“For the first time, the power of technology decision-making is in the hands of those who will be using the solutions deployed“, says Aaron Levies. And it’s true. Some days ago we published a post explaining the new strategies that CIOs have to implement on their own companies in order to take advantage of new technologies maintaining the system under control and let users bring their “consumer” apps at work. The article writted by Levies, “How the IT department can go from zeroes to heroes“, wants to help IT departments to answer this question: how can we let technology run rampant through our organizations, technology that is fundamentally improving business outcomes, while still maintaining some semblance of a coherent IT strategy?
The article identifies some key points:
- Adoption is now fundamentally different from buying
- IT Director or CIO has two options: sanction the tool in its current use and evaluate it for broader deployment; or block it, risking a productivity drop and associated business consequences.
- Companies need a new methodology for managing enterprise software implementation exercising tight control over technology choice, and as little as possible over technology use. Tight control over technology choice ensures that a big organization doesn’t wind up with hundreds of disjointed deployment efforts and fragmented technology environments.
- It’s mandatory to change the buying concept: Buying based on existing supplier relationships and system consistency — and avoiding a little chaos and user testing — is at the root cause of the problem with enterprise technology today: slow, awkward, and unloved by users.
- Technology has almost never been maximized in the best possible ways, by all the possible parties. That is changing, and quickly. To do this, of course, software vendors have to put much more effort than ever before into building solutions that don’t fail their customers and delight rather than block users
It may seem unrealistic to think about IT professionals as the heroes of an organization. They don’t belong to the department that makes the most money, or builds the products or services that their company sells. And yet, the IT department fundamentally powers all the activities at the lowest levels of how we operate our business in today’s competitive environment. Let’s think about it!
