It's About Learning

As we consider how to take mobility to the next level at ACU, I am looking at what we will need to do and have also been considering what may be holding us back. As a result, I have been reviewing some of my older, Diigo links,  blog posts and an assortment of books I have previously read dealing with leadership in IT. The following article was originally posted in 2008 which is a long time in terms of the mobility and the Internet but the message that it holds is still relevant today.

In the article IT 2.0: How Changing Technology is Having Big Impacts on Business, the ReadWriteWeb stated:

This next big shift is on the horizon, but you can see it coming. Today, there still may be plenty of businesses employing “classic geeks” in their IT Department, but that’s about to change…

…Instead, tomorrow’s computer “geek” will be a true member of the business team as opposed to the mysterious man behind the curtain who you only notice when something goes wrong. So what does the “new geek” need to know to run tomorrow’s IT Department? An entirely new skill set, as it turns out.

As we grow closer to ubiquity and transparency in our IT infrastructures the need to keep the fans humming and lights flashing may be relegated to the “classic geek”. In contrast the innovative use of IT resources as a competitive advantage within an organization will require a much more digitally and socially savvy individual. This individual will need to understand and grasp the broader perspective of a connected world that includes the following emerging trends:

• Enteprise 2.0 – Collaboration among employees and teams using tools such as SharePoint, Wikis, blogs, and RSS
• Cloud services – A lot of servers will move from the corporate data center to the cloud, hosted by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon
• The mobile workforce – Mobile office work will spread across the organization, and will no longer be confined just to business travelers
• Self-provisioning user base – The next generation of users will be digital savvy and will often select their own hardware and software

We need to ask if this new brand of IT leader will, or even can, come out of IT (the ReadWriteWeb author suggests they will be “rare”). Or do we even want him or her to come out of IT? We look to IT to provide reliability and stability, so innovation and creativity are generally not what IT are good at. We want the fans to hum, the lights to flash, and the network packets to flow to the point that we can forget that IT are even there. Perhaps the new IT leaders will come from outside IT and bring with them a much broader understanding of the organization and be able to blend the reliability and stability of IT with the innovation and creativity required to do business in the connected and collaborative world that we are quickly moving to. Perhaps IT 2.0 will bring about an even greater change in IT leadership than what we may initially expect.