Creating a Digital Enterprise – Part 5: Raise of Information Professional

The current conventional focus is all about the technology plumbing we need to put in place to manage the looming Information chaos. Traditionally, IT has been more about the T than the I. Technology staffs have focused and have been valued on the deployment of massive enterprise software applications, seemingly the more complicated, the better, and maintaining the plumbing of our information infrastructures. Even at the highest levels, most CIOs have not really focused on the I part of their job title, and part of the frustration that the CEO has with the CIO is that many CIOs have been more focused on deploying technology than on optimizing information assets.

Reviewing the skill sets required for digital transformation

The digital transformation is ultimately more than just data and technology. This narrow view is a recipe for unfulfilling and suboptimal returns from digital transformation initiatives. In order to drive digital transformation, organizations need IT staffs with broader skills. Specifically, they need executives who understand the I part of the IT value proposition. That's not to say that technical competency is unimportant; far from it. But there is a complementary skillset necessary at this unique moment of both chaos and opportunity.

They need IT staff who understand the management, utilization and application of information and social assets, and are as skilled at connecting systems as they are at developing them. Here’s a great quote from the IT Skills Demand and Pay Trends report, "Gone is the tendency to hire specialists and large teams of limited-range permanent staff for long-term initiatives. New models require smaller teams made up of multitaskers and multidimensional skilled workers with subject matter expertise, business savvy, technology skills, and a range of appropriate interpersonal and 'political' skills." But digital transformation requires more than a change in IT skillsets.

It also requires new skills on the business side. For far too long, the business has been content to throw technology problems over to IT with a vague set, and often conflicting set, of requirements, and expect IT departments to return a perfect solution on time and on budget. And if that didn't work, in an era of consumerized solutions, many business executives can now end run their own IT departments and deploy solutions without IT intervention. And while this may be satisfying in the short term, it is not a recipe for long-term success and for solutions that can operate across departments and at enterprise scale.

It is time for business executives to step up and enhance their technical skills. That doesn't mean that business people need to become technical people, but it does mean that business people need to get serious about understanding the core technologies that they use to run their operations. On both the IT side of the house and the business side of the house, there is need for a new job description. I will call this an Information Professional. 

Understanding the rise of the information professional

The new job of information professional can have a number of roles within the organization. Few people currently have information professional as a title, but many have the stewardship, management, and application of information assets as a core part of their job. Information professionals can be found within the legal, records, and library staff of organizations, they can be found among information architects and managers whose primary focus is governance, they can be process owners, business analysts, and knowledge managers. All of whom need to have an effective information management as a core part of their skillset, or they can be the new wave of information curators and community managers who currently focus primarily on social systems.

And that's the point. At the early stages of a new profession, particularly one that cuts across and encompasses a wide variety of technical disciplines, it is difficult to define where the role begins and where it ends. Consider just one profession that is very well-defined today, project management. 25 years ago, the idea that there was a body of knowledge associated with people who manage software projects and manufacturing projects and construction projects would have been met with extraordinary scepticism.

How can that be? The projects are so different. There can't be any commonality across projects that are that different, and yet today we have the established role of project manager applicable to many diverse kinds of projects. That's how the role of information professional stands right now. A new set of broad skills that will someday be expected standard for analysing information in the enterprise world.

So in conclusion, let's recap the requirements for success in the new era of digital transformation.

1.      One, organizations are being disrupted by the combination of Consumerization, Cloud and Mobile, and the Internet of Things. 

2.      Two, this creates enormous opportunities to rethink your business, but it also creates enormous risks of information chaos. 

3.      Three, in order to address information chaos, organizations need to focus on four key business problems, information risk, automating processes, engaging customers and employees, and applying analytics to gain insight.

4.      Lastly, there is a new skill set needed to capitalize on the opportunities created by digital disruption and avoid the risks of information chaos. IT has traditionally focused on the T part of their job, technology, but the new information professional will focus much more on the I, information, and harness this resource to meet the challenge of digital transformation. We need Information Professionals.

Wishing good fortunes to you and your organization in the digital transformation exercise and look forward to see you in a Digital Enterprise soon.

Cheers

DC*

The Monk Moment for Entrepreneurs & Start-Up Champs

***I Dedicate this post to all my Startup & Entrepreneur friends***

The Monk Moment - Many great entrepreneurs have had a moment when they have lost everything. Monks create this situation intentionally through "Vairagya" when they give up all money and possessions. Many entrepreneurs end up in the same situation unintentionally. 

Elon Musk lost $180M and was in debt in 2008. Seven years later, he's worth $13 billion, but he'd be ready to risk it all again. Steve Jobs lost his entire Apple fortune by 1994, betting it on NeXT and Pixar. In 1995 everything turned around, he sold NeXT to Apple, Pixar to Disney and he passed away an icon. Walt Disney mortgaged away his entire fortune in the 1950s to build Disneyland, against everyone's advice. He too went from giving up everything to becoming a legend. Each bet everything material they had on something invisible - their purpose and vision.

Monks call the state that comes after giving up everything "Moksha" which means liberation from the illusion. We're not alive until we know what we'd die for.

I'm not saying great entrepreneurs are monks, but they do have 'monk moments' when they lose everything.

Many of the greatest entrepreneurs unintentionally find themselves in this state by betting everything on their dream. Maybe you're in this place right now. It is a place of pure power. When you have nothing to lose, you have infinite potential.

That is provided you don't focus on what you've lost, but on everything you have to gain. That's when everything turns around. As Walt Disney said "I don't make movies to make money. I make money to make movies".
That's the paradox of entrepreneurs having a 'near-death' experience where they lose it all. Steve Jobs wrote:

“Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

There was a man who had four sons. He wanted his sons to learn not to judge things too quickly. So he sent them each on a quest, in turn, to go and look at a pear tree that was a great distance away. The first son went in the winter, the second in the spring, the third in summer, and the youngest son in the fall. When they had all gone and come back, he called them together to describe what they had seen.

The first son said that the tree was ugly, bent, and twisted. The second son said no it was covered with green buds and full of promise.

The third son disagreed; he said it was laden with blossoms that smelled so sweet and looked so beautiful, it was the most graceful thing he had ever seen.

The last son disagreed with all of them; he said it was ripe and drooping with fruit, full of life and fulfillment.

The man then explained to his sons that they were all right, because they had each seen but only one season in the tree’s life.

He told them that you cannot judge a tree, or a person, by only one season, and that the essence of who they are and the pleasure, joy, and love that come from that life can only be measured at the end, when all the seasons are up.

If you give up when it’s winter, you will miss the promise of your spring, the beauty of your summer, fulfillment of your fall.
Don’t let the pain of one season destroy the joy of all the rest.
Don’t judge life by one difficult season.
Persevere through the difficult patches and better times are sure to come sometime or later.

What mission is so important to you, that you'd be ready to clear out the old and make way for your new?

Wishes for a Monky week ahead. 

DC*

Creating a Digital Enterprise – Part 4: The Four Building Blocks of Digital Transformations

In this article we will explore 4 building blocks of digital transformation, they are the catalyst for transforming today’s enterprises to digital enterprises.

Building Block 1: Managing the risk of accelerating information

The first strategic building block in digital transformation is risk. How should your organization manage the risk of accumulating too much information?  Organizations began to realize that they needed a strategy to find, produce, and protect their information assets. This includes formal records like contracts, as well as informal communications like emails and instant messages.

In addition to this new legal requirements to safe guard digital documentations, most companies also face industry-specific laws and compliance requirements tied to how they manage information. For example, healthcare organizations must demonstrate compliance with HIPAA. Public companies must demonstrate compliance with Sarbanes–Oxley. The new Dodd-Frank reform legislation contains a host of new information-related requirements. These kinds of unique rules exist for just about every industry. Adding to the complexity of any organization that operates at scale, they also vary by country.

Data leaks and security breaches have magnified these concerns. The list of front-page security breaches and information management disasters gets longer by the day. Think about the Target, Home Depot, and Sony hacks. These problems are not just embarrassing; they directly impact credibility, trust, and value. And yet despite all the evidence and a lot of good intentions, organizations still have major problems securing their information.

Managing information risk is a first key element in building a strategy for digital transformation.

The next element is reinventing and automating your business processes. 

Building Block 2: Transforming and automating information-intensive business processes

The second building block in building a strategy for digital transformation is process automation. How should your organization transform and automate its information-intensive business processes? The walls that used to exist between your customers and all those messy, back-office business operations are being torn down by social technologies. Organizations can no longer hide the weakness in their processes. The next five years will witness a massive reinvention of business processes. If the first wave of automation was all about digitizing existing processes, the next wave will be much more radical and involve the actual reinvention of processes from the ground up.

AIM data suggests that organizations still have a significant gap between what their customers see, their external-facing systems of engagement, and how business actually gets done, their core back-end systems of record. Organizations understand that they have to automate, and they need to expose their back-end processes to the light. 68% of organizations agree that business at the speed of paper will be unacceptable in just a few years. Getting there, though, is quite another thing. The amount of paper still used in your business processes is a good indicator of how far behind you are.

For example, in 25% of organizations, the volume of physical paper is increasing instead of decreasing. Even when organizations deploy scanning technologies to reduce their use of paper, 16% of the original paper documents still get photocopied before scanning, and 65% of those documents are not destroyed or recycled after scanning. In other words, the paper still survives and keeps piling up. Even business processes that many think were automated a long time ago still use significant amounts of paper.

For organizations committed to financial automation, 44% of their invoices typically arrive in electronic form, yet 59% of those digital invoices will still end up as a paper copy. So reinventing your core processes is clearly critical to building your digital transformation strategy.

Building Block 3: Engaging employees and customers

The third building block in building a strategy for digital transformation is engagement. How can your organization use information to better engage customers and employees? In this new world of rapidly changing information technologies, our ability to engage is the key to success. If you're not fully engaging your customers, your partners and your employees, your business is probably falling behind the competition. You can no longer assume that engagement will happen serendipitously in your organization. You need to think strategically about the information systems that are necessary to make it happen.

According to Gallup, in Average Organizations, 33% of workers are engaged in their jobs, 49% are not engaged and 18% are actively disengaged. On the other hand, in World-Class Organizations, the numbers are vastly different. 67% of workers are engaged in their jobs, 26% are not engaged and only 7% are actively disengaged. In far too many organizations, collaboration is just another name for sending around big attachments on email to a long list of recipients asking everyone to comment and then sending those comments via a reply all message. Social technologies give us a way to rethink and reinvent this, and directly tie collaboration to your business processes. There's also a critical need to rethink how we engage with customers. Most organizations have a thin veneer of social engagement. They have a Twitter account or a Facebook site or a mobile app.

The challenge moving forward is that most of these systems are basically just a veneer, unconnected with the core back-end business processes. Everyone has experienced the call center from hell, where you wait in a long queue for a real person only to have to constantly restate information to all of the various people with whom you speak. Organizations have long had a challenge with building a 360-degree view of the customer. In an era of radical transformation, this problem is getting more pronounced, except now the customer has social power to immediately tell the world when they've had a bad experience with your business.

Engaging with employees is not the same as engaging with customers. Senior executives often confuse them, and this is reflected in AIM survey data. 54% of organizations are finding the rapid convergence of collaboration and social tools to be very confusing. 65% of organizations say that their employees struggle to access internal information from mobile devices. 50% of organizations believe that they have shortfalls in technical support for internal collaboration.

And 42% of organizations struggle with rationalizing the many ways customers engage with them and connecting these inputs to key business systems. Connecting with customers and employees is critical to building your digital transformation strategy. 

Building Block 4: Integrating analytics and big data

The final building block in building a strategy for digital transformation is insight. How can your organization get business insight out of all the information you are gathering? Organizations of all sizes are struggling with how to extract insight and mitigate risk relative to the massive volumes of information and data that they're accumulating. This isn't just a question of big data. It is also a question of dark data trapped in long forgotten repositories, often without accompanying metadata. This is content and information that just begs for the light of day through semantics and analytics.

Big data initiatives to date have been almost exclusively driven by IT. These initiatives are focused on the question of how do we apply technology to manage large volumes of data? And that's where cognitive computing comes in. Cognitive computing operates in natural language, makes evidence-based recommendations, and is not bound by volume, by memory, or by format. This technology creates an entirely new set of opportunities for organizations to understand and interpret the data they have.

These tools allow you to move beyond the sheer volume question and ask what kinds of questions and hypotheses we should be testing with our data. In other words, how does insight into our data change the very nature of the questions we ask and the hypotheses we form in our businesses? Almost all Analyst data suggests that most organizations are still in the very early stages of this transition. Forty-seven percent of organizations today feel that internal search and e-discovery is becoming impossible, given their volume of data.

For 71% of organizations, search is vital to extracting insight, yet only 18% have cross-repository search capabilities. For 34% of organizations, big data will be an essential capability, but they face enormous challenges in connecting, in linking, and in supporting systems.

So if the four building blocks of a digital transformation strategy are risk, automation, engagement, and insight, what kinds of skills do we need in our organizations to address them? We'll explore this question in our next article.

Cheers

DC*

Creating a Digital Enterprise – Part 3: The impact of Disrupters

 The future will not just be a linear extrapolation or progression of the past. Organizations need to think logarithmically about the volume of information they'll need to manage in the next five years. According to EMC, an international data corporation, the digital universe is doubling in size every two years, and will multiply tenfold between 2013 and 2020 from 4.4 trillion gigabytes to 44 trillion gigabytes. The amount of information currently in the digital universe would fill a stack of iPad Air tablets reaching 2/3 of the way to the moon.

By 2020, there will be 6.6 stacks this size. Consumers create much of this data, but enterprises are responsible for it. 2/3 of digital universe data is created or captured by consumers and workers, yet enterprises have liability or responsibility for 85% of it. This phenomena of accelerating information has three elements to it, and they go like this:

1.      One, an organization is a system of information networks. It only operates effectively when there is clear and predictable information flow within and between these networks. 

2.      Two, 50% annual growth in the volume of digital information means that these networks, and especially the points of connection between them, will become increasingly unstable. And

3.      Three, without intervention, the resulting information chaos will threaten the viability of the entire organization. 

Exploding volume, variety, and velocity of information

Unprecedented volume, variety, and velocity of information are all around us. According to a recent global survey by conducted by one of Global System Integrators, 70 percent of executives viewed digital initiatives as a seriously important factor in their company's success in the next five years. However, only eight percent say they actually have a digital strategy. Think about security. Over the past ten years, there have been over 300 data breaches involving the theft of 100,000 or more records, and that's just for the breaches that have been disclosed publicly.

Gartner analyst Doug Laney has assembled an impressive list of examples of the volume, variety, and velocity of information. Here are a few. Walmart deployed semantic search on their website, which increased their conversion rate from 10 percent to 15 percent, generating significant new revenue. The supermarket chain Tesco collected 70 million refrigerator-related data points coming off its units and fed them into a dedicated data warehouse. Those data points were analysed to keep better tabs on performance, gauge when the machines might need servicing, and cut down on energy costs via proactive maintenance.

Macy's adjusts pricing of its products in near real-time for 73 million items based on demand and based on inventory. That's a huge amount of data to track and update. You get the idea. All of this translates into a period of radical growth in information. We are at an unusual moment in time when all of the major analyst firms, Gartner, Forester, IDC, McKinsey, and a host of others agree that a revolution is underway, that there will be unexpected victors and victims in this revolution, and that information is in the middle of it.

As we shift our frame of reference to the world ahead, there are four major questions that every organization must ask about its digital transformation strategy. 

1.      How do you manage the risk of growing volumes of information? 

2.      How do you transform and automate your information intensive business processes?

3.      How do you use information to better engage customers and employees?

4.      How do you get any business insight out of all the information you are gathering? 

These four issues, risk, automation, engagement, and insight, are the key questions that businesses should be asking.

In the next article, we'll explore the core building blocks of a strategy for riding the crest of this resolution, instead of getting buried in the foam

Creating a Digital Enterprise – Part 2: Three Disrupters driving IT Transformation

The first of the three disrupters driving IT transformation is Consumerization

Consumerization of IT

We are in an era of massive decentralization of technology resources as the control and manipulation of information moves from the IT Department to individual users. In "Digital Disruption: "Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation", James McQuivey looks at the four major factors necessary for massive disruption. 

1.      The computer.

2.      An internet connection. 

3.      A programming language in SDK.

4.      A friction-free platform for ecommerce

What this means is that how we look at applications in the enterprise, how we buy enterprise technology, and how we deploy enterprise systems, are all changing simultaneously. There are more sources of innovation available in more places in the world than ever before. And the era in which organizations could exclusively depend on their internal IT resources as a source of competitive advantage is coming to an end. It wasn't that long ago that complex enterprise systems were the exclusive domain of a limited number of vendors, who delivered a sophisticated and expensive solutions to a limited number of large customers.

That's all changed. Software as a Service companies, or SaaS companies, like Salesforce and Workday, Hub Spot and Basecamp, have totally revolutionized the market for enterprise-scale solutions by allowing business executives to take ownership of IT. By standardizing and commoditizing solutions that were previously custom, these SaaS solutions have radically reduced the cost and complexity of core business systems. The responsibility for keeping the software updated has also moved from the customer to the provider.

Business people assume that enterprise solutions can be delivered as seamlessly and as simply as the latest app on their phone. It just isn't the case. It certainly isn't this simple, but that is the assumption. As organizations increasingly confront information management challenges that begin with paper and end somewhere in the cloud, their risk of information chaos intensifies.

Mobile and cloud computing

Cloud and mobile are the second disrupter driving IT transformation. These two technologies change everything. They change our expectations of where we can work, when we can work, with whom we can work and on what devices we can work. It seems like only yesterday that the iPhone first appeared. Believe it or not, it's been less than a 8 years, a blink of an eye in technology time. The iPhone was introduced in June 2007 to fairly widespread snickering among serious technology types.

Blogger Mark Flores had this take on the initial rollout, "The initial reaction from competitors ...was either shock or laughter. RIM didn't think it was possible to have such a device without it being a power hog. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer laughed at it for not having a physical keyboard. “Well, a lot has changed. We now find ourselves in a world where there are more tablets and smartphones sold than PCs. Where people are more likely to own a cell phone than any of the essential consumer electronics. Where customers expect to use a mobile device to interact with enterprise information and processes.

Where employees have been unchained from their desks and expect to use multiple devices and locations to interact with corporate systems that we once thought of as locked down and company confidential. Where less than 1/2 of the devices accessing the Internet run on Windows. The complementary steroid to mobile is the Cloud. That is, information and software services stored online. There is a clear lack of knowledge about the Cloud among senior executives and a crying need for business-centric, not technology-centric, education.

Most senior executives have the sense that the Cloud is something that must be part of their business equation and a belief that this will lead to a dramatic reduction in IT costs. One of the CIOs told me that this is how the Cloud is being sold to the business. In the Cloud, all is wonderful, everything is cheaper, there are no problems and it's a mature technology. Everybody's doing it. We are now seeing the Cloud move into the mainstream. Cloud has passed the tipping point and is now used basically everywhere that matters.

For example,

·        Software as a Service adoption has grown from 13% in 2011 to 72% in 2014.

·        Infrastructure as a Service adoption has grown from 11% in 2011 to 56% in 2014. 

·        Platform as a Service adoption has grown from 7% in 2011 to 41% in 2014. 

Here's how Geoffrey Moore puts it, "SaaS frees us all from the tyranny of the product release business model. Yes, with SaaS there is some level of ongoing disruption that you must cope with both within IT and within your user base, but please, do not even mention that in the same breath with the kind of burden that the product release model imposes.

Instead, thank your lucky stars you are getting innovation that you are paying for when you are paying for it. It is current, and so are you." The challenge, of course, in all this is that mobile and Cloud technologies increase the volume, variety and velocity of information in our organizations. Cloud and mobile heighten information chaos in the short term. And that explosive growth in the volume, variety and velocity of information is at the core of our third major disrupter, which we'll talk about next.

The Internet of Things

Finally, let's look at disrupter number 3, the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things is the impact that sensors and network devices will have as they allow buildings and infrastructure to swap information. According to International Data Corporation, there will be 212 billion connected things by the end of 2020, all emitting and receiving data. Intelligence systems will be installed and collecting data from all of these things. IDC forecasts that this will be an 8.9 trillion dollar market by 2020.

According to the Harvard Business Review, "The Internet of Things has the power to profoundly change operations-- that's where much of the coverage of this burgeoning network has focused. “But companies should also be preparing for profound shifts in their competitive strategies as the Internet of Things takes off." "It will change the category you compete in, the products and services you sell, how you market them, and even the talent you acquire." So our three disrupters, Consumerization, Cloud and Mobile, and the Internet of Things create enormous opportunities for organizations, but they also create the potential for different kinds of information chaos, which we'll explore in the next chapter of this article.

Cheers

DC*

Creating a Digital Enterprise – Part 1

Globally, the digital revolution has impacted enterprises on an unprecedented scale. Today, the advent of an innovative and agile digital workplace is imperative to sustaining competitive advantage, driving the adoption of Big Data and analytics, cloud computing, social media, and mobility and convergence computing, among other digital technologies. Given the potential business value that these technologies can unleash, organizations are proactively leveraging them - in specific focus areas or where strategically possible, to digitally reimagine their businesses. In this article series I would like to share with you all what I gained as a knowledge through different learning mediums and our experience working with customer across the globe.

We're moving into a brave new world where technology reaches every aspect and every function within a business organization. The challenge that we're experiencing is that information technology can no longer just be thrown over the transom to IT people by business people who then just sit by and wait for something magical to happen. There is now a need to view IT with as much emphasis on the "I", "Information", as we've historically placed on the "T", "Technology". Organizations have spent three decades building out enterprise systems of record, that is, the first generation of systems used to digitize basic elements of business, but we're moving into an era of systems of engagement, by which I mean systems that are pervasive, that are user-driven, and that touch every element of our business.

You can sense this pervasive impact of technology by listening to the perspective of users. For example, process workers are asking us to stop making them copy-paste the same information in five different spreadsheets. Knowledge workers are telling us they are drowning in information but thirsty for knowledge. Security officers are telling us that information is leaking out of the organization at every turn. Records managers and lawyers are concerned that the volume of information is threatening the business with increased risk and increased exposure.

IT executives are concerned that they are being marginalized and that the business is increasingly working around them rather than with them. And the C suite is concerned that they will be the next Blockbuster who misses the arrival of a Netflix innovator because they're too focused on legacy systems and business models. This article is intended for IT people, for business executives, for lawyers, for records managers, in short, for the information professionals of all stripes, who will be critical in managing the challenging times ahead.

Systems of record vs. systems of engagement

Let's start with a little history. Systems of record are the core systems that we put in place during the 70's, 80's, and 90's to automate the first generation of digital processes. Think of these as the very initial replacements for paper-based processes. The major technology eras through which we've evolved, from mainframes to mini computers to PC's.During the era of mainframes, our primary focus was on managing batched transactions. This evolved during the minicomputer era into a focus on managing departmental processes, and in the PC era, the focus moved to managing documents.

Beginning in the early 2000's, our information systems began to change. Consumer technology started to be the primary source of innovation, and individual and users became the primary focus for technology. This era began with the Internet and the task of managing webpages, and has since evolved into the mobile and Cloud era, with a focus on managing interactions and conversations. I call these new mobile and Cloud technologies "systems of engagement". The challenge facing today's organizations is to determine how to gradually minimize spending on legacy systems of record while simultaneously taking advantage of new systems of engagement, and not losing control in the process.

Information chaos

Information surrounds us. Documents, emails, videos, podcasts, voicemails, texts, Tweets, Facebook posts, and LinkedIn conversations are the informational backbone of our personal and work lives. I use the phrase "information chaos" to describe this ongoing and accelerating state of massive information disruption and our difficulty in effectively utilizing this avalanche of data. Using information to understand and exceed customer expectations is the competitive challenge today.

In the face of all this massive change, employees like Chief Information Officers are increasingly under siege. There is probably no more vulnerable place to be than CIO in a modern organization. One newly appointed CIO told me, "CIO ought to stand for Career Is Over," and as Bob Dylan would say, "You better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone." Here are some perspectives from contemporary CEOs about their IT Department and their company's CIO.Almost half of CEOs feel IT should be a commodity service purchased as needed.

Only a quarter of executives feel their CIO is performing above his or her peers. Almost half of CEOs rate their CIOs negatively in terms of understanding the business. And 57% of executives expect their IT function to change significantly over the next three years, with 12% predicting a complete overhaul of IT. On the one hand, in our digital industrial economy, information has become the central currency by which organizations create value. On the other, information chaos is making it more and more challenging to harness that information effectively.

It's a whole new world of information requiring a new set of business principles. 

The big bang of enterprise systems

 The collision between systems of record and systems of engagement has set off what I like to call an informational big bang. Think about what enterprise technology systems currently look like. It's a world where IT acts as a train system, moving huge volumes of data from A to B on fixed tracks. It's a world where IT reduces costs by substituting people with technology. Processes are standardized, automating simple or repetitive processes. Executives are generally oblivious to technology, and they bolt technology onto existing business strategies instead of developing new ones.

Complexity equals job security. IT staff pride themselves on the complexity of their projects. Most spending is CAPEX, in other words projects that can be capitalized and their costs stretched out over multiple years. Mobile and social are differentiators, and even having a mobile and social strategy can at least bring temporary competitive advantage. And pure technical skills are valued. The focus is on development, not on integration. Now think about what the world is likely to look like just within a few years.

IT will act as a logistics medium, allowing information journeys that are flexible and constantly changing. IT will be focused on raising value. IT is part of growing revenue, not just cutting costs. Processes will become agile. The emphasis will shift to how knowledge workers react and interpret rapidly changing customer information. Executives will become technology-aware. Personal experiences with technology will be carried over into the workplace. Executives will develop new business strategies based on new technologies.

Simplicity will be valued. Perfect and complex solutions will be replaced by those that are simple and quick to implement. Most spending will be OPEX. Projects will need to be justified in one quarter, not across multiple years. Mobile and social will be expected from any companies, they must have them. And technical skills, in context, will be valued. Skills in how systems link together will be increasingly important. When you compare these differences, you can sense the massive disruption to enterprise IT that is about to occur.

All of this sudden change comes from three major disrupters. I will cover them in my next article

Image credits: © reborn55 – Fotolia.com

Cheers

DC*