Agreed, IT needs to play a proactive partnership role to move these new approaches forward.
Individually, IT professionals probably “get” new technologies and concepts before anyone else. But collectively, IT only has a very limited amount of time and resources, and therefore must focus on that 20% of projects that deliver 80% of the results. Many are mired in maintenance and administration. New technologies and methodologies need to prove themselves in terms of paybacks, and this takes time, and a strong, supportive constituency within the organization.
I think that this has been a major factor in the growth of the SaaS model. Departments can usually afford the lower pricing without going to far up the command chain AND they avoid IT, which is usually too busy (according to them) supporting the existing systems than to try and integrate one more system.
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LyndarJune 4th, 2007 at 6:16 pm |
It’s difficult to see how IT is going to lead the adoption of useful business applications especially when most of them are on the web. For instance, ask any sales person what her most useful tool is and she’ll say Google. After that it’s Hoover’s. What *can* internal IT do? 1) Make sure the network is running so that people don’t have to work from home where their cable access is faster than the office network, 2) make sure their firewalls aren’t blocking the most useful productivity tools on the web and 3) report directly to their line-of-business managers who have a better sense of what’s important than the centralized IT staff.
Joe, yes, it’s true, IT has to play the 80-20 rule and sometimes wait for technology to prove their worth but it also has to be able to occasionally seize the day, and allow the user to do what they ought to be doing, whether it be on the Web, via SaaS, or via innovative licensed software. And a brief point to Lynda, her most useful tool isn’t necessarily Google, but it is search.
I agree with what is being said here about the 80/20 rule and how IT has to pay attention to keeping what it already has running. But I also think that IT departments need to do a much better job of explaining the benefits of standard and secure infrastructure to people.
Many of the benefits of the newer tools that focus on collaboration and knowledge sharing will be lost if they are not implemented across the board. That’s what might happen if individual departments go off and purchase their own — potentially incompatible — remotely hosted solutions.
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