I talked in my last post (Business-IT Maturity: Theory of the Case – Part 1) about IT leadership either being “victims” of the trends and drivers around them, or leveraging them for advantage. I want to expand on that thought today.
I’m afraid if history is any indicator, the natural behavior of IT leaders is to be very conservative in their approach to emerging technologies. They also tend to be blind to (or at least, chose to ignore) the trends and drivers going on around them.
I remember when the PC first emerged, IT leaders everywhere went into denial regarding the implications of PC’s on their companies. I had several experiences where a CIO would tell me, “PC’s have no place in our company, and we’ve successfully been able to keep them out!” I would then take them by the hand along office corridors close to their own to point out the TRS 80′s, Apple 2′s and early IBM PC’s that were sitting on people’s desks – mostly, business desks rather than IT professionals desks!
Ditto with the Internet. I was fortunate to be working in a research center in the early Internet days, so I was exposed sooner than many of my client’s in the business IT community. But as the Internet became more widely known, it was not the IT leaders (by and large) who were the proponents – quite the contrary. The Internet revolution happened largely outside the IT shops in Global 5000 companies.
Today, the Web 2.o technologies are mostly appearing outside the business workplace – surfacing first in homes and among teenagers. And again, I’m seeing a majority of IT leaders being reactive rather than proactive.
Of course, there are many exceptions, where IT leadership is embracing the new – or at least trying to really understand it, its opportunities, and its limitations. There are also good reasons to protect the IT infrastructure from unstable or dangerous technologies.
I think a couple of telling metrics (perhaps even leading indicators) are:
- What percentage of thier time are your IT leaders spending thinking about and/or working in the Web 2.0 space?
- What percentage of IT spend is set aside to understand and experiment with this space?
- What proportion of these experiments have heavy business involvement?
Filed under: IT Management, Web 2.0 | Tagged: IT leadership, Web 2.0
