“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair..in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted being on its received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only” – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
I recently read a CIO magazine article that had the above paragraph as a metaphor to describe the current state of an enterprise IT. It struck a chord with me as I could totally relate to the same metaphor. I believe we are living in a time of fundamental shift in how enterprises are using the technology to run the businesses. This fundamental shift is resulting into both confusions and opportunities in the contemporary organizations. The roles of enterprise technology leaders are changing. Though, we have a diversity of opinions on what enterprise technology leaders should or should not do, there are two common themes in all opinions.
First, the enterprise technology leaders have to transition themselves to be enterprise innovation leaders who can work side-by-side with their business colleagues. They help formulate the business strategy. They take the business ideas and execute on them using technology. They participate in all critical business meetings. They help organizations in not only cut costs through productivity improvements, but also increase market share through a superior use of technologies. They are a partner to the customer service organizations to create end-to-end customer interaction experiences. All of this is hard work and requires them to create a balance of priorities between the existing systems’ operational improvements and execution of the new ideas. Therefore, enterprise technology is increasingly becoming an art instead of a science as it requires more creativity and business insight on the part of its technology leaders.
Second, the enterprise technology leaders must be technical enough to learn and incorporate the consumer-oriented technological innovations into their enterprises. The Googles, Yahoos, FaceBooks and YouTubes of the worlds are raising the customer expectations to a higher level. The services of these consumers companies are simple but yet very innovative. The enterprise technology leaders cannot dismiss these services as “consumer” space anymore. These consumer services have become part of the lives of both generation X and generation Y. These new generations expect all enterprise services to behave in the same way. They expect enterprises to provide free-of-charge trial or advertisements-supported product use. They expect enterprises’ products support to be web-enabled, chat-enabled, and voice-enabled. They expect enterprises to be responsive and do not tolerate any wait time. They expect enterprises to be candor during the critical situations. They expect more and more communication from enterprises’ leaders over the electronic mediums such as web blogs, online videos, and podcasts. To enable such a change, technology departments have to deploy a layer of communication, interaction and collaboration channels on top of the existing very complex enterprise systems. It requires a careful balance between revealing dirty secrets vs. the candor that would boost customers’ confidence on the enterprise. It requires an understanding of different technologies available to handle different situations. Therefore, enterprise technology leaders must step-up and learn all of this if they want to capture generation X and generation Y customers.
I strongly believe that we are living in the best of the times of technology and its impact on our businesses. It is impossible to precisely define the new roles of enterprises technology leaders but an understanding of challenges faced in and skills needed for the new roles is a good start.
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