Adopting new IT technologies by the Business & IT

I attended an excellent seminar in Brussels on "The future of ICT" on October 4th organised by IT works.

I noticed a few things:

• In the folder and emailings it stated that the targeted audience was ICT decision makers involved in IT planning and management.
• I checked the attendee list and 95% of the people present were working in IT departments, the other 5% were heads of business deparments who where directly involved in IT projects
  
• When talking to people during the breaks people where frustrated that the business leaders did not understand why new IT technologies were important

I borrowed a few lines (below) from "http://www.computable.nl/nieuws.jsp?id=2157297"

Gartner states that CIO's and it-managers should implement disruptive technologies to stay ahead of the competition.

Examples of these technologies as mentioned in the article are:
1. Multicore
2. Web Platforms
3. User interface
4. Web mashups
5. Sociale software
6. Tera - architecture
…

I believe that CEO's (and business people in general) are the final decision makers on which technology to use to gain competitive advantage in the market and these people are not going to go all warm inside from technical concepts like mashups, platforms, Web2.0. That's for sure and is absolute normal because it's not clear what these technologies can do. More importantly even if you convinced the business to invest in e.g. SOA this technology might not be supported by a change in vision/culture/thinking in the business making it difficult to reach its full potential.

Your CEO is not going to become enthusiastic when hearing your speech "We have to change coz we have SOA, and web2.0 now".

Whereas if you explain to the business that the customer base is increasingly composed of 'IT natives' (people who were e.g. using the web, mobiles, and messenger from the cradle) who expect any company to respond via and communicate via web2.0 phenomena (like: all communication is digital, peer2peer networks, all the time real time contact via messenger & mobile phones, blogs & wikis)…

If you explain to the business that any authentic and feasible implementation of such new relationship with the customer requires that these new expectations of the consumers are to be reversed engineered into all layers of the company....

If you explain to the business that the making your company (web)service oriented is a good way to go about this back office implementation…

Then I believe the business and IT have a better basis for understanding and decision making.

Interesting example is the paperless world of ING direct.