I have an article in the current (November) issue of Harvard Business Review intended to help non-technologist managers make sense of the huge range of available applications and also to clarify their roles in IT efforts. The full text of the article is available online for the month of November, and reprints can be ordered here.
The editors at HBR did a great job pulling quotes from the article to summarize its points, so let me just reproduce them here:
Classifying IT into three types can help leaders understand which technologies they must invest in as well as what they should do to maximize returns.
Once the company’s business needs are clear, the technologies it requires will come into focus.
The biggest mistake business leaders make is to underestimate resistance when they impose changes in the ways people work.
Please do check out the article and let me know what you think, either with a comment here or an email.
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Interesting stuff Andrew – thanks. I presume you have seen Nick Carr’s comments here: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/10/the_brouhaha_th.php
I share some of Nick’s observations but, as I discuss here, http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/softwareinfrastructure/2006/10/on_gpts_organisational_complem.php,
I think he is missing an important aspect of your model: the fact that you marry the classification of IT with the organisational implications and so help to facilitate a dialogue between business and IT in a language which both sides understand. Equally importantly, you move beyond the technology selection phase to outline the role of the business during adoption and subsequent exploitation.
I haven’t read the article, because I did not subscribe to HBR on line. However, it appears to me that those three categories do make sense but do not provide enough guidance for IT managers who need to make decisions. The paralysis in big companies is not only due to the fact that we split IT in two groups that no longer make sense(Enterprise tools vs. personal productivity tools), but also that our industrial business model for introducing new software is top-down in all cases. And it no longer works.
The real problem is about a new way to introduce technology in large corporations, from the ground up rather from the top down, from the experiment on the field to the infrastructure for all, rather than from the specs to the roll-out. And very few IT department – and very few CEOs I should say – actually think that way.
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