the handholding traditionally provided. Instead, IT must provide the basic configuration instructions and the facilities to allow communities to form and self-support. The obsessive focus on cost must be replaced by a focus on delivery of business value. Technology must become an integral part of the normal conversation in the business, not a strange fiefdom to the side.
Similarly, our enterprises must be willing to give over control of a portion of the message around their products and services to the customer. The content created externally must be consumed and intelligently analyzed and, rather than seeing customers as essentially passive consumers of our content and services, we must embrace the opportunity to have them as active partners in the design and implementation of new products, in the creation of messaging around those products. Those companies that most effectively combine platforms or facilities that empower and promote their customers as product ambassadors will reap rewards in the form of brand loyalty. And if all this sounds crazy, consider that these ideas are common currency in younger industries like gaming.
The best and most progressive firms have chosen to embrace these trends. Those leading businesses are committed to finding ways to extend and enhance the tools chosen by co-workers and to leverage the feedback and passion of their customers to better serve their organization. Many such firms are updating core technologies, often investing in unified communication and collaboration tools, and migrating away from older and less flexible technologies (think big iron PBXs). And while they invest in the tools and capabilities that will unify their work force and connect their enterprises with their customers, they are implementing architectures and supporting processes that will capture more knowledge and ideas from their many content creators for the betterment of their firm and mission.
Also important, firms must make the strategic decision to empower their employees to select and own the next generation of devices used to access corporate content and data. This is the first step in a wider program to open the technology departments to the wants and needs of the business, and to transform the business and IT relationship.
As always, other options are available in response to these trends. We can put our heads in the sand and ignore them, becoming irrelevant in the process. We can actively resist them by putting policies and procedures in place to limit technologies to those approved by IT. The best firms believe that meeting co-workers and customers where they are rather than telling them where they should be, and by empowering them to make decisions on the technology and tools that surround them, they will stimulate and democratize the process of innovation and liberate their organizations from the yoke of oppressive and outmoded tools and policies.
