CIO 100 Awards - On Disrupting IT

In August, I attended the CIO 100 Symposium and Awards in Colorado Springs, CO.I was lucky enough to get an invite to the event and jumped at the chance to go. The event’s ‘tagline’ was “Thriving in an Age of Disruptive Innovation”, which fits the IT world perfectly these days I think.

Forrester’s James McQuivey kicked the conference off with a keynote titled Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation (amazon link), which is also the name of his new book. In the keynote, McQuivey provides  a walk-through of what he’s written about in his book.

While the majority of the keynote was more of a soft sales pitch for the book, there were a few nuggets of knowledge from James’ talk. A few that I wrote down or noticed via twitter:

• Tech is a way to create new experiences, not replace old ones  – HT @jackieyeaney
• Digital disruptors – Better products, stronger relationships, faster to market
• Your customers and employees have already invested in the devices that your future depends on
• Don’t build the future, but the next thing people really need and let the future find you
• Digital disruption isn’t only about the platform(s). Platforms build the foundation, but experience is the goal
• You must digitally disrupt your product and your processes

Some good stuff there. Of course, nothing mind-shattering but worth hearing and thinking about.

Of particular note for CIO’s and IT groups is the third bullet point that says “Your customers and employees have already invested in the devices that your future depends on”. We’ve seen this for a few years now with the growth of Shadow IT.  Employees are needing new services and products and are looking for help from IT and when they don’t get the support needed, they go out to the cloud (ot elsewhere) for those services and products.

Another point I really liked was the last one about digitally disrupting your product and processes.  This particular idea is essential for the future of IT in my opinion. As IT professionals, we sometimes find ourselves in a comfortable position. We tend to only review our processes and services when there is a ‘problem’. Sometimes we review processes during the year or at year end, but we rarely go looking for ways to disrupt our own processes or products.

But..we should welcome the opportunity to disrupt our own services, products and processes. It keeps us from being comfortable and just might help us find new ways to add value and drive revenue.  Additionally, using technology to disrupt your own team and organization is much better than waiting for your competitor(s) to do it, yes?

Are your using technology to disrupt your own processes, services and products?

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