Sound like fun? Well…it does to me…and I plunked down more than 1800 words on it so be prepared to read

My “what if” scenario revolves around tomorrow’s organization…and whether it can be built without today’s IT. Here’s the premise:

What if you could build your organization from scratch.  No legacy systems.  No sacred cows.   What would the IT group look like?

Interesting question right?   While its not likely that anyone would scratch their legacy systems and start over, it still might be a fun mind game to see if IT matters or not.

The basis for this “what if” scenario is built upon the Future of IT survey report by the Executive IT Board – read more about that survey in my article titled The Future of IT & the CIO – Redux of the Dodo.

Tomorrow’s Organization

What would your organization look like if you could start over?  Would you have the same physical space and layout?  Same overhead?  Or…would you try a more radical approach and go with telecommuting, remote working and outsourcing?

Since we all have different ideas of what an organization is…let’s set some ground rules.  Let’s assume the following:

• You have 500 employees
• Customers are spread across North America (US & Canada)
• Your company provides services (rather than make/sell products)
• Due to customer demands, you need to have some employees in a different areas of the country.

So…how would you design your organization to handle the demands of the business?

Open up four offices in the four largest cities in the country?  Open offices in geographically important areas?  Let’s say you want to have a presence in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas.  Not bad locations…but expensive too.

Each business is different of course, but let’s say that we need to have physical presences in this four cities because customers demand it.  Fine…let’s open up some offices.

Now.  You’ve got your physical space figured out. How about your technology?

Remember…you can start from scratch.  No legacy systems to think about. But…you do need to think about whether today’s IT will work in tomorrow’s organization.

What would you do?

What I’m going to do in this post is show how tomorrow’s organization can be built with absolutely zero professional IT staff.

Building Tomorrow’s Organization

What are the basics needed for running your business?  What systems do you need?   I’ll go with these as my absolute  must haves:

Basics

• Computers / Workstations (not servers…they will be included in Systems)
• Printers
• Copiers / Scanners / Fax (anyone use fax anymore??)
• Phones

Systems

• Email
• Web
• Collaboration
• Financial
• Sales/Pipeline Management
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• HR / Payroll

I’m sure there are others but this covers the basics.

The basics are no-brainers. Find a reputable company / vendor and order some hardware.

But…before you take this first step, how will you organize your business?  Will you hire IT staff to implement and manage this hardware or will you outsource it?

Me?  Nothing on this basics list brings me an advantage in the marketplace.    I’d outsource the whole kit and kaboodle.  I’d find a company (or companies) that could manage the roll-out, maintenance, support and hardware/software refresh needed to support and maintain this equipment.   Of course…you’d need to make sure the company(s) that you outsource this to is credible and dependable…but that’s easy enough to do right?

If you wanted to try an even more radical approach, you could let each employee manage their own computer, printer, phone combination.  Might be a support nightmare here but you could give each employee a stipend upon hiring and tell them to ‘buy their own system’.  Kraft is already trying this approach.  Looks like Citrix is trying it out as well.  You’d have to build some detailed guidelines to provide some direction on systems, software, and specifications, but I think it could be done.

Regardless of which approach you take, we’ve now found a way to get the basics for our 500 employees and we’ve not hired 1 IT employee yet.  Should we think about bringing on an IT pro?  Maybe…but do I need an IT professional?  I need someone to manage the vendors, the process and the relationship….so maybe I bring a procurement / vendor management / contract management professional with experience in the IT space. With 500 employees focused on providing services, I probably already have someone perfectly suited for this role. If not, +1 on the employee side…but we haven’t hired an IT employee yet.

We’ve got the basics down…let’s dive into the systems.

Outsource, in-house or the cloud?

Based on the necessary systems listed above, we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to handle seven different systems. Do we build out a datacenter and pack it full of servers and then start hiring employees to support these systems?  We could take that route…or….we could outsource it all to third-party vendors to manage for us. Or….we can look to the cloud for all these systems.

Let’s look at a few different options.

• Option 1 – All systems in-house in a standard datacenter
• Option 2- Some systems on-house staffed by employees with others outsourced (via cloud or standard datacenter)
• Option 3 – All systems outsourced (via cloud or standard datacenter)
• Option 4 – Some Critical Systems in-house with others outsourced (via cloud or standard datacenter)

There are many combinations to look at…but these are 4 options to consider.

Which option do we take?

Do we hire a full IT team and build out our own datacenter?  In my experience, there’s an awful lot of overhead, staffing and headaches involved in building and managing your own datacenter …way too much for very little real value.

Do we hire a partial IT team to manage in-house systems and outsource the rest?  I’m learning towards this approach. Personally, I’d suggest putting critical systems in-house and outsourcing the rest.

So..let’s figure out what our critical systems are.  Is an HR / Payroll system critical? What about email?  Financial Systems? That’s a call that each organization has to make…but here’s how I’d break them down for this particular excercise:

• Critical: Web, Financial, Email
• Non-Critical: Collaboration, HR/Payroll, Sales/Pipelne, CRM

Critical Systems – In-house or Outsource?

I’ve said before that email can easily be outsourced and/or moved to the cloud and I still believe that.  Email, although a critical app, can be moved to the cloud via either Google Apps, Hosted Exchange or some other form of outsourced email arrangement.   In today’s world, I wouldn’t  even think about staffing up to manage and maintain an email platform.  I’d outsource it.

What about the Web function / systems?   It sort of depends on what you want / need to do I think.  Will there be an ecommerce function?  What about the need to capture sensitive customer information?   Those questions play a key-role in the decision.

Let’s assume our website requirements are like other similar businesses…we need a website that looks good, is easy to change/update, has a client portal, can collect new lead, etc etc etc.  Do we need to build an entire group within IT to manage / maintain the web?

A good portion of what needs to be done on the web can easily be moved onto the cloud….see the write-up by Scott Brinker in his post titled The Age of Disposable Software and his Marketing in the Cloud slides for an overview of many of the cloud solutions available for web/marketing.

I’m going to go with outsourcing my web system(s).  There’s absolutely nothing I can do in-house that can’t be done by plugging several systems together using the cloud or a managed server (or servers) with a company like Peer1 or Rackspace. Why hire a staff of IT professionals to manage servers when I can offload this to professionals at another company for much less money?

That said, I do think there’s a need for someone in the organization to architect and manage the web presence…is that an IT person? Or…can a Marketing Technologist do that? For the sake of argument here, I’m going to say that I’d hire a technologist and place them in my marketing department.  This person (or persons)  can provide strategic direction for all things web and manage the vendors & technology used on the web. +1 on the employee side…but still no IT staff.

Now…how about the Financial System?  Since this business is a services business, we really don’t need anything major…we just need a financial and accounting system to run the business.  What does that entail? I have no idea to be honest…I’ve never done finance / accounting IT systems. Because I don’t understand them, I’m going to outsource the system implementation & maintenance but will require the systems be in-house. Do I hire an IT person to oversee this platform?  I don’t see why I would…my outsourced vendor would handle all technical details and I would pay them for it.  I would hire someone to oversee this critical application though…+1 on the employee side…but still no IT staff.

Non-Critical Systems

The decisions for our non-critical systems are a bit simpler than our critical systems.  These types of systems are well understood in the world of the cloud and outsourcing I’m going to look to outsourcing and the cloud for my non-critical systems. Salesforce.com for Sales/Pipeline & CRM, SocialText for collaboration and a company like Paychex for HR / Payroll / Employee adminstration.

Perhaps there’s a need to have a person (or two) to manage the relationships, contracts and procurement…but no technical staff. Perhaps a +1 or +2 for employees…but yet again, no IT staff.

Tomorrow’s Organization without Today’s IT?

Did I just design an organization without a single professional IT employee?  I sure did.

Is it realistic to do this?  Maybe…maybe not.  Is there ways to argue against everything I’ve done here? Absolutely…there are tons of holes in this new organization.  That said…I do think a company could easily outsource most of their IT infrastructure…if not all of it.

Do I really think that tomorrow’s organization will be built without IT? Not really…I think there will always be some form of IT but the status of the IT group (and the CIO) will change if we keep going down the road we’ve been traveling on for the last umpteen years.

The history of unfinished & unsuccessful projects is leading to a dead-end for most IT groups.  The mentality of process over people has lead most organizations to despise IT and everything IT stands for.  I can’t tell you how many organizations I’ve talk to where the IT group is looked at as the ‘enemy’ rather than as a friend.

Don’t get me wrong here though….I truly believe there are good IT groups and good CIO’s out there…but the majority are just average.  And today’s average isn’t good enough for tomorrow.

Don’t let tomorrow’s organization be built without having a role in building it.   IT Professionals, Leaders and Managers….what can you do today to make sure you’re delivering the value that tomorrow’s organization will need?

Here’s a hint:

Start looking at bringing humanity back to IT.  Focus on your people, their skills and the human side of IT and start focusing on what those people can do for the organization. Do this and you might have a chance in the future.  Don’t do it and you’ll find yourself stuck in yesterday.

Building Tomorrow’s Organization – without today’s IT? is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Defining "Right" – The New CIO Series
2. Values and The New CIO
3. Leading by saying No – The New CIO Series
4. Small Business IT Outsourcing – don’t go too far
5. Building Trust

Yep…its true…..but most people don’t realize it.

Many in the IT world love to get asked to be a part of a technology selection project. These types of projects usually provide a learning opportunity for everyone on the team and an chance to really help drive the platforms used within the enterprise.

The basic question at hand for most technology selection projects really comes down to “‘what do we need and how much is it?”

With that question in mind, most IT professionals approach technology selection with the following three questions in mind:

• What are the functional requirements?
• What are the non-functional requirements?
• What is the selection criteria?

These three questions definitely cover a great deal of requirements….but one major area is missing.  I’d add the following:

Does the technology fit the culture?

Pretty broad question but one that’s extremely important to answer.

Now…one could argue that cultural fit should fit into the non-functional requirements or selection criteria selection questions…and I’d agree. That said, very few people really consider organizational culture when choosing technology.

Cultural Fit – why worry?

Why should we worry about cultural fit when selecting technology?

Simple…organizational culture is a key driver of technology acceptance and adoption.

Company culture will dictate how much support for a new technology is required. It will make a difference whether your users will take it upon themselves to learn a new technology or expect to have their hands through detailed training classes.

Culture will also determine how technology is used. Will the technology you select and implement by used in some new, innovative way or will it barely be used for its intended purpose?

Cultural fit is just as important to an organization as functional requirements but its an often overlooked  step in technology selection.

A Case Study in Cultural Fit and Technology Selection

I was hired by a large organization a few years ago to implement and manage development and customization for Sitecore CMS.  The project was an interesting one…the organization hadn’t used a content management system prior to their selection of Sitecore and had been building all websites using HTML and flat-file databases through a two person web team.

The team responsible for the selection and implementation of Sitecore CMS had assumed that the platform could be rolled out and anyone / everyone in the organization would be allowed into the system to input and manage their own content.

Now…with the proper people and culture, this might not have been a bad idea.  But the culture of this organization at the time was top-down command and control where everyone had been conditioned to do as they were told.  At the time there was even a paper based communication approval process that required at least 5 signatures (sometimes more) before anything was allowed to be published to the web (this process has since changed for the better).

Can you imagine implementing a technology like Sitecore with built in workflow processes, approval processes and publishing capabilities and to not really use those processes because a paper-based approval system existed?  I will note that the Sitecore driven workflow processes were considered as a replacement for the paper-based system but never properly embraced or used.

With a culture built around waiting for your boss to tell you what to do, do you think the CMS platform was accepted and embraced by the users?

Another issue that was obvious from the beginning of this project was the complete lack of understanding of everything ‘web’ within this organization.  This was very much an organization with a “print” mentality and modern digital communications and marketing concepts weren’t well understood by most.

Needless to say, the plans to roll out Sitecore to the entire organization never really panned out. There were pockets of people and teams within the organization that were chomping at the bit to get into Sitecore but that was the exception rather than the rule.

Technology Selection – Lessons learned

What can we learn from this example?  The strategic objective behind selecting and implementing Sitecore was sound.  So were the functional requirements…the platform is an excellent platform and fit into the organization’s overall technology architecture and roadmap.

A failure occurred when the technology met the culture of the organization.   The culture was rooted in ‘do nothing wrong’ and ‘receive approval for everything’.  This culture let the inability for the people within the organization to understand, embrace and use a technology that allowed individual achievement, initiative and innovation.

If the real goal of this organization was to put the power of digital communications and marketing technology in the hands of individuals (with proper workflow processes of course), a first step should have been to take on some form of organizational readiness study prior to technology selection.  If this had been done, perhaps a different technology would have been selected or at least a different plan for rolling out the selected technology could have been created.  Perhaps some organizational & cultural changes could have been implemented to allow this technology to better serve the needs of the company & people.

Regardless of what could have been done differently, the basic lesson is this: failure to consider organizational culture prior to or during a technology selection project can be disastrous.  Next time you take on a selection project, add the ‘cultural fit’ question to your list of things to consider…you may just be surprised at how differently your selection criteria and project turn out with this in mind.

Technology Selection and Cultural Fit is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Technology Selection, Acceptance & Culture
2. Common Sense and Technology Selection
3. Technology Selection Revisted
4. Information Technology Strategy
5. Do you have a technology strategy?

The survey, titled The Future of IT (pdf download), basically argues that the role of IT will diminish in the future.  The survey argues that the IT group will move away from a large centralized function and transition into a shared services model with smaller IT teams sprinkled within business units.  The role of the CIO will also change quite dramatically moving from that of Technology leader to that of either leader of a shared services group or a much more transactionally focus role in charge of IT procurement and integration.

Does that mean IT and the role of the CIO is going away?  Like I said in the previous article, no…I don’t think either role is going away completely but I do believe the CIO role and the IT group must change in order to remain relevant in tomorrow’s organization.

The Diminishing Role of IT and the CIO?

The The Future of IT (pdf download) survey is an eye opener if you take the time to read it.  Once you do, then go read the great stuff that Scott Brinker is putting out today…especially his article titled Rise of the Marketing Technologist.

Scott’s been advocating about the need for marketing organizations to own and manage the technology within the marketing group. Scott writes:

As marketers, you’re already responsible for the outcomes based on such technology. The accountability so widely promoted in digital marketing has you in the hot seat for results. It’s only sensible that you should have full control over the means and mechanisms to deliver those results.

You must be the driver of marketing technology, not merely a concerned passenger. But if you don’t have technical depth, who can help you navigate?

Scott argues for a need for a Marketing Chief Technology Officer (CTO) reporting into the Chief Marketing Officer with strategic technology initiatives for the marketing organization as well as acts as the liaison with the IT group and product marketing teams.

Scott writes the following to highlight the role of the Marketing CTO:

….I am suggesting that technology become one of the vertical pillars of the marketing function — with the marketing CTO as its head.

Resources that used to be begged, borrowed, or bought would instead become a native part of the marketing organization.

Pretty powerful argument for the need to have a strong technology leader within the marketing group.  Scott puts together a very (very) compelling argument for why marketing organizations need to be growing a technical skill set to own and manage their own technology initiatives.

Scott’s article is also an extremely good example of how the idea of IT services are changing within organizations.  Business functions are looking for ways to no longer be beholden to the IT group for all technology needs.  Business groups, like marketing, are needing to find ways to be more agile, more flexible and have more ownership in the technology they use.

Why is that?

Some would argue that the IT group has trouble getting things done.    Some might argue that IT isn’t aligned with the business and describes methods and processes to help IT align better while others argue that it isn’t alignment that is the problem…its the ability for the IT group to be agile and synchronized with the organization.

At the end of the day, the CIO role and the IT group are diminishing in many organizations because they haven’t been able to provide what the organization needs.  It’s as simple as that.

Take a look at Scott’s article again….would the idea of a self-contained technology organization within marketing be necessary if IT were delivering what the marketing group needs?  Maybe…maybe not.

I’m 100% behind the idea of the marketing CTO and have even delivered consulting services as a marketing technologist…but I think there’s a lot of room for the CIO to take a leadership role in this area if they can change the direction and values of the IT organization.

What’s next for the IT group and the CIO?

The diminishing role of IT the CIO has been discussed for many years.

Nicholas Carr wrote a post titled Twilight of the CIO in 2007 that discusses the topic. Harvard Business Review had a similar post in 2002 titled Should you fire your CIO? arguing similar points. More recently, Surendra Reddy is rethinking the role of the CIO in the aptly titled Re-thinking: CIO Role in a 21st Century Corporation. In the The Future of IT (pdf download) survey, the future of the IT group and the CIO is definitely highlighted and discussed.

So…what’s next for IT and the CIO?

Continue to focus on doing business the old way and try to own everything around technology and the business will continue to move past you.  Shadow IT will proliferate.

But…what if you take a different approach?   What if you reach out today to the business to deliver the services they need tomorrow, today.  Reach out and recognize the people and processes that are creating Shadow IT within the organization and start making changes to formalize that shadow function into an IT supported function. Mind you…I’m not arguing that you take over the Shadow IT function…just provide support.

Instead of holding corporate data close to your vest, why not build an Open API to allow everyone within the organization to use data for whatever purpose they need.  Build standards and open access methods to allow technology initiatives to be owned by other groups.

Rather than be the technology police, be the technology ambassadors to the organization. Spend time with each group and understand their needs. Truly understand their needs and goals.

Embrace ideas like Scott’s Marketing CTO.  Reach out to the marketing team and find out what they truly need to get their job done.  If these non-IT teams are looking at growing their technology skill-set, find out why. Find how what you can do to help.

The future of IT is dependent on its ability to be agile, flexible and open. If you can create an IT team that embraces these values, you’ll find that your role as CIO and the IT team’s importance to the organization will grow rather than diminish.

The ability to turn on a dime to deliver what your organization needs is the key to ensuring a strong, useful IT group for the future. You’ll be much more than a the “IT group”…you’ll be the group that allows the organization to grow, innovate and succeed.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Why Can’t My CIO Be More Like Me? (blogs.hbr.org)
• IT Executives Must Embrace Innovation Opportunities or Expect Weakened Leadership Role: Diamond Digital IQ Study (eon.businesswire.com)
• IT & Marketing – Like Peanut Butter and Jelly? (ericbrown.com)
• CIO’s: Consider This… (ericbrown.com)

The diminishing role of IT and the CIO (?) is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. The role of CIO going away?
2. Building Tomorrow’s Organization – without today’s IT?
3. Innovation and The New CIO
4. The New CIO – An Introduction
5. The Future of IT & the CIO – Redux of the Dodo?

Have you ever thought about how much the information technology and marketing organizations are like a PB&J samich? Yes…I said samich….been wondering how to work it into a post forever. Never worry…I use sandwich from here on out…maybe.

Think about IT as the peanut butter in a PB&J sandwich.

Peanut Butter, much like IT, is the glue that keeps things together.  While Peanut Butter can be found in a few different varieties…its pretty much the same everywhere.   it may have a different taste if you try different types / brands of PB but you pretty much know what you’re getting when you ask for peanut butter, you get peanut butter.  Kind of like IT…you know IT is pretty much the same regardless of where you go.

Now…the marketing team is the jelly.   It can come in many varieties.  Grape. Strawberry. Kiwi.  Cactus.  Squash?  Yep…Squash Jelly.

Just like real jelly, there are different varieties…different companies need different approaches to marketing.  The problem…when you ask for jelly, you really don’t know exactly what type of jelly you are going to get…unless you are very specific (squash jelly please). The same can be said for marketing….unless you are extremely specific, you may get something other than what you asked for.

So….when you put the PB (IT) and Jelly (Marketing) together, you get something delicious right?  Sometimes. But sometimes you end up with a Peanut Butter and Squash Jelly Sandwich.

You got what you asked for, but maybe not what you expected.

Marketing Technologists – Helping IT and Marketing work together (or…how to make the sandwich)

I’ve started describing a portion of my consulting practice as that of marketing technologist.

Why?

Because I’ve spent a good portion of the last few years working with and for marketing organizations as their technology strategist, manager and liaison with the information technology organization. In this role, I’ve leveraged my technology background along with my marketing experience to form a bridge between IT and Marketing and, for the most part, I’ve been very successful in getting things done.

I’ve found this role is one that most organizations haven’t figured out yet. Many companies have IT groups who feel as though they must own and manage all technology within the organization. Most marketing groups need technology to do their job but have a hard time interacting with IT.

These types of situations lead to the rise of Shadow IT throughout organizations. Most companies fight Shadow IT with arguments about security, platform stability, technology platform integration and budgets…and normally these fights are won by the IT group and the CIO. Usually, the IT group within an organization owns, manages and leads all technology efforts and their happy to do it.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The IT group has the technology expertise and should be involved in any technology decisions and, in fact, should manage the operational aspects of any technology platforms within the organization. .

That said….there are many times when it makes sense for areas like marketing, HR and Finance to step into a leadership role to ensure they have the necessary technology to move forward.

Note that I said leadership role. I’m not arguing that non-IT groups should go out and find their own vendor/technology, purchase it, implement and manage it. I prefer to see the IT function remain in the middle of all technology decisions but I do see a role for technologists within these non-IT functions.

Think of the marketing technologist as the sandwich maker.

As I’ve said, the marketing technologist is someone with a technology and marketing background. This person can easily interact with both IT and Marketing to ensure that everyone understands exactly what is needed, what the goals are and why the request is being made.  This person can also help to lead the IT developers and architects down the right path when developing functionality / websites for the marketing team.  This person is also in a perfect spot to lead branding and usability of new technology platforms.

The Marketing Technologist is the one that figures out what type of bread you want, just how much peanut butter you need, what type of jelly is wanted and how to combine them to form the sandwich.  The marketing technologist is also in a place to spread the peanut butter and jelly on the bread, makes sure everything fits nicely together, works well and looks nice.

Jump over to the signup process that Scott Brinker mentions in his Shadow IT vs. Shadow Marketing article (awesome post BTW)….he had to go through five or six screens to download a white paper.  I’m sure someone within the organization asked for a website for users to register and download whitepapers. While the website works, the registration process, usability and usefulness of the website are downright bad.

Would it have been better with someone acting as a liaison between IT and Marketing?  Who knows…maybe yes…maybe no.   But…in most instances, these types of fiasco’s can be avoided.

Making the IT & Marketing Functions work better (or…making a great PB&J sandiwich)

Here’s my Five Steps for helping IT and marketing work better together.

• Step 1 – move away from the ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality.    You can’t have marketing today without IT…and IT won’t have a reason to exist within most organizations without a good marketing function.  Just like you can’t have a PB&J without both the PB and the J.
• Step 2 – Agree that IT owns and controls technology, but Marketing lead its own initiatives.  While its true that peanut butter is usually more noticeable on a PB&J sandwich than the jelly, you can’t have one without the other.  The Jelly adds just as much to the taste equation.  Stop worrying about who controls technology and ‘who does what’ and focus on getting your projects done.
• Step 3 – Agree that Marketing owns branding and usability. Remember that Squash Jelly?  You don’t want that do you? If you want to make sure your organization gets the right jelly, you’ve got to make sure the Marketing team is leading and owning the look/feel, usability and branding of all projects that have any ability to interact with clients, employees and partners.
• Step 4 – Engage with each other – IT and Marketing need to engage. Let the technology savvy folks in marketing lead some technology projects.  Let some IT folks into the marketing projects.  Get to know each other.  You’re going to be on the same bread together…might as well know each other right?
• Step 5 – Promote marketing technology as an area for growth. Find those folks that have an interest in both IT and marketing and put them into the marketing technologist role.   You’ve got to have someone who knows how to make the PB&J sandwich.

While these five steps aren’t guaranteed to create a successful relationship between Marketing and IT, they’ll go a long way to making it easier to get marketing technology projects initiated and completed.  Who knows…if you work hard enough, you might just make the perfect PB&J samich too.

IT & Marketing – Like Peanut Butter and Jelly? is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. The diminishing role of IT and the CIO (?)
2. The New CIO – An Introduction
3. Building Tomorrow’s Organization – without today’s IT?
4. Innovation and The New CIO
5. Mike Schaffner on Marketing IT

Ever found yourself  ’afflicted’ with cognitive dissonance?  Sure you have.

Do you speed during your commute to work?  Intellecutally, you know its wrong but you do it any way.

Do you smoke?  Again…intellectually you know its bad for your health but you continue to smoke.

What about your use of social media?  Sure you understand (and believe) that social media is a place to build relationships with your clients / customers, yet you still approach social outlets with your old ‘pitch and blast’ methods of talking at your clients instead of talking with them.

Cognitive Dissonance results when an individual (or organization) has to choose between attitudes and behaviors that are contradictory.

This occurs daily in the world of IT doesn’t it?

Think about it…your Marketing and Communications team need to live in the social media space these days yet many IT teams have disabled access to all social networks because of ‘productivity’ issues.  This approach creates cognitive dissonance in a big way…it forces the marketing team to have to choose between following IT standards or breaking those standards and using these platforms.

Another example – The IT group forces users to use the IT helpdesk for any service requests.  Except for when its ‘really’ important or if the requester is someone ‘important’.  So….what do people do?  Do they call the helpdesk and wait for 2 days to get their minor computer issue working or do they make the issue more important than it is?  Or do they escalate to their boss (who escaltes to her boss, etc) and get IT to fix the issue now?  This happens every day in every organization and it happens because its allowed to.  It happens because the IT group has allowed the ‘important’ people to have their issues addressed differently than the ‘regular’ folks.

This mentality creates dissonance…everyone knows they should follow the procedure but they also know it will take too long so they call their buddy to get the problem solved.  I’ve done it. You’ve done it..everyone does it.

What can IT do?  Remove the contradictions. Remove the exceptions.  Everyone goes through the same process.

Removing Cognitive Dissonance

To get rid of Cognitive Dissonance, you’ve got to make sure you aren’t confusing your customers with options that are contradictory.

You’ve got to remove contradiction from your processes to make them mirror the reality of business today. That’s a tall order for most organizations…but its a necessary one.

Make it easy for yourself and the organization to make decisions…take the contradictions away as soon as you can.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Stop Confusing Your Customers with Cognitive Dissonance (blogs.hbr.org)
• Cognitive Dissonance (tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com)
• The Cognitive Dissonance is Strong in This One (ozatheist.wordpress.com)

Cognitive Dissonance & IT is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Minding the gap between Strategy and Tactics – The New CIO Series
2. CIO’s – If you can improve one trait in 2010, let it be this one
3. IT Marketers – Five Reasons we aren't listening
4. Authentic Conversation – Real, Simple, Honest
5. The New CIO: Social Media and the Enterprise

• Shadow IT vs. Shadow Marketing By Scott Brinker on Chief Marketing Technologist

  Quote: IT people work for IT. Marketing people work for marketing. And, as illustrated with the dangers of shadow marketing, marketing technology is now an integral part of marketing’s strategy and execution. The people working on it need to have their focus — and more importantly, their passion — on marketing outcomes. You can’t get there with dotted lines and chargebacks.

• Financial Steroids by Aaron Wall on SEOBook.com

  Quote: Money can be a great lever. And if you have a lot of it certainly it makes sense to use it to your advantage. But the compounding interest on debt is also a lever working against you. It is what forces us to have recessions.

• Do This One Thing and You’ll Rise Above Your Peers by Donald Miller

  Quote: If you want to be a person of influence, or if you want to lead, or for that matter if you want to succeed, start reading. These days, you have less competition than your parents had, or their parents for that matter. If you read as few as fifty books, you’ll be considered a genius. Subscribe to the Economist and read a handful of articles each week and your friends will wonder when you intend to run for congress.

• Looking for An Answer by Moose Peterson

  Quote: I’ve been looking for an answer for over thirty years, ever since I picked up a camera and decided to make it my career. I remember all to clearly leaving a night college class and thinking out loud, “What’s the answer?” And here’s the problem. I don’t know the question. Seriously, I know the answer is out there, the one that will make it all work, make it all right, the one that will solves all the problems and put everything in its right place. But if there is an answer, shouldn’t there be a question?

• How LeBron James shows us it is time for a new job search by Scot Herrick on Cube Rules

  Quote: The critical piece here is to know the work you do best, how you do your work the best, and what environment best matches up to your best. If you do not understand this, you will never get happiness from your corporate experience. If you do understand how you do your best work and consistently analyze how long a job will last, you will be light years ahead of your coworkers. Especially if your coworkers are jumping for joy at the signing of LeBron James and not realizing the signing was the death of their job.

• You Don’t Sell To A Community. You Support A Community by Dan Blank on Publishing, Innovation & the Web

  Quote: Suddenly, every company is “developing” a community online, or engaging an existing community, at least in their marketing plans. But a crowd isn’t a community. A market is not a community.

Links for August 8 2010 is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Links for August 15 2010
2. Links for August 1 2010
3. Links for August 22 2010
4. Links for August 29 2010
5. Links for April 4 2010

If I give up on your phone tree, your communication options aren’t good enough.

If I don’t understand your FAQ’s, your product or service is being lost.

If I get lost on your website, you’re closing the door in my face.

Read through those again and pretend you’re an IT user within your organization.

CIO’s: Consider This…

Take a second to think about what your users face day after day.

Let’s say you have an IT user who has a computer problem and need to get support.  How many hoops do they have to jump through to get their problem resolved?

What about the new project the marketing group needs to undertake to get the new marketing strategy moving?  Do they know who to come to in the IT group for help?  Do they WANT to come to the IT group for help?

What about the user who has a desktop PC that’s 4 years old while of the IT group walks around with new laptops?

How does your organization see you and your team?  Do they love IT?  Or hate IT?

Take a second to consider this.

Are you making it easier for your organization to use technology…or harder?

CIO’s: Consider This… is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Photography is tough
2. Connecting IT with Business – The Go Betweens
3. Don't let the big (or small) words win – The New CIO Series
4. The New CIO – An Introduction
5. Googlenope

In that post, I mentioned the Boy Scouts of America and how their magazine group uses WordPress.com’s VIP hosting platform for Boys’ Life magazine’s Boyslife.org website.  Wordpress is open source…but as far as I’m aware, this is the only example of open source platforms being used at the National office of the BSA.

This story isn’t about boyslife.org though or just about the BSA…its about how important it is to embrace whatever community you have.

Boy Scouts & Open Source

Now…before I continue, you should realize I worked at the BSA national office as an employee for ~ 1 year and as a consultant for ~1.5 years. I know the organization very well.

The Boy Scouts of America has over 1 million volunteers. These volunteers come from all walks of life with many of them being new volunteers with young kids in the programs.  Out of 1 million volunteers, I’d estimate that the BSA could reach out and find 1,000 people who have  a strong computer background. Out of those 1,000 people, I’d be willing to bet that 100 of them would be willing to give a portion of their time to various IT related activities (software development, etc).

So….here’s an organization that has a dedicated volunteer community large enough to include a few people (maybe even a few hundred people) willing (and eager) to help develop new and interesting software platforms for the organization.  Is the BSA reaching out to embrace this community?  They are reaching out, but not truly embracing them.

Failing to embrace the community

Back in 2008 there was an open source initiative announced within the BSA.  On the surface, it looked good…even Eric S. Raymond (former president of the Open Source Initiative and former Scout) was excited about the announcement.

Like I said, on the surface it looked good. Here we had the BSA reaching out and embracing their large volunteer base and providing yet another way for those volunteers to help the organization out.

The CIO of the BSA hired a consultant to come in and build an open source strategy and program.

What did this program consist of?   A website, a forum and an open source ‘strategy’ document was created and published on a website.    The act of publishing that document and website was considered the ‘last step’ of the open source program and the consultant went on his way.

The website and forum actually got some decent traffic…within days of the announcement there were 10 to 15 people on there announcing their interest in helping the BSA.   From what I saw, these volunteers were extremely interested in helping, extremely comptetant in their fields and full of ideas of how to bring open source into the BSA.

But….those people were ignored. After 6 months, the forum was closed down. There were zero projects undertaken.  There was zero communication from the BSA IT group to these volunteers.  There was no embracing of this community.

It was sad really.  Watching these people comment over and over on the forum about how they were wanting to help.  Some even started up projects independently of the BSA National IT group but as farm as I know, those projects never went anywhere. The Boy Scouts of America’s IT group had no idea how to reach out and embrace these volunteers.

The open source initiative was an excellent idea, especially for an organization with over a million volunteers ready and willing to help.  The only issue – the BSA didn’t really know how to embrace their community, at least on the technology side.

The Boy Scouts of America hasn’t quite figured out how to embrace their technologically advanced volunteers…and I don’t know that they ever will be willing to reach out for help within the IT space.  There are a ton of security issues to worry about at the BSA due to the large amont of data on children…but there are many options for an organization like the BSA and even more for other organizations.

What could you do with One Million Volunteers?

Just imagine what you could do with a million volunteers.  Imagine having a million people beating down your door to help in any way they can.

That’s what the BSA has…and they’ve done a good job of utilizing those volunteers…but have they embraced them?   On the technology side of the house, they have not.

Here we have an organization who has an IT group that is understaffed and overworked and has a hard time getting anything done quickly. Now…add to that a large group of volunteers willing to help in any way they can and you’ve got a recipe for success….but those volunteers have to be embraced.  Right now..they are kept are arms length.

Imagine if you had had a group of people willing to help your organization out.  Maybe not 1 million people…but what if you had just 10 or 15 people willing to help you with your project and/or initiative? You can have that if you build and embrace your community.

This is the power of something like open source.  You’ve got people wanting to help. You’ve got people willing to help.

Whether you’re the Boy Scouts of America or a small business with 1 employee, you’ve got a ton of ‘volunteers’ out there waiting to help you out in the open source world. You just have to be willing to reach out and ask for help…and understand how to embrace those folks that are willing to help.

Of course, there’s times when you can’t (or won’t) opt for open source platforms….but odds are that there is a community out there willing to offer assistance.  Take a commercial content management product like  Sitecore for example. Sitecore has a fairly large community of developers on the Sitecore Developer Network who offer advice and propose solutions to problems.  Take advantage of communities like and embrace them when you can.

Whatever your community looks like, embrace them.  If you don’t have a community, build one.  You may be surprised to find what your business / organization can do when you open your arms and embrace those around you.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Boy Scouting in America Celebrates 100 Years (prweb.com)
• Open Source, The Enterprise and The Community (ericbrown.com)

Embrace your community is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Open Source, The Enterprise and The Community
2. Boy Scouts CIO Interviewed on Enterprise Leadership
3. Sitecore, Me and the Boy Scouts
4. A techie in a marketers world
5. The New CIO: Social Media and the Enterprise

While the open source world has been a viable area for quite some time, there seems to be a lot of talk these days of open-sourcing many things. Google has opened up Android, the Department of Homeland Security has just announced an open source intrusion detection engine, and more organizations are embracing open source platforms while also complaining about open source software overload.

Welcome to the open source world…whether you want to be a part of it or not….open source is here to stay.

Open Source

Take a second to jump over and read the definition of Open Source as defined by the Open Source Initiative.     Lots of interesting stuff there: Access to source code. Redistribution rights. Technology-neutrality.  Integrity of original code.  Good stuff….if you can understand how to take advantage of it within the enterprise.

Open source has its roots in the ‘free software’ movement but the open source world of today is a far cry from that of the free software movement in the past.  No longer is the main argument for free software….its moved into a more pragmatic argument of making software development a more open environment.

The open source world is an amazing one…and its an environment that many CIO’s and IT departments have tried to stay away from. I think its time to change that.

Open Source & The Enterprise

In the past, many people have argued against Open Source in the enterprise.  Most of the arguments against the open source movement have been based around security concerns, support concerns and/or intellectual property issues.

While some of these concerns are valid, I think many organizations, CIO’s and IT departments have a pre-defined prejudice against the open source world. They see this world as nothing but a bunch of hackers giving things away for free.

Far from the truth….but even if it were the truth…what’s wrong with it?  If I were working within an organization that had resource constraints (budget, people, etc), I’d have to look for ways to be more effective with the resources I do have.

Take a second to step back and rethink the open source world. Think about the people. Think about the willingness to give. Think about the community that exists out there.  Think about the hundreds of people that are willing to give their time to develop a piece of functionality that could be beneficial to you.

Look at WordPress (also WordPress.com) as an example.  Its one of the largest blogging / content platforms in the world with over 25 million people using the software to power their blogs. Its also an open source project with hundreds of volunteers contributing to the code base to extend features and functionality. The WordPress platform is used by individuals (it powers this blog) and Fortune 500 companies to run their blogs and content platforms….its even used by the Boy Scouts of America‘s  to run the website for Boys’ Life magazine.

If you were looking for a content management platform and couldn’t spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars buying and implementing one, WordPress could be an ideal choice. So could other platforms like Drupal or Joomla among many others.

With these open source platforms, you’ve got thousands of people willing to give their time and effort to build more functionality (in the form of plugins and themes), most of which wouldn’t cost you a dime.  If you did want to add some specialized functionality to your platform, there are thousands (or more) WordPress developers out there who can do some amazing things for very little money (think thousands of dollars versus hundreds of thousands for closed-source platforms).

But…what if you’ve already got money sunk into another system?  What if you already have a fully built IT architecture based on Microsoft platforms….open source isn’t an option for you….or is it?

Open source is always an option….you’ve just got to change how you think about the open source approach.

Open Source, The Enterprise and The Community

Let’s say you are a .NET shop.  Your entire IT architecture is built with Microsoft systems.  You run windows as your web server, SQL Server for your database platforms, Sharepoint for collaboration and content management and you have zero interest in replacing any of these platforms.

When I talk about open source….you probably shrug your shoulders and say “not for us…we’re a .NET shop”.  Well…you’d be wrong. Look at Umbraco for example….its a .NET open source CMS platform.  Brilliant!

Open source isn’t implementing the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack…its an approach to your business.

You can still be a .NET shop and embrace the open source community.

So…now you argue that open source isn’t secure.   Bollocks I say! (I’ve been waiting 4 years to use that on my blog).

Open source can be as secure as you want it to be.   You define the entry- and exit-paths for open source software and data flow.  Perhaps you setup an API that allows non-sensitive data to flow in or out.  Perhaps you setup certain non-critical functions to allow open source software to be implemented.

There are lots of ways to argue against the “open source security” argument.  The biggest argument is that security is as security does….you make your systems secure today with closed-source software…the same can be done with open source software too.

Open source platforms & software can bring a lot of value to an organization…you’ve just go to be willing to open your mind to open source. An open source approach & mindset can help in many ways.  It can save you money…but it can also allow you to reach out to the community (either your internal community or an external community) for help.

The open source community could be a lifeline for non-profits and community groups.  Imagine what an organization like the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts of America or The United Way could do if they embraced the open source movement and then embraced their community for help?

What about a for-profit company?  Can you still ‘embrace your community”?  Maybe…maybe not.  You’ll have to figure out if you have a community first…but that shouldn’t stop you from embracing the open source community as a whole.

There are a lot of smart folks out there just itching to solve a new challenge…reach out and find them…you’d be surprised just how much you can do when you open not only your IT platforms but also your mind.

The open source approach is much more than a philosophical approach to software / hardware /IT….its an approach that allows you to embrace your community to help you move forward.  You’ve already started embracing the community on the marketing side of the house to help ‘spread the word’….why not use that new-found good will and ask for help on the technical side of the house?

Join me next week for more on how non-profits can embrace their community (more specifically how one non-profit has not embraced theirs).

Related articles by Zemanta

• RackSpace issues a challenge to the cloud industry; goes open-source with OpenStack. (thenextweb.com)
• Open Source Software: Less Feature-Rich Than Proprietary Competition? (ostatic.com)
• Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight…: Why aren’t we seeing more adoption of open source in large enterprises? (duckdown.blogspot.com)
• Rackspace Backs the Open Source Cloud (datacenterknowledge.com)
• The truth about government and open source (zdnet.com)
• Does Open Source Matter in the Cloud? (zdnet.com)

Open Source, The Enterprise and The Community is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Embrace your community
2. The New CIO: Social Media and the Enterprise
3. Enterprise Risk Management Survey
4. Book Review: Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0
5. Cloud Computing and the Enterprise

Last week I published a post titled Mining for Knowledge where I discussed some of the research that I’ve been doing in my doctorate program.

One of the favorite lines from the article, and one that resonated with a few others as well. The line was:

…converting tacit (i.e., internal) knowledge to explicit (i.e., external) knowledge is one of the most difficult things to do.

I’ve been thinking about this (and reading A LOT of articles, papers and books on the subject) and have come to the conclusion that trying to force someone to convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge is a wasted effort.

Why?

Can I truly convert 100% of my knowledge into the written form?  Will the context of my knowledge be converted?  Perhaps a good portion of my knowledge can be converted, but can my experiences, thoughts and believes that shaped that knowledge be converted?  Can I ‘write down’ the knowledge that I have and truly make it meaningful to others?  I don’t think (feel free to disagree here).

Does that mean that an organization should stop trying to gather an individual’s internal knowledge to add to overall organizational knowledge-base?  Nope…. definitely not.

Rather than forcing a conversion from tacit to explicit (which is darn near impossible), are there ways to manage the internal knowledge of people?  Managing that knowledge is a much easier process that converting that knowledge.

Knowledge is best internalized when wrapped in context

Nonaka and Takeuchi, the godfathers of Knowledge Management, argue in their book The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation (affiliate link) that tacit knowledge can be converted into explicit knowledge only through externalization and describes this process as being one of dialogue, discussion and reflection.

Basically, they’re saying that in order to share internal knowledge, you’ve got to start a dialogue with others.  That’s why activities like storytelling, mentoring and other forms of social interaction can play a huge role in knowledge managment…they help to start and maintain dialogue and discussion on various topics.  These activities help to provide context around knowledge, which helps a person internalize that knowledge and make it their own.

In my previous article I talked about ‘mining for knowledge’. I talked about using web 2.0 platforms to capture knowledge and to share knowledge. All good stuff (and still interesting to me) but I’m looking at other methods to make these platforms more social.  Make dialog and discussion a more active portion of these tools.

If we can find ways to create dialogue and discussion within the enterprise, knowledge sharing would happen much more naturally.    This is why I like the idea of Enterprise 2.0.  While some people hate E2.0, I think there’s some real value there. Of course, E2.0 won’t solve world hunger and probably will never truly win over its detractors, there are many aspects to the idea that make sense.

What would it mean for an organization’s knowledge managements capabilities if a system could be implemented that found indexed the many disparate repositories of structured and unstructured data sources found throughout the enterprise and then provided that information in a socially aware platform that could wrap context around the indexed knowledge as well as provide a mechanism for dialogue, discussion and reflection?   You’d have a platform that could capture and share explicit and tacit knowledge.

Anyone know of any companies with products in this space?  I know SocialText is out there but I don’t think they have a platform as robust as the one above. SharePoint also has some aspects to this but not everything.

Mining for knowledge in a social word is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Mining for Knowledge
2. The New CIO: Social Media and the Enterprise
3. Improving Knowledge in Projects
4. Stories, Projects & Knowledge Management
5. Knowledge Management In Projects – An Overview