Not any more. In fact, in the IT arena, the rate at which new revolutionary technologies are bursting into the public psyche is directly forcing changes within IT business models. Some companies, because of a lack of foresight and adaptability, may no longer be aware of the pace of change within these emerging technologies. As a result, they may lack the proper IT infrastructure and risk falling behind their competitors and becoming irrelevant within their respective marketplace as Pierre Champigneulle of KPMG’s Advisory practice explains.
Businesses like to think they are in complete control of something like their IT strategy and the programs and processes which it underpins. This may no longer be the case.
I believe that business technology is now being driven by the prevailing out-of-work attitudes towards new, revolutionary collaborative technologies (e.g. Twitter, Google Wave). These attitudes are creeping into the workplace and into customer marketplaces. The boundaries between home and the workplace are fast becoming blurred.
As a result, businesses are being forced to change their approach and attitude towards newer technologies far more quickly than in the past.
The sudden explosion in the use of social networking sites is a prime example of this. Social networking is a revolutionary technology which appeared with such speed that few businesses have been able to proactively stay ahead of developments, anticipating how this new technology could be made to work for them. Instead, many have been forced to patch these technologies into their existing IT infrastructure because of public pressure instead of incorporating them based on the best interests of the company.
This failure to keep pace may be because there are just too many emerging technologies and the company simply does not have the capacity. In addition, the way in which people utilise these technologies is evolving at a rate which far outstrips many businesses’ efforts to stay abreast of those changes. With businesses thus reduced to acting merely in a reactive manner, we really are seeing the tail wagging the dog when it comes to IT architecture.
Unfortunately, because of the rate of change we are seeing today, merely reacting to changing business practices might be ‘too little, too late’. By the time the new technologies have been implemented, the next one is already being used, effectively keeping the business world one step behind.
Arguably, this is because businesses find themselves playing catch-up around technologies which they never envisaged incorporating into their IT architecture. Applications and technologies are being imposed on organizations whether they like it or not. This issue is being exacerbated by the fact that today’s employees — as extensive technology users in their own right — are bringing pressure to bear on their employers if they don’t permit the usage of certain new technologies or don’t use them properly for competitive advantage.
When asking yourself the question of what it is that inhibits internal IT teams from moving at the same pace as these new technologies, you have to look at the typical IT business model. Quite simply, such models were not built to cope with such rapid change; they’re not flexible enough or have not been designed in such a way to easily integrate new technologies. This is the frustrating thing for the CIO; some of these new technologies are actually quite straightforward to integrate yet the organizational model within which his or her team operates simply finds it too hard to cope with something which comes out of left field.
In addition, IT organizations tend to be somewhat reactive in nature; they don’t have the innovative R&D capabilities to be ahead of the curve regarding the use of these new technologies. By contrast, the revolutionary technology providers themselves approach this in a very different way. They create a solution and then look for a public purpose for that solution, meaning that the public are far better placed to experiment than businesses are.
These new technologies, in terms of creating ‘living dialogues’ both inside and outside of a business are, without a doubt, useful. This should not be a discussion about the whys and wherefores of an individual revolutionary technology. It should be about a company’s readiness for incorporating such technology into their IT architecture in a manner which suits them first and foremost and considering the risk implications of allowing such technologies into the workplace when many employees may be tempted to use them in a manner more befitting their living room than their office.
Many IT teams will thus be required to up their game; to be nimble, manoeuvrable and able to respond to the evolution of revolutionary technologies as quickly as society as a whole does; rapidly enabling new business ideas for the company’s benefit. Using the example of social networking technology, this would entail finding ways of limiting a company’s risk and liability resulting from employees’ online presence while also finding competitive ways of injecting themselves into their clients’ online lives via their employees.
If they can do this — if they can promptly interpret and react to the impact of revolutionary technologies — then they should be able to allow the business to leverage these revolutionary technologies within the IT architecture. If not, they will have little control over IT. Either way, we are heading into a period during which the IT agenda will be affected by external forces more than ever before.
— Pierre Champigneulle is part of the Technology Agenda team at KPMG Advisory, based in the U.S. firm.
- The technology agenda think tank