CIOs ready to leap boundaries in our omni-channel world

Accept software development as creative

Marketing, the true enemy

The boundary issues are becoming more critical because of both internal and external competitors. Users can buy in products such as Salesforce, analytics, Office 365 as well as DropBox and other things that they don’t really see as to do with IT.

This leads to exactly what you’d expect, security problems, users signing contracts that end up costing serious money, different groups using systems that won’t talk to each other without hideous and flaky integration projects, and of course security snafus.

Partly that is our own fault and the ITDMs recognised this. If you’ve got a sales department, you can’t just wait until they ask for something, you should go to them, before they go to someone else. The first few attempts will be patchy, but as you reach out, they will reach back.

Culture shock

If you’re not (yet) an IT decision maker, some of this will make for uncomfortable reading and of course you will see that plenty of “creative” solutions to business problems have failed because creative does not equal competent and the ability to knock up great front ends is just putting lipstick on a pig.

But across our roundtables, the ITDMs are in expansionary mode and as they spread their tentacles deeper into other business areas, skills at winning hearts and minds are going to be an increasing part of your future.

They are trying to create virtuous circles, whereby the more times they go to user departments with ideas, the more they will be in their loops. That will hurt, a lot. Most IT people are used to being insulated from users saying how shit a new system is.

Part of this has been the traditional walls between “IT and the business” but also because the number of deliveries has been so low that we just don’t get feedback very often and certainly not to our faces. As we try out more things, many of us are going to have to develop thicker skins.

What we learned

According to our ITDMs, IT is moving in one of two ways. One is towards an ever smaller island that is little more than facilities management, supplying networking etc, in much the way they expect to get electricity to their desks and servers that are like the lifts, in that you only notice them when you get trapped in one.

The alternative is a Venn diagram, where we overlap and integrate with as many business groups as possible, gently elbowing our way towards the centre. That means taking more risks, but smaller ones and if one reads the business media, we see that across all types of enterprise, and the fashion is towards lots of small failures that we walk away from, occasionally winning big, rather than betting the farm on blockbuster projects.

As a Reg reader you may of course dismiss this as the latest BizSchool bullshit, but it’s like war: you may not be interested in management’s latest ideas, but it will be interested in you. ®

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