What is the Impact of Enterprise 2.0 on the CIO

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The Chief Information Officer’s (CIO’s) role in an organization is to oversee the provision of technology and information to power the processes and systems that facilitate business transactions. This includes transactions to drive revenue, as well as transactions to drive communication and collaboration between people. As the senior information executive in the organization, the CIO is the prime candidate for assessing the impact of Web 2.0 offerings on the enterprise.

With rapid innovation taking place in the Web 2.0 world, the CIO must first answer the primary question: Will Web 2.0 offerings lead to different outcomes than current systems? Or are they merely another way of delivering current services? While they are new and getting a lot attention in the trade press, the question remains: Are they suitably different? In a classical analysis, the impact on the CIO is negligible. These new tools merely represent another supply-side option for fulfilling information, communication, and collaboration requirements of people inside the organization. Hence, the CIO needn’t do anything especially different. There should already be someone within the CIO’s department responsible for evaluating new technology as it becomes available, and advising the CIO in terms of which new solutions offer possibilities for adoption.

Is Anything Different with Web 2.0?

There are three reasons why these new technologies should be treated as a special case. Firstly, as a consequence of the consumerization of IT, Web 2.0 technologies are readily available outside of work at low or nil cost to people within your organization. This is a discontinuous change from new enterprise-oriented offerings from SAP or Oracle, which historically have been inaccessible to “normal” people. Therefore, people come into your organization with awareness, understanding, and expectations about the availability of such tools, and in some instances expectations about the availability of specific tools. If your organization is still stuck in the “dark ages” of enterprise IT for communication and collaboration, there is sure to be a backlash from employees.

Secondly, many of the Web 2.0 services enhance cross-organizational collaboration in a way that current enterprise-oriented communication and collaboration tools cannot. Shared access to team documents and data, shared task lists and project plans, and shared calendaring is difficult when people are prohibited from using common systems! Many organizations are reticent to open their directory services so external people can be listed in the directory for access and authentication through enterprise systems. With Web 2.0 tools, this problem is eliminated. Users from multiple organizations sign up to a hosted, neutral third-party Web 2.0 service that enables team and project interaction without having to experience the pain of working through the limitations imposed by IT.

Finally, Web 2.0 services such as blogs and wikis can enable rich interaction with customers and prospects, opening a new channel for communication and two-way learning. Conversations about the organizations products, services and future plans can incorporate real-time feedback from external constituencies. Facilitating such interaction with customers is one of the six key priorities held by CIOs, according to one of the sessions at the 2006 CIO 100 Symposium.

What Should the CIO Do in Response?

The worst thing for the CIO to do in response to Web 2.0 is to ignore these new developments and be uneducated on the options and unimaginative on the possibilities. Although it is dangerous for the CIO to get too far ahead of users, lagging too far behind is equally dangerous. IT departments at many organizations have a very bad reputation for customer service and business value delivery. I really like what the IT department at Intel Corporation is doing: running a publicly accessible blog that opines on issues at the intersection of business and IT including systems, virtual teams, and collaboration. They are making a concerted effort to understand Web 2.0 technology and its applicability within Intel. And by doing it in a public way, their learnings are open for the world to see.

Taking this idea a step further, CIOs and their departments should be interacting with business units, educating them on Web 2.0 technologies and seeking jointly championed trials and pilot programs to test the validity of applying these new tools within the enterprise. Perhaps the outcomes will be no different from existing tools, but then maybe the outcomes will be fundamentally different. The only way to prove this within a given environment is to test, debrief, learn and try again.

For some organizations, the promises of Web 2.0 will need to remain mere promises. Whether due to the regulatory environment, specific retention mandates, or the need for safeguarding very commercially sensitive intellectual property, the openness espoused within the Web 2.0 world will be inappropriate. But on the other hand, just because an organization cannot take advantage of publicly provided Web 2.0 services does not preclude the IT department from making such systems available within the firewall.

Potential to Re-Shape IT Departments

Web 2.0 could lead to a fundamentally re-shaped IT department. Rather than having to a build and maintain internal systems to deliver service to internal clients and external customers, IT professionals instead focus on helping business people and groups select, from a smorgasbord of hosted services, the most appropriate technology for the challenge or project at hand. Thus, IT professionals change from being tech-heavy propeller heads to business analysts and savvy negotiators, seeking to align internal requirements with a range of options offered by external providers. Obviously, this means a lot of changes in terms of the types of people that are employed within the IT department.

There’s much to like in the innovativeness of Web 2.0 services, but their applicability within the enterprise requires domain-specific savvy. CIOs should not ignore these new offerings, but rather engage with the business to surface new possibilities.

For Your Reference

Blogs@Intel

Messaging News writer Michael Sampson focuses on collaboration technology that improves the work practices of people and teams. He blogs at: www.michaelsampson.net.

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