Panel retrospective: “Outside-In Technology and Innovation”

At the Information On Demand Conference on Thursday, I joined moderator Chris Anderson, with colleagues Jeff Jonas, Anant Jhingran, Carol Jones, and Hamid Pirahesh, to discuss “Outside-In Technology and Innovation.” The following, although not a transcript of what I actually said, is what I had hoped to say.

Imagine a graph with a line representing the gap between IT and line of business users over the past 40 years. That gap has always been there. But the IT Revolution 26 years ago caused a spike so significant you have to put our imaginary graph on log paper.

That 1^st IT Revolution came from the introduction of PCs, along with VisiCalc, Lotus 123, and eventually Excel. Knowledge workers could take control of their business analysis to get the agility they needed to do their jobs. Soon there were departmental LANs of PCs, and content and data began to live in a formal way outside the scope of the IT shop. This fundamentally changed the roles of CIOs and IT shops.

Today, we’re already experiencing the 2^nd IT Revolution.

But in this one, IT teams are – for the most part – like lobsters in a pot of cold water – slowly coming to a boil and not realizing that we’re in hot water. Because we aren’t addressing Web 2.0 and social networking as what they are: the instruments of the new Revolution.

This 2^nd IT Revolution will take that gap line up again on the log paper graph in ways we can’t even imagine today.

What’s happening instead is a continued tug of war between IT and LOBs. Already, end users can use mashups to dynamically compose new ad hoc applications. And some teams find it more effective to use FaceBook to collaborate with their colleagues and business partners than the structures their IT teams put in place.

What’s the IT response? Do we just say, “Let’s shut that stuff down?”

Tug of war won’t help.

We need tool kits.

Tool kits in several categories:

Information On Demand so we can get information and knowledge out to our business knowledge workers to enable them to use and reuse that information to be nimble and effective.

Enterprise Content Management so we can deal with the requirements of compliance and business process efficiency and still empower departmental exploitation of that content.

SOA so we can build more agile core services and expose services to empower new Web 2.0 applications.

And a different way of building IT, ISV and Vendor applications. One that recognizes the full suite of stakeholders, their often competing needs, and resolves them effectively – that’s what I call “Outside-in Development.” Outside-in thinking helps us find the middle ground between tight IT control and anarchy.

If we stay in tug of war mode, we’re going to be at odds with the knowledge workers of the 2^ndIT Revolution, and my money is on them.

But IT teams can co-opt the 2^nd IT Revolution and make it our own. We can dramatically improve business agility, client satisfaction, and business success. And, by the way, have more fun too.

(Image attribution: “The Death of Marat,” by Jacques_Louis David.)