Links for April 27 2014

Shadow IT: Far Bigger, Less Manageable And More Important Than You Think

Quote: Even when lines of business initiate technology purchases, it is increasingly including IT. So for the CIO worried about Shadow IT and the developers that foster it, don’t. Even with the rise of DevOps, those developers more often than not are happy to collaborate with IT in the ongoing maintenance of applications; they simply don’t want to be blocked from starting on such projects.

Can CIOs lead digital innovation?

Quote:But leading digital innovation is more than just having sufficient time to focus on the subject. Whilst the CIO came out top of the list of roles that should lead digital innovation in the Gartner report, CEOs also highlighted that many other roles should be heavily involved in leading digital initiatives. In other words, CEOs see digital as a team activity. This is not surprising given that digital spans the entire business. To successfully transform the organisation, all members of the leadership team need to work together to create the holistic and joined-up approach that is essential to being a digital business.

Mental Model: Complex Adaptive Systems

Quote: Thus, behavioral dynamics indicate a key difference between weather and climate, and between systems that are simply complex and those that are also adaptive. Failure to use higher-order thinking when considering outcomes in adaptive systems is a common cause of overconfidence in prediction making.

What Hemingway would say to the CIO on Customer Engagement

Quote: Try to move outside of your role as an IT person, or BI, or Data Scientist, or CIO, for a moment, and put yourself in your civilian clothes talking to your bank, or consider the products, services, offers, or treatment that you have received in a clinic, or a retail store, or car dealer, at a government office or a university. Does it feel like they have been ‘listening’ to you across the years as your needs have changed and your income gone up or down or family situation evolved? If you are anything like the author, the answer is, ‘no.’ A resounding ‘no.’

Conditions where innovation thrives

Quote: But what this may point out is that innovation in more heavily regulated firms will move more slowly in the areas where products and services are regulated, but there may be opportunities in any industry that reflect what Google is doing.  Increasingly more data is digital and available on the web.  Can any industry create value on the web, where the regulations are lower, the development times are shorter and the willingness to experiment far greater?  I think the answer in many cases is “yes”, but it may take a mindset change in order to identify these areas of innovation possibility.