Democracy is coming to IT. Whether we liked it or not, IT had the power, the budget and the control over who used what, when and how within an organization. For years, mavericks have said that IT should not have an IT budget, that other departments should have the budgets and IT should deliver stuff to them. For exactly as long, IT has argued that that way lies anarchy and widespread chaos.
Whichever argument you favoured is now becoming irrelevant. Now that everyone has devices and the ability to instantly access everything they need, change is afoot. Now executives in Marketing do not have to ask nicely for information, they can simply get it and in the way they want it. Journalists and analysts are predicting that Marketing and others will spend more on IT than IT within five or six years. Relationships in almost every corner of business are changing. Customers can access information as fast as the vendors who are selling software or services to them. Vendors are beginning to sell their solutions to ‘the business’ not IT. Long term strategies are a thing of the past. Flexibility, speed, responsiveness and trust are the new watchwords in a business that is changing daily.
For a long time, we have acknowledged that the toughest thing to change in an organization is the culture. Now, with the advent of cool devices and new ‘social’ ways of communicating with colleagues and teams, change is coming from the inside.
Image – courtesy of Telco 2.0
We used to speak of empowering employees, of flattening organizational structures, of tearing down silos. Now, the employees are empowered, the structures are mirroring real, flat, slightly chaotic but workable real life and the silos – well, we are too busy doing interesting collaborative things to bother tearing them down.
Let them stand as monuments to the passing Age of IT.
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