IT Savvy? Watch out for the IT Explorers!

There has been a lot of focus on IT Savvy over the last few years.

Some are looking at how an IT savvy organisation makes better use of its resources to employ IT in the successful pursuit of its objectives. To follow-up from the 2005 paper by Peter Weill and Sinan Aral, Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross have recently written a book targeted at business executives discussing the merits of an IT savvy organisation, IT Savvy – What Top Executives Need you Know to go from Pain to Gain. Here is a link to a December 2009 interview with Dr. Jeanne Ross, MIT Sloan School of Management.

Others are looking at the impact of IT savvy on security. This Deloitte article Equipping the Federal Workforce for the Cyber Age, looks at the concept of a cyber savvy workforce to reduce security risks. While others look at the impact of an IT savvy workforce on internal fraud risks.

A recent ZDNet UK article by David Clarke looks at the need to increase baseline level of IT savviness of the public to even out the uneven access to and understanding of information technology. I contrast this view with a look at the potential future workforce. The "Shift Happens" series provides some interesting statistics about the changing world. I particularly like version 3.0 of Did you know? found below.



This video in combination with my experience with my son makes me wonder what the future holds? My son and his friends have no fear of IT. They see it as a landscape to explore. They use social media, videogames and productivity software with the same mindset - exploration. I also wonder about the upcoming generation's ability to take in data. I have found this article on the Spatial Brain and how we use our brains in 3-d videogames along with articles on video games slowing brain development but from my observation, my son and his friends seem to have an ability to suck-in more information from multiple sources simultaneously and react to them then I have any hope of coping with. So what does this all mean?

There has been a concern over the millennial workforce and the security risks from their use of social media on corporate networks as described in Millennial Workforce: IT Risk or Benefit? But looking at my son and his friends, the millennial workforce is the start of a trend towards a workforce of IT landscape explorers that will challenge the conventional IT operations, governance, risk and compliance processes. Anarchy vs. Control? Consensus vs. Autocracy? Barriers vs. Openness? Where will the balance lie in the future? The IT organisation will have unprecedented pressure from the workforce to respond and to partake in the exploration. In the words of Bob Fletcher and Cole Porter "Don't fence me in."

Alignment - Why is IT singled out?

Everywhere you look these days, there are articles stressing the need for business and IT alignment. A CIO.com article calls it the 'holy grail'.

Why is IT singled out in the call for alignment and what exactly is 'the business'? In his blog, Joe McKendrick claims that IT is part of the business and therefore alignment is not an appropriate goal for IT. I tend to look at a business in two parts: one is the operations-side, focusing on producing outcomes for the companies clients and the other provides support to the operations and monitors compliance with regulations. This support side typically includes Finance, Human Resources and IT. Why is then that when I searched on "Finance Business Alignment" the articles I found were on managing the IT portfolio expenditure not how the finance function may better support the operational outcomes of the business?

Like IT, both Finance and HR are endeavouring to free-up resources from transactional processes to enable investment in providing strategic services to optimise operations. This is coined as "Strategic HR" or "Strategic Finance". Is there a difference between the end state, which is being sought after through business-IT alignment and what could be coined as "Strategic IT"?

If the true intent of business-IT alignment is for IT to be a strategic partner, where does this leave the idea of alignment? Isn't the selection of "Enterprise Alignment" as a blog name somewhat inappropriate? Maybe, but in my travels implementing bespoke and ERP systems in large enterprises, I have seen many disconnects in business processes. Some of these disconnects were between activities within one function, like payroll and others became evident when functional boundaries were crossed (for example between HR and Finance). For me the idea of enterprise alignment is for an organisation to breakdown its traditional stovepipes and align its activities throughout. In today's enterprise, IT is uniquely positioned to see these disconnects as it touches all (or nearly all) aspects of the business. I see concepts like Enterprise Architecture and Service Oriented Architecture as well as technology like Business Process Automation having the potential to bring-out the disconnects and forming a key part of the organisation's journey through the continuous improvement process. The question is how IT's role in the journey will be perceived by the organisation? Will it be as a partner and enabler? I think that may be what IT-Business Alignment is striving towards.