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. Small Business IT Outsourcing – don’t go too far
4. The diminishing role of IT and the CIO (?)
5. Leading by saying No – The New CIO Series

I’m all for backing up claims with evidence. I mean I am working on my doctorate you know…nothing like a doctorate program to teach you how to base theories on evidence right?

So…let’s take a second to revisit my theory that cultural fit is important to technology selection projects. We’ll start by taking a second to review the idea of Technology Acceptance.

To get started, let’s take a second to review a highlight from my previous article:

…failure to consider organizational culture prior to or during a technology selection project can be disastrous…

Now…the rest of this article dives into why I think culture is a key component of technology acceptance.

Technology Acceptance within Organizations

The Technology Acceptance Model (which I linked to in my previous post but didn’t really discuss) was introduced and popularized by Davis and Bagozzi in the late 1980′s and early 1990′s.  You can find a brief discussion of the model on Wikipedia or you can dig through the following papers:

• Davis, F.D., Bagozzi, Richard P., & Warshaw, P.R.. (1989). User Acceptance Of Computer Technology: A Comparison Of Two Theoretical Models. Management Science, 35(8), 982.
• Bagozzi, R. P., Davis, F. D., & Warshaw, P. R. (1992). Development and test of a theory of technological learning and usage. Human Relations, 45(7), 660-686.
• Adams, D. A., Nelson, R. R., & Todd, P. A. (1992). Perceived usefulness, ease of use, and usage of information technology: A replication. MIS Quarterly, 16, 227-247.

All are great papers and provide a good introduction to the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM for short) and how it can be used in organizations.

The model boils down to two major points for consideration during technology selection. A quick discussion of these points follows.

1. Perceived Usefulness -The understanding / belief by a user that by using a new technology they will be able to do their job better / faster / more effectively.
2. Perceived Ease of Use – The understanding / belief by a user that a new technology will be easy to learn and use and will require little effort to use on a regular basis.

Notice that the model uses the word “perceived” for both major issues affecting technology acceptance.  Perception is key….if the users perceive that something is difficult to use or that it will not make their job easier, they will not use it to its full potential…if they use it at all.

The TAM has been built upon many research projects, all of which are very rigorous and the model has been the basis of a ton of other research projects with similar results.

Based on my research and my experience, I believe the Technology Acceptance Model is a fairly good model to use as a rule-of-thumb while looking at an organization’s ability to accept a new technology.  In fact, in most of my technology selection projects, I’ve used the TAM as a starting point when surveying organizations to help determine a baseline for the organizations willingness to accept new technology.

Acceptance is an important aspect to technology selection wouldn’t you agree?  Without acceptance, technology is useless.

Technology Selection, Acceptance & Culture

Now that we all have a baseline understanding of one theory around technology acceptance (there are other more complicated theories than the TAM), let’s take a second to look at how culture plays into this and how it can greatly affect technology selection.

I think we can all agree that acceptance of any new technology is important.  The perception of the usefulness and ease of use of any new platform is extremely important.  Definitely something to consider during technology selection projects, no? I believe these two areas (usefulness and ease of use) are considered during selection projects, but I don’t think the real underlying cultural aspects are well understood.   What do I mean by the ‘underlying cultural aspects’ behind ease of use and usefulness?

Organizational culture plays a large role in creating the concept of ease of use and usefulness to an individual.  Think about it this way…ease of use and usefulness is a factor of how a person perceives technology as a whole and for the most part, that perception is shaped and driven by the underlying organizational culture. While the TAM is a bit too simplistic to model every individual’s reaction to new technology, it can be used as a baseline heuristic for how well the organization will accept new technology.

The culture of an organization plays a large part in the individual’s reaction to new technology and platforms. Before undertaking a technology selection project, if you can take some time to understand the the cultural proclivity towards acceptance of technology, the selection project might be more successful.    With the culture of the organization better understood, you can add some additional filters a more robust selection criteria.

Have I provided “proof” that my idea of culture playing a large part in technology selection project outcomes? Nope…but I might find a way to do so in the future  Sometimes you need proof…sometimes you can just go with faith that something feels ‘right’ and you should go with it. With this particular issue, I feel that organizational culture has played such a large role in the success and failure of technology selection projects that it feels ‘right’ to say culture and technology selection are intertwined.

Stay tuned for more on this topic…I’m hoping to put together another post with some actionable items for use in your next technology selection project.

Technology Selection, Acceptance & Culture 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 and Cultural Fit
2. Technology Selection Revisted
3. Culture and the CIO
4. Common Sense and Technology Selection
5. Information Technology Strategy

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.

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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...

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2. Building Tomorrow’s Organization – without today’s IT?
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5. The Future of IT & the CIO – Redux of the Dodo?

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.

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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...

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One of the biggest issues I’ve found while working as a consultant is the amount of knowledge that I walk away with after a project is complete.  Sure, I try to share this knowledge in every way possible but converting tacit (i.e., internal) knowledge to explicit (i.e., external) knowledge is one of the most difficult things to do.

Let’s assume though, that some portion of the knowledge that I hold in my head is converted into some form of writing at various periods throughout a consulting project.  Where does that explicit knowledge live?  In an email?  In some document stored on a server?  In a knowledge repository somewhere?

In the past, this problem has been attacked using centralized knowledge repository platforms.  These systems require users to log in and ‘enter’ their knowledge into the system.  Many of these platforms have been well built and some have been successfully used in organizations, but the success stories are far outweighed by the stories of KM repositories sitting idle and unused.

So…how can we get that tidbit of knowledge from my brain into some form of knowledge repository without me logging in and ‘entering’ it into the system?

Web 2.0 as knowledge repository

The use of Web 2.0 tools (blogs, IM, wikis, etc) has become ubiquitous..  If incorporated into a project environment, these tools might allow an easy and efficient method for capturing and sharing knowledge throughout project teams and project organizations.

The key to retrieving knowledge from tools is to make the user experience as seamless as possible. For example, an employee creates a blog on an organization’s intranet and then uses this blog to write different topics, some that pertain to her project and some that don’t.

Perhaps this employee is participating in two projects within the organization and she writes about topics that might be of interest to a portion of the organization and project team members.  While she writes about interesting topics and at times, writes about her experiences on the projects that she’s worked on, perhaps her blog posts aren’t widely read.  This employee has attempted to convert a portion of her tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge but few people on the project team or within the organization find this knowledge because its tucked away in the intranet site (which is rarely used anyway).

In the above scenario, knowledge was converted from tacit to explicit but few people are able to absorb this knowledge and make it their own (i.e., perform the conversion from explicit to tacit knowledge).  What would happen if this knowledge were indexed, searched and shared with the rest of the project team in something akin to a project knowledge ‘journal’?

Since Web 2.0 platforms are ubiqutious, why can’t we use these tools as our knowledge repository?  Employees and project team members are already using them…so can we find a way to ‘mine’ these platforms for knowledge?

Could a system be built that ‘mines’ these web 2.0 platforms along with other unstructured data (documents, email, etc) to ‘build’ a knowledge repository available to the entire organization?

Mining for Knowledge

I’m currently looking at ways to use text mining methods and techniques to mine for knowledge. Text mining looks to be a good approach to solving this problem because it allows for knowledge to be gathered without additional work by project team members.

There are other approaches that could be used for gathering knowledge from project team members, but all require additional work to input information.  For example, a project team using a manual approach could ask team members to regularly update their blog and to ‘tag’ their posts with a special project tag or keyword so that a non-intelligent aggregation system (RSS, etc) could simply pull these tagged posts into a central repository.  While this is a good approach, it relies on the end-user to tag their content correctly, accurately and in a timely manner.  Tagging, and other categorization and taxonomic approaches, require the user to do something to allow their knowledge contribution to be categorized, indexed and found by aggregation systems and other users.

Using text-mining methods against pre-existing tools and platforms takes away the human fallibility issues found in current knowledge management repository platforms or by requiring a user to ‘tag’ a piece of content correctly as described above.

Using text-mining and other data mining approaches, I’m looking at ways to build semi-autonomous systems to index and organize both structured data and unstructured data pulled from blogs, email, IM, social networks, documents, spreadsheets and any other location / data sources. This system could aggregate knowledge found via text mining and social network analysis and build a project knowledge ‘repository’ that will contain all knowledge for any specific project. This repository will be searchable and will contain both manually curated content (e.g., content uploaded by project team members) and automatically curated / generated content based on text-mining and indexing techniques.

There are some major privacy issues here of course. How can you mine a users email and find the relevant knowledge without truly invading their privacy?  Not sure you can but I’m looking at it.

Trust & Mined Knowledge

One key element of this new inter-connected world that we live in is trust.   How can I trust that the information I read on a web page is worthwhile, honest and accurate?   If I want to know something about organizational behavior do I read go read a Wikipedia article on the subject or do I go look through the Harvard Business School’s Organizational Behavior faculty pages and find publications written by the faculty there?

Which of these two sources of knowledge would you trust to be more accurate?

The same can be said of knowledge captured and shared within an organization. How do you know that the white paper on your new API is true?  Is it because it was released? Is it because of the author(s) of the paper?   What if you had a knowledge-base generated by an autonomous agent using text-mining techniques…how would you know to trust the information contained in it?  Who wrote the content?  Were did it come from?

This is where trust comes into play. If you could ‘see’ the qualifications of the author or authors of the knowledge base articles would you trust the content more?  If I knew that the worlds leading authority on organizational behavior wrote the Wikipedia article on the subject, I’d tend to trust that article more.

This is another aspect of my research…building trust into the mined knowledge using social network analysis (SNA) methods & techniques.  Using SNA techniques, can the background, profiles, connections and knowledge of the users within an organization be automatically (or semi-automatically) generated to provide some form for initial trust metric to show that mined knowledge can be trusted?

I don’t know if it can…but I’m looking into it

Next Steps?

So what are the next steps for me and this research?

I’m working on a research paper now that I hope will outline the research in more detail.

Lots of questions still exist and there is quite a bit of research left to do.  I do believe I’m headed in the right direction as evidenced by an HBR video & Blog tilted How Knowledge Management Is Moving Away From the Repository as Goal which discusses a similar topic.

Look for more on this topic from me in the coming months.

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• Problems of Shifting from KM to “Knowledge Sharing” (kmci.org)
• How Knowledge Management Is Moving Away From the Repository as Goal (blogs.hbr.org)
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Mining for Knowledge 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...

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Why?

Because both terms normally convey a sense of importance upon the IT group that really isn’t there.

Think about it this way:  Have you ever heard anyone in finance say ‘we need to run finance as a business’ or ‘we need to run finance like a business’.  I’d bet you haven’t.

What about HR?  Ever heard anyone within your HR team say they need to ‘run HR like a business’?  No?  There are some proponents for running HR ‘as a business’…if you google that term you’ll find a few results for the term in books/ articles.  In reviewing those articles/books, the writers are really saying the same thing I am…take a business approach to HR (and in our case, IT).

So why do we IT folks think we need to ‘run as a business’?  Shouldn’t we just ‘run’ as part of the overall business?

What is really being said with ‘IT should run as a business’?

Normally when I hear this term from someone, they are trying to say something more along the lines of ‘IT should be more business-savvy’ or ‘we need to take a business approach to IT’.

What these people are really saying is that they understand that IT isn’t delivering the value that it should to the organization. They understand this and are they trying to find ways to change it.

But the key isn’t to run IT ‘as a business’.  You don’t have ‘customers’….you have business partners.  Treat people like customers and you’ll be treated as a vendor.

Look at it another way….do you (in IT) pay for the services the HR function provides you?  Do you pay for the functions that finance / accounting provide you?    Perhaps in a shared services environment you might pay for these services, but the shared services approach is one that is another bad idea in my opinion.  More on that level of hell in other posts perhaps.

What to do?

The first step is to go read Bob Lewis’ InfoWorld article titled Run IT as a business — why that’s a train wreck waiting to happen and then go read Chris Curran’s Run IT like a business, not as a business.

Interesting reading, right?

The takeaways from those articles?  Stop trying to be a business and start working a partner to the rest of the business.

Step away from running IT as a business.  Move toward a more integrative approach to working with your business partners within the organization.  Stop worrying about what you can out-charge and to whom and focus on delivering business value.

If you continue to run IT as a business and focus on costs and out-charging your ‘customers’, you’ll continue to be seen as a vendor.  Vendors aren’t part of the business…they are a necessary cost to doing business.  The instant a better (e.g., lower cost, bette quality, etc) vendor comes along, you are toast.

How do you do this? Stop being seen as a vendor.

Stop trying to get that $180 out-charge for moving a network drop from cube A to cube B and start wondering how you can help the people in those cubes do their job better.

Can we stop trying to run IT as a business? 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.
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I wonder if there are any CIO’s and IT leaders out there that read that and wondered about their story?  Their personal story…and their IT group story.

Have you thought about what the story is for your IT group?  Are you the team that ‘gets things done’ or are you known as the team that’s hard to work with.

Do people within your organization come to you first for projects….or are you the last to hear of new projects?

Are you the group driving innovative ideas…or the group that causes innovation to falter or fail?

What’s your IT group’s story?

CIO’s – what’s your team’s story? 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...

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That one word can send shudders through many folks.  That one word has made millions and millions for consulting companies and consultants.

Can you answer the question “what’s your strategy?”  Can everyone within your organization?

If I were to talk to the front-line workers in your organization and ask them “what’s your strategy?”, will they just smile and say they don’t really know?

Most people I’ve talked to over my career will point me to the mission or vision statements as proof that they have a strategy….but very few have been able to articulate the organizational strategy clearly.

Why is that?

Is it because consultants and senior leadership have turned Strategy into a something inaccessible to the common front-line worker?  Is it because an organization’s strategy isn’t well communicated?

Could be.  Both of those issues often have something to do with it..  But the biggest issue that I’ve found is that people just don’t know how to implement strategy.

Before I continue….let’s take a quick look at what strategy  is.  Oh…also…this is a rather long post so bear with me.

What is Strategy?

BusinessDictionary.com defines strategy as:

Approach to future that involves (1) examination of the current and anticipated factors associated with customers and competitors (external environment) and the firm itself (internal environment), (2) envisioning a new or effective role for the firm in a creative manner, and (3) aligning policies, practices, and resources to realize that vision.

Not a bad definition.  Actually…it’s a pretty good one.  It covers the creation of a strategy and implementing it.

But like everything else in life, its easy to read a definition and think you ‘get it’ but much harder to actually ‘do it’.

So…we have a definition of strategy.  Now what?

Time to develop a strategy.

Strategy Creation

Developing a strategic plan isn’t easy….and I’m not about to claim that I’m an expert at it. That said, there are some basics approaches to strategy development.

First thing you have to do?  Step away from the burning fires and think. Think about where your organization needs to be in the future.  Then…think about where your organization wants to be in the future.  Lastly, think about your organizational capabilities.  Will they get you where you need to be?  How about where you want to be?

If where you want to be, or need to be, can’t be reached with your current organization’s people, skill sets and technology, its time to revisit your organization.

You can’t reach your strategic goal if your organizational alignment isn’t correct.  Seth Godin says that alignment is really nothing more than “getting your team in alignment (having their job match their tools match their mission).” I tend to agree with Seth on this one.

If you don’t have the ability to reach your strategic objective today but you are sure your goal is where you need to be…then you need to revisit your current organization.

Implementing Your Strategy

So…you know where you need to be.  You know where you want to be.  Now you have to build your plan to actually get there.

This is where most of us fail because it just isn’t that clear how to go about implementing implementing a strategy.

Some companies pay millions of dollars for a strategic plan to be developed…and then do very little with that plan. Some companies pay millions to a consulting company to have their strategic plan implemented. Some succeed and some don’t.

Strategy implementation is tough because sometimes implementation requires hard choices.  And

To do it right requires an organization to step back and look at their organizational abilities.  Can you reach your objectives with your current staffing?  If not, what needs to change?

What’s Your Strategy?

Let’s go back to the original premise of this article.  What is your strategy?  Can you answer that question clearly?

Is your strategy to “build your brand”?  If so, that isn’t a strategy.

Is your strategy to “be the #1 IT consulting company in the world”?  Might be a good vision but where’s the plan behind that vision?

To be honest…it really doesn’t matter what your strategy is.  If you don’t have a plan to reach the strategic goals, your strategic goals are nothing more than a bunch of words on paper.

THAT is the reason most people within an organization cannot clearly articulate your strategy.

Sure…they may understand all the ‘words’ but they don’t understand how they play a role in that strategic plan nor how the organization will ever reach the goals stated in said plan.

Example Time – You own an American Football Team

I’ve used this example before – see Competitive Advantage – The Human Capital approach.

You own an American Football Team.  Your goal is to be the next ‘dynasty’ and win 5 super bowls in the next 10 years…something very few football teams have done.

So…you develop a strategic plan to get you there.  What is your strategy?  Is it to ‘win 5 super bowls in 10 years’?

Better not be.  While that’s your goal, it isn’t your strategy.

What is your strategy? Wouldn’t it depending on what your team looks like today doesn’t it?

Do you have the right coach? Right quarterback?  How about your offensive line?  Is your defense the first in the league…or last?

The answers to these questions will help you build your strategy.

If you have a great offense but a piss-poor defense, wouldn’t it be worth focusing on building your defense up to be one of the best in the league?

So…your strategy for the next 2 years is to build the best defense in the league….but how?  Via the Draft?  Trades with other teams? Free agents?

Do you have the money to pay for the new talent you need to acquire to build the best defense in the league?  If not, what trade-offs do you have to make to get the best defense? Do you need to get rid of a few star offensive players?  If so, will that affect the offensive production of your team?

How do you communicate your new strategy? Do you tell one or two people about your goal? Or…do you sit down with everyone involved with the football team clearly communicate what the goal is, why its important and how they can help achieve that goal? I’ve found you get more from approach #2.

Building a strategy isn’t easy for a football team owner/manager.  Lots of moving parts.  Lots of strategic and tactical thinking involved.

Conclusion

Building a strategic plan for any business will be done in the same manner as the football team above. You’ve got to think about your strategy and the tactics to get you there by Minding the Gap.

You’ve got to identify what your main goal or goals are and then figure out how to get there.   Once you identify them, communicate the goals and the plan to reach them in a way that makes sense and makes people feel as though they can help reach those goals.

Be realistic about those goals too.  You won’t be the #1 IT Consulting company in the world if you only deliver services to clients Jackson Mississippi.    You can strive to be the #1 IT Consulting company in Jackson…but the world might be a bit too much for you to bite off.

Next time I ask someone on your team “what’s your strategy”…will they be able to answer?

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What’s your strategy? 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.
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Image by kevinzim via Flickr

The future of the information technology group  has been determined…and it doesn’t look good.

See that bird over there? That’s the Dodo.  He’s extinct.

Will IT follow the Dodo into extinction?

I don’t think so…but without some real changes in how iT groups do business, many IT groups may find themselves on the endangered list.

The Future of IT & The CIO

Earlier this week on CIO Essentials, I wrote about CIO Insight’s reporting on the Corporate Executive Board‘s (CEB) research report titled “The Future of Corporate IT“.

I asked readers there if they had any more detail on the report…and a good friend let me read his copy and I also found a version of the report online - read a PDF version of “The Future of IT“.

The report is an interesting one….and one that every CIO and IT professional should read through.

The main points of the report can be summarized as a “current state” and then a “future state”. These points are provided below with a brief discussion of each.

Current State: Business Process First

Future State: Information Over Process

IT has been working with the motto of ‘business first’ for a few years now (and maybe longer) but the CEB report states that this will change over the next five years.  Rather than focus on the business process, IT groups will change their focus to be more on the customer experience, data analytics and making the job of workers easier by providing better access to knowledge.

Current State: IT as Service Provider

Future State: IT Embedded in Business Services

According to the CEB report, IT will move away from providing services directly to business units and move toward supporting platforms, systems and applications that are embedded within the business unit(s).  IT’s role as central service provider will change and IT positions will move into business units.

Current State: Right-sourced IT

Future State: Externalized Service Delivery

A fancy way to say more internal IT jobs will be outsourced or completely eliminated due to the move to SaaS, cloud, and other offerings from vendors.  This is a scary one for anyone who’s in an IT operations role.

Current State: Pressure for Central

Future State: Greater Business Partner Responsibility

IT will no longer hold the keys to the technology kingdom.  Responsibility for purchasing, and managing technology solutions will migrate to the business units.  This is already occurring in many organizations (think about Shadow IT) and will only continue to grow.  What is IT’s role in the future if business units will be managing their own technology?  Better figure that one out Mr/Ms CIO.

Current State: Fully Functional IT

Future State: Diminished Standalone IT Role

The role of IT will move away from an all-in-one functional unit to a dispersed group of smaller IT shops within business units.

The CEB report continues to say that the IT group will transition into a shared services group (much like HR and finance has done in the past) and most will shrink by a whopping 75%.  Ouch!

The role of the CIO in the Future

So…if we do see these things come true, what happens to the role of the CIO?  Well…according to the CEB report, the CIO will:

“expand to lead the group of Business Shared Services or shrink to manage IT procurement and integration”

Wowsers.

The “future of IT” (and the CIO) looks bleak.  Gone are the widespread powers and responsibilities.  Looks like the CIO could transition into a role of procurement and project manager.

So…is the IT group and the CIO going the way of the dodo?

Nope…but I do think there will be some major changes coming in the next few years.  IT groups will shrink due to external platforms (e.g., the cloud) and will transition from a pure technical group to a more business oriented IT group.

The future of IT is actually bright….but I do see a need for change.  Without change, you may just find the CEB report to be true.

There are just too many stories (most shockingly true) of the inability of IT groups to actually get anything done.  I know quite a few groups who regularly take 10 times as long and 10 times the budget to get anything accomplished.

Organizations have become immune to the delays, cost overruns and failures found within IT projects…but I think we are seeing that changing now.  Companies have realized how important technology is to their competitive advantage today and are no longer putting up with the CIO & IT group of yesterday.

Change is coming. I”m not sure it will be the revolution that the CEB report predicts but I do think the IT group 5 years from today will be different.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the Corporate Executive Board Report and the future of IT and the role of the CIO.

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The Future of IT & the CIO – Redux of the Dodo? 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.
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