It’s time to fully acknowledge what I first recognized back in 1980 when I read Alvin Toffler’s remarkable book, The Third Wave. In that book, Toffler pointed out that the differentiation of production and consumption is not the natural order of things. Separation of production from consumption was necessary to fuel the industrial age (which Toffler called the Second Wave). Before that, human beings (as individuals, families and small communities) produced what they needed to consume. With the industrial revolution, there was a “breach,” as Toffler referred to it, between production and consumption, that was “an unnatural act” and that would be healed over time by technology. Fast forward 30 years to the age of mass collaboration, mass customization, crowdsourcing, open source and Wikinomics, and Toffler’s words ring true to a degree unimaginable back then!
The Separation of IT Production and Consumption is an Unnatural Act!
Back in 1980, as I read The Third Wave (and coincidentally was personally transitioning from managing a software company to management consulting – helping IT organizations increase their effectiveness) it occurred to me that the need for an IT organization represented an unnatural separation of IT consumption from production. I came to realize that the whole notion of the IT organization, especially as it was typically configured back then, was essentially a temporary phenomenon. It’s also worth noting the IT context around 1980. Apple had introduced the Apple II in 1977 and IBM legitimized personal computing as an enterprise capability with its introduction of the IBM PC in 1981. Suddenly, Toffler’s words as they applied to enterprise IT were looking prophetic!
So, nearly 30 years later, having conducted literally dozens of global multi-company research projects into various facets of IT effectiveness, and worked with hundreds of IT organizations over much of the world, I am more convinced than ever that no IT organization is “good enough” for the institutions that they support to fully leverage the incredible emerging power of the Internet 2.0 (let alone 3.0!)
Why Web 2.0 Will Render Today’s IT Organization Obsolete
I see at least two major reasons that today’s IT organization will become obsolete over the next dozen years or so.
- Just as the PC democratized computing, if only in a relatively small way, Web 2.0 is revolutionalizing it in a massive and far reaching way. The PC moved computing from the mainframe “glasshouse” to the desktop, and ultimately laptop. Web 2.0 is moving computing (and nearly all the associated software needed to “compute”) from the desktop/laptop to the “cloud”. When the PC first appeared, even a modest tool such as Visicalc had “end users” doing things with computers that would have taken some pretty heavy duty Fortran programmers to achieve. Today, “end users” are doing things with mashups and widgets that would have taken some pretty heavy duty web programmers to achieve just a couple of years ago!
- IT professionals, and the organizations they staff are not just providers of IT products and services – they are also consumers. As such, they too will benefit from Web 2.0 (although as I’ve pointed out before, they may not be the first to the party!) The types of collaborative capabilities needed by the enterprise today also lend themselves to (and perhaps mandate?) collaborative approaches to IT management. Think of it this way, virtually everyone will be a “programmer”, system administrators will be everywhere, and technical specialists will be ubiquitous.
And the Walls Came Tumbling Down!
I realize that I am taking an extreme position – that the reality will be somewhat less severe for most of us. But I also see great potential to remedy some of the shortcomings of the typical IT organization:
- Business-IT alignment has been a perennial top challenge for years! Always showing up at or near the top of “biggest issues” in the annual computer magazine and research surveys, having an IT organization that translates business requirements into IT specifications and solutions is always, at best, a flawed approach. If I need a translator, something will get lost in the translation. Also, how can I tell you what I want, when I don’t know what I want till I see it! Give me the tools, let me explore and play, and I’ll figure out what I want, and in so doing, satisfy the need!
- There’s always an element of “the IT organization adds cost but not value” – this is just inherent of the role of intermediaries. The Internet has disintermediated many types of services – increasing pricing transparency and eliminating (or at least reducing) supply/demand asymmetries. The Internet has also led to new forms of intermediation (aggregators, brokers, agents) but these are not of the same type as those that were disintermidiated.
From Fishing for them to Teaching them to Fish
So, there will be new and different roles to play for the IT professional – but I emphasize DIFFERENT! Today’s IT organization has to carefully rethink the IT capabilities needed by the enterprise it serves, and how best to satisfy those capabilities – but not just from within the IT organization. We have to consider an entire ecosystem including the business user as producer, external entities as producers and consumers, and new internal roles of “brokers,” “guides,” and “information assistants”. I don’t know what all the roles are, what they will be called, where they will all work, what competencies they need, or how they will be sourced and trained. But I do believe they will not be configured in anything like today’s typical IT organization – dozens, or hundreds, or in some cases, thousands of IT professionals, “doing IT stuff for the business.” We have to shift our emphasis from fishing for the massess to “teaching them to fish” and providing them with the fishing rods and well stocked lakes for them to fish in.
How do you see this playing out? Back to the title of my blog, what will the IT organization look like circa 2017?
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Filed under: IT Management, Next Generation Enterprise, Next Generation IT, social networking, Web 2.0 Tagged: | Alvin Toffler, business-IT convergence, Cloud computing, collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Information technology, Next Generation Enterprise, Open Source, Personal computer, Web 2.0
I like your vision. End-user computing as the rule rather than the exception. In many ways I see this as the natural progression of the IT Department, or the way a company should look at a baseline operating protocol if it were to start fresh. It makes a tremendous amount of sense for all the reasons you mention.
Unfortunately, it is rare that we have such a clean starting point. Decades of baggage from inadequate point solutions, to partially implemented enterprise systems, a patchwork of interfaces, outsourcing relationships gone bad, and a workforce to maintain all the chaos (and the technical savvy to weave together a dozen “platforms to end all platforms”) is frequently the norm.
Starting fresh takes courage to start, and courage to maintain the course for time it will take to achieve the needed transformation. Where I see hope in all of this is in the courageous souls who will dare to innovate in the areas you mention without necessarily knowing where the end zone is. They do know the experiments are directionally correct, but do not know specifically what the application will be. It is this innovation and experimentation that will prime the pump however and the application of the experience will be game changing.
This is what i refer to as “Playing to Win” http://bit.ly/9yQE1
Russ, clearly the “fresh start” is rarely an option. But neither is business as usual. I believe that for most CIO’s a far more aggressive and bold path is called for – and indeed is facilitated by the economic climate.
Agreed. Business as usual is not an option. Change is necessary – and the economic climate will provide the air cover to make the bold change. End-user computing is a true enabler of this change and the newer technologies will be able to make a dramatic change in a short period of time.
My line of thought is looking at the pragmatic means to get from here to there. Big bites or nibbling around the edges. Revolution or evolution.
The “do more with less” song is being sung with an entire choir of executives these days and fueling the required organizational change. Opportunity for “revolution” is here, but for most firms I work with they are not prepared to capitalize on it in a big way. They have been running so lean for so long that they haven’t had the opportunity to look beyond the current quarter.
What they can do in times like this is to look for the funding to plant the seeds of innovation and research. Innovation is the laboratory where this required big change will be born.
Well, that’s what I think!
I think there’s gonna be blood on the floor of IT Departments everywhere after the recession – IT are being asked to “be different”, help us save costs etc etc and are turning in droves to SaaS/”the cloud” and agile frameworks to fulfill those demands.
Once these are embedded the need for traditional IT bods will decrease at such a rate that those that can’t reinvent themselves will struggle
If you’re in IT may I suggest NOW is the time to start that process.
Hi Vaughan,
I agree with your emphasis and believe you me, it’s happening. It’s gut wrenching to the IT folks and departments.
What needs to be done as well is to connect the business people into this change – help them understand how this will change so much in the business, the organizations, the people etc.
There’s no “business as usual” anymore….
Cheers,
Thanks, Lui! And you raise an important point – the business people MUST be part of this change. It’s not just a return to IT decentralization – IT shadow organizations all over the place. It is a new convergence between business and IT.
Well stated, Mike! The recession should provide ideal “air cover” to take a more aggressive path forward. In a multi-company research study I am just wrapping up, only 15% of the IT organizations are actually taking such a posture, the balance preferring to hunker down and ride out the storm!
Great Post Mike!
The future is about empowering end users not doing things for them. As the gap between “Business” and “IT” skills shrink and merge the most important thing the “IT” department should be doing is enabling an environment that empowers users with as little friction as possible. It’s amazing we trust business users with millions if not billions in revenue but don’t trust them to do the most basic IT tasks on their own!
Great Post Vaughn!
The future is about empowering end users not doing things for them. As the gap between “Business” and “IT” skills shrink and merge the most important thing the “IT” department should be doing is enabling an environment that empowers users with as little friction as possible. It’s amazing we trust business users with millions if not billions in revenue but don’t trust them to do the most basic IT tasks on their own!
Superb comments, Ross – thank you! Your observation about the business and IT skills gap shrinking is important – and I think it sets the scene for new forms of collaboration between the IT specialists (of various stripes), and the generalists (of various stripes).
I suspect I should write my own blog post at some point on this, but here is a quick comment: Yes, I agree. Unfortunately, I am not sure all the users out there are ready to fish for themselves yet, no matter how easy to use the search engines, social communities and systems implementations tools become.
I remember a video (or, rather film) from IBM from the early-to-mid 80s about End User Computing – a notion that the role of IT was to provide the tools for end users, and then they could build their own systems rather than wait for IT to build for them. (This, incidentally, was also the motivation behind COBOL in the 70s: The language was supposedly so intuitive that end users would be able to describe the processes they wanted automated directly into the computer, obviating the need for anyone in a white coat.) The movie showed an end user (for some reason a very short man in a suit) sitting in front of a 3140 (I think) terminal running VM/CMS. Next to him was a friendly person from the EUC group explaning how to use the friendly terminal, which towered over him like the ventilation ship of an ocean liner. It didn’t look very convincing to me.
At the same time, I was teaching rather smart business students how to do statistical analysis on an IBM 4381 and knew that many of them could not even operate the terminal, which had a tendency to jump between the various layers of the operating system and also had a mysterious button called SysRq, which still lingers, appendix-like, on the standard PC keyboard. Very few of those students were able to do much programming – but they were pretty good at filling in the blanks in programs someone already had written for them.
The upshot, of course, is that as the technology gets better, we cede more and more responsibility for how things work to the computer. Take the wonderful new “computational search engine” Wolphram Alpha, for example: It can give you all kinds of answers to numerical questions, and will also (I haven’t seen it, but if the capabilities of Mathematica are anything to go by, it is great) allow you to explore, in a drill-down procedure, how it reached its answers.
But how many are going to use that feature – and how many are going to write spreadsheets rather than just use them? For as long as I have worked with computers, each new leap in functionality and performance has been heralded as the necessary step to turn users from passive to active, from consumers of information to creators of knowledge. While each new technology generation, admittedly, has achieved some of this, it has always been less than was promised and much less than what was hoped for.
And so I think it is this time, too. Many people read Wikipedia, few write for it (though enough do). More importantly, many of Wikipedias users are unaware of how the knowledge therein is instantiated. Online forums have many more lurkers than contributors. And human ingenuity is unevenly distributed and will continue to be so.
So I think the IT department will continue to do what it is doing, in principle. It will be further from the metal and closer to the user, but as long as the world remains combinatorially complex and constantly changing, there will always be room for people who can see patterns, describe them, automate them and turn them into usable components. They will be fewer, think less of technology and more in terms of systems, and have less of a mismatch in terms of clothing and posture between themselves and their customers than before (much of it because the customers have embraced nerd chic, if not nerd knowledge).
The key for a continued IT career lies in taking charge of change rather than being affected by it. I think the future is great – and that we are still a long way from true end user computing.
All valid points, Espen. I’m deliberately painting an extreme picture to be provocative. But I do think the mindset of IT leadership has to change – from “blocker” to “enabler.”
I was at our Insight research conference in Toronto the last 2 days and one of the researchers put up a slide characterizing the IT organization as the one that tells you all the things you can’t do, or all the fixed standards by which you must do things. (BTW, in a lunch conversation one attendee told me how the IT organization had insisted that the marketing group follow the IT methodology for their web design efforts – only it was a circa 1990 waterfall methodology!) This mindset has to change. The mantra of IT leadership has to become, “How can we get out of the way and enable our business to exploit all the new capabilities? How do we help them understand and manage the risk?”
Come to think of it, it seems I did write a blog post. Copy/paste: http://www.espen.com/archives/2009/05/end_user_comput.html
Hi Vaughan,
My belief is that going forward, IT organizations need to put the “I” back into “IT”. They’ve been far too focused on spending $$ on technology, and forgot that their value to the organization is in managing information between people and processes. I think that IT organizations in the future (the successful ones, that is), will be comprised of people who understand how business processes work, how to improve them, and how to ensure the flow of information between them. The value that IT can then provide is to see this across the organization, rather than just in the silos, and ensure that the value of information can be maximized throughout the firm.
Good point, Tom, but I still ask, can (or should) an intermediary really “manage information” for the business folk? Or can it rather lay down the infrastructure and provide the tools for the business to manage their own information? The CFO does not manage the company’s money – but they do provide the tools and controls to help business folk do that.
I agree with your supposition, and I’ll revise my comment to “enable the management of information”. The business owns the information, IT can provide the means to manage it more effectively as an asset. I think the IT organization of the future needs to have a more in depth knowledge across the various business functions. This unique view would put IT in a position to see valuable opportunities to shape business processes and leverage capabilities across the silos. To make it happen, IT needs to identify where the opportunities lie, collaborate and build consensus across functions, and drive the change within the organization.
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