Some good conversations yesterday, in the morning with @em_stone, and in the afternoon with @robgray and @mattycharman.
An observation that came out, and a link that I hadn't made before, is that whilst senior IT folk seem quite at home with new gadgets, they seem far less at ease with the application of software on those gadgets. This is based on completely unscientific observation at three events in the past 13 months… The two Google Atmosphere events, and at the recent CIO magazine CIO Summit. At all of the events pockets and bags were brimming with gadgetry… mostly Apple branded – last year iPhones, this year iPhones and iPads.
However at all three events, there was next to no Twitter activity.
Now you could argue that that means nothing; Twitter is but yet another Web 2.0 fad of the Soho media set (and in that you may well be right). However I do think it is significant of the old ways of thinking about technology delivery, and why shifting from a view of the world that is about providing boxes (physical or virtual) to one of facilitating business change and improved collaboration is such a challenge for the IT industry.
Particularly when you get into the soft skills realm of facilitating better team working, most IT management is uniquely misplaced to help: either they've come from an engineering background (read: borderline autism) or from a finance background (borderline autism with OCD). I've yet to work for a CIO who has been able to sustain a smalltalk conversations in a lift (well unless, possibly, it's in Smalltalk).
(By the way, if you are a CIO who offended by that last paragraph, you are the exception that proves the rule).
Why's this important? Well because this all makes for an endangered species. Salesforce have shown the power of being able to market a full Cloud service direct to a target consumer market in business, completely bypassing the IT function. It's time for IT people to evolve or reskill…
mmitII 