I gave a talk last year to a group of enterprise software executives entitled "Paper is an Information Technology." The point of the talk was to get people thinking outside of enterprise software boxes and realize that software changes drastically, and "enterprise software" will follow suit in short order. The industry is beginning to publically push in this direction, as evidenced by this article (sent to me by Will Bunker) :
http://scobleizer.com/2010/03/10/the-revolution-at-work-the-industry-reacts-to-salesforces-moves/What I think is profoundly important to people who seek to work together (i.e. transact business, start a company, gain customers, etc.) is that organizations - particularly those people who consider themselves 'technologists' - need to think in terms of human interactions, and how to facilitate and enable those interactions through technology *without casting the interactions in terms of technology"
There was a time a time where a good geek could impress executives by setting up some working software that did ________ automatically. "Wow, that's cool!" is what you'd hear for getting a simple database driven Web site up. Those days are gone, and technology is now ubiquitous. It's not longer enough just to put a system together. Today startups with no money have access to the types of automation that cost six figures and months of implementation time 5-10 years ago.
The challenge for "IT" is to stop thinking in terms of "IT" and start thinking in terms of human relationships and interactions: within the organization, between organizations, relationships between the organization and the people it serves. Doug Levy (friend but no relation) and my friends over at IMC2 highlight these changes by talking about "the Relationship Era" in marketing (check it out at IMC2.com).
I think this idea applies far more broadly than how we market; it has always applied to collaboration and every aspect of business - we just have not been able to focus on it the way we can today. If you look at the companies performing like champs right now - the Amazons, the Googles, Zappos, Facebook - they all share an approach that focuses on how they interact with people. This focus leads these companies to make decisions that "traditional IT" would not even consider - decisions that place human interactions above technology. What's fun to see is that more and more companies are doing this today. We are witnessing evolution, the kind Seth Godin describes in his great book <u>Survival is Not Enough</u>
Here are some things going on that I think are helping drive these changes in thinking for more and more companies:
1. Today there are folks driving technology who do not recognize traditional departmental prejudices that exist in most corporations. IT, Sales, and Marketing typically are all at odds. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard people in one department express frustration with "_______ types" (fill in one of the departments). This happens because people refuse to grasp the idea that I have worked, and continue to work in all three areas. If I can speak their language in sales, and sell, they presume my technical skills are limited. If I can show them high quality code I have written, and discuss pen-protector grade geek fu, they presume I cannot sell. Same things happen on engagement where I do marketing consulting. I know I am not alone on experiencing this. In any case, here's a news flash: prejudice has limited utility to say the least.
The companies that maintain such prejudices have been selected for extinction and will be outmaneuvered. It's happening now - perhaps these are the companies the build up employee numbers rather than employee skills....so that when a downturn happens, they have to cut people.
Either way, the take away: If you work in an organization and make decisions on its behalf in any of these three areas (sales, marketing, IT), you have no excuse for not understanding as much as you can about every aspect of the business - including the two areas you don't think of yourself as knowing At the end of the day these distinctions exist to help us divide and conquer many different types of concerns. They are not in place to allow us to be lazy and neglect understanding things critical to the business.
2. Open Source has matured, and is now part of business strategy. How do todays industry leaders get amazing things done in technology? They help build communities that share innovations. I had a client once tell me he would never use open source. His vendor of choice is now forcing him to because they have rolled jQuery into their Web development platform. Additionally, look at Google, Yahoo, NetFlix (and a host of other companies). Guess what else they have in common: they sponsor open source projects that help them develop more with less. It's brilliant. Immanuel Kant would be proud
3. Furthering point number two, there are open source technologies available that offer the type of architectural conventions, flexibility, performance and security required for "enterprise grade" solutions, without being burdened by closed source constraints.
4. No one ever bothered to teach younger, up and coming professionals that they had to rely on your favorite technology vendor. And fewer people have had to rely on one software vendor to learn about practical business technologies - we can all learn technology on the Web.
The moral of this story: KEEP LEARNING, and stay focused on people interactions. There are going to be constraints in technology, each will carry a cost to overcome, but if you are literate, you have the best chance of finding real ways to help people through innovative uses of the Web.
