The times for IT are changing

Times they are changing.

The times for IT are changing. De nieuwe applicaties hebben steeds meer do-it-yourself mogelijkheden waardoor eindgebruikers zelf direct aanpassingen kunnen maken binnen de applicaties. 

Met name de opmars van media als smart phones, netbooks en webbased software zorgen ervoor dat deze trend steeds meer doordringt binnen de heilige huizen van de IT afdelingen en de Business Afdelingen als bv Marketing.

Bedrijven die sterk actief zijn met new media - dit zijn niet alleen alleen jonge bedrijven maar ook bedrijven met grote marketing en communicatie afdelingen - ervaren problemen met het beheer van hun applicaties. Daarnaast is het integreren van deze ontwikkeling binnen een IT strategie een grote uitdaging.

Ik vond dit interessant artikel Ted Schadler.

Doe er je voordeel mee

Re.M.I.

IT in the Age of the Empowered Employee

by Ted Schadler   

Incremental innovation and process improvements have always come from those closest to the problem. It's the basis of kaizen, a system where employees continually improve manufacturing processes. It's also a founding principle of Six Sigma — tap employees' relentless, incremental quality improvements.

The same is true in the way employees are harnessing consumer technologies — social, mobile, video, and cloud. They're improving how they do their jobs and solving your customer and business problems. And it's not just a few employees; it's a critical mass of employees. In a survey of more than 4,000 U.S. information workers, we found that 37% are using do-it-yourself technologies without IT's permission. LinkedIn, Google Docs, Smartsheet.com, Facebook, iPads, YouTube, Dropbox, Flipboard — the list is long and growing. Many of these scenarios are do-it-yourself projects. For example, want to ask me business questions on Facebook? Piece of cake, I'll just friend you. Personal iPhones for email, apps, and Internet access outside my clients' door? Check. Google Sites and Docs to exchange documents with partners? Sure, I can spin up a free site or IT can spend the $50/user/year and make it secure. YouTube to post fix-it-yourself videos for tough service problems? My kid's good with a Flip camera. She can film me doing the fix myself.

In all of these real cases, an employee figured out a better way to solve a customer or business problem without IT's help. Call it the consumerization of IT; call it harnessing the groundswell; call it Technology Populism. It's all the same thing: individuals harnessing readily available social, mobile, video, and cloud technology to solve customer and business problems.

In our new book, Empowered, we call these covert innovators HEROes — highly empowered and resourceful operatives. HEROes are those employees who feel empowered to solve customer problems and act resourcefully by using whatever technology they need to use. HEROes comprise 20% of the U.S. information workforce, but your industry may have many more or many fewer highly empowered and resourceful operatives.

It's all well and good to have employees solving customer problems. But chaos and rogue behavior is not okay. To identify the employee initiatives that are worth pursuing and figure out how to make them safe and enterprise-grade, your IT organization needs to get involved.

Peter Hambling, the CIO of Lloyd's of London, recently shared a story with us about Facebook and iPhone. A sales person wanted to use Facebook to talk to a client. An underwriter wanted to use a smartphone to access key account and policy information while away from their computer. The business manager and IT security professional feared the unknown and shut down both solutions.

As a CIO with business acumen, Hambling understood that he and his IT organization needed a new contract with business managers and employees that allowed him to help with technology solutions while sharing the responsibility for business risk with employees and managers. To get it done, he took the business case to the board of directors and got permission to proceed with caution and with a clear eye on the tradeoff between business value and business risk.

They didn't stop with Facebook and iPhone. They've also embedded IT staff directly into the cubicle farms of business employees; they've built innovative solutions with teams comprised of business and IT employees; they've created applications that empower employees to understand global risk through a familiar interactive map. They created a new contract with business managers and employees that gives IT professionals a place in the business.

Hambling exemplifies one of the key action items that we've discovered: Make new technology risk a business problem to be managed rather than an IT problem to be stifled. And that requires a new way of thinking and of working.

We spoke with hundreds of people when researching Empowered. In discovering their solutions to these thorny empowered technology problems, we identified a new contract that's emerging between IT, business managers, and employees. We call it the HERO Compact and it looks like this:

 

In the HERO Compact, there is a real give and take needed between employees, managers, and IT in this empowered era. Employees need to step up and behave responsibly (which means HR needs to be involved). Business managers need to roll up their sleeves and learn enough about the technology to understand the potential risks. (Managers also need to encourage and reward experimentation.) IT needs to assess and mitigate technology risk. And that means IT staff need to be much closer to business employees and activities so that they can help with technology platforms. And everybody must put technology-induced risk into its proper business context. It's a new set of priorities all the way around.

Are you building a new contract to empower employees to solve the problems of empowered customers? Are you running into barriers? Finding successes? In either case, I'd love to hear about it.

Ted Schadler is VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research and Coauthor of Empowered: Unleash your employees, energize your customers and transform your business.