The past 25 years have seen one corporate IT revolution after another, like waves crashing on the beach. How can corporate IT support businesses more effectively in the face of continuous technology revolutions? A recent book by a Twin Cities CIO addresses the topic: “The Technology Doesn’t Matter”, by Rachel Lockett, CIO of Pohlad Companies.
In the mid 90’s, the overwhelming majority of computing at major corporations was performed by mainframes, as it had been for thirty years. Then client/server computing was introduced, leveraging powerful (and relatively inexpensive) UNIX workstations which came to market in the 80’s.
This was immediately followed by the Dotcom era, which introduced B2B and B2C computing. After the dot-com crash, it seemed that corporations would be busy for a long while fine-tuning Internet computing. But in less than 10 years, smartphones and social networks shook the foundations of IT. Most recently Data Science and AI have once again turned IT on its head.
IT professionals had to repeatedly re-learn how to efficiently leverage powerful and flexible new hardware and software technologies. Business executives often fumed at the mixed results of their large investments in IT, and at IT’s tendency to prioritize implementing new technologies over adding business value.
Some commentators suggested companies slow play the introduction of new IT, learning off the trial and error of early adopters, as Nicholas Carr famously did in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article, “IT Doesn’t Matter”. But it increasingly became clear that companies didn’t have that luxury; not constantly innovating could easily result in losing markets to companies built on a digital foundation.
There is no reason to believe the speed of IT change will slow down. If technology revolutions have become, in industry parlance, “a feature, not a bug”, how can IT increase its effectiveness?
It is important to consider how new computing is as an engineering discipline. Civil engineering is 2000 years old – the Romans knew how to grade roads and raise arches. Electrical Engineering is 150 years old. Modern IT is generally considered to have begun in 1965 with the IBM 360 mainframe. Information management, which critically enables “a single version of the truth”, is about thirty years old, as is the World Wide Web.
IT is slowly maturing as an engineering discipline. Methodologies like DevOps, borrowed from manufacturing process optimization, are turning IT operations from a craft to a repeatable process.
Software development will continue to become more intuitive, in a “no code” future, enhanced by AI tools like ChatGPT. Businesspeople will become increasingly savvy relative to data and analytics. IT will, in the words of pioneering management Peter Drucker, become more focused on the “I rather than the T” – the information, rather than the hardware and software.
Lockett’s book is written for a joint audience of business and technology leaders, with the objective of improving the alignment of the technology function to the business strategy. Lockett maintains the interest of technical and non-technical readers alike with an engaging style, humorous anecdotes, and numerous case studies.
Topics addressed include: the four types of business executives relative to their relationship with IT; the prevalence of Information Technologists who are on the autism spectrum (it’s a competitive advantage), how to manage and develop them, and the implications for increasing the representation of women as technologists.
Lockett’s book is a primer full of useful heuristics on how to optimize the ROI of corporate IT, shared by an executive with over 25 years’ experience in the field. It is a somewhat rare find – the majority of books on IT are written by technologists or strategic consultants.