What Jurassic Park Teaches About Ideas, Business-led IT & What CIOs Can Do About It?

Jurassic Park from 1993 is one of the finest movies of our time. Beyond it being a ground-breaking, heart stomping movie; it is the magnum opus that brings Steven Spielberg’s boundless imagination to life.

The movie becomes all the way more interesting if you look at it from a technology enthusiast’s point of view. If you were to watch this movie today, you’d be astonished to see self-driving cars, touch screen computing devices & reference to finite CPU cycles. Aren’t these some of the coolest things we’ve in the tech space today; Apple with iPads getting thinner and getting more capable with every release; Tesla with self driving cars & reference to running out of CPU cycles in the movie can’t be about anything other than the ever increasing relevance of cloud.

Talking about cloud, almost anybody who has heard of the term is clear of the problem it solves. It gives you the ability to get just enough compute muscle when you need it and you pay for what you use. However, there is more to the characteristics of a cloud platform; self-service, elastic, scalable, shared & on-demand are some of those. You can read more about the characteristics of cloud [SPOILER ALERT: sales pitch] here, here and here .

The most astounding of all the benefits of cloud is its ability to help democratize execution of certain ideas. This means almost all of the advancements we’ve in the tech industry is accessible at a marginal cost to even the smallest of companies operating on a relatively smaller capital as it is/was accessible to the largest of corporations.

This is like an ambitious kid in a dorm room has found himself inside the Ironman suit. The situation with business leaders who have been having a hard time selling their requirements, business scenarios and challenges with IT is no different. Businesses have always believed that ideas do not require IT approval, now cloud makes it easy for businesses to move forward with execution of ideas without IT's approval. And budgets for such executions or experiments can come right from the departmental budget and not that of IT’s.

It is easy to confuse Business-led IT with 'Pocket IT' or 'Shadow IT'. However, Business-led IT isn't an attempt to duplicate core IT operations, instead it is a result of not approaching corporate IT for guidance or support and go about executing ideas that drive business outcomes all by themselves. This reduces IT's opportunities to apply their expertise on driving operational efficiency, security, compliance and related elements that are critical to an organization as a whole.

How should IT and new-gen CIOs respond to this?

In a business led IT world, business leaders are making technology decisions. In this scenario IT has to rethink the way they position themselves. IT needs to incorporate business facing roles in the function that acts as a trusted advisor with the tenacity to see through to the desired business outcome.

IT has been traditionally driving operational efficiency, compliance & security by laying out policies. As you might remember, the character Ian Malcolm mentions that 'life will find a way' as a response to the scientists who have genetically modified the dinosaurs for controlled breeding. The case with ideas is no different, it’ll find a way.

In today's scenario, IT has to drive these factors through influence and through technology leadership. IT has to be the front runner in adopting the newest of trends in the industry that aligns with the organization's business requirements. Early recognition and adoption of these trends will help CIOs carve out a model where IT personnel and expertise is shared while service line managers can track and manage business outcomes that results from business facing engagements.

Many business leaders have a firm belief that managing technology is their responsibility and not IT's, much like hiring people is their responsibility and not HR's. In the face of new age developments in the tech space, resources and talent is more easily accessible to businesses than it ever was. IT has to re-brand themselves to be seen as an adaptive, and a collaborative entity that has interests in business outcomes, rather than perceived as a hindrance. The CIOs will have to take initiatives that drives this culture across all levels of the IT function to put it in practice. Studies indicate that operating expenditure increases across divisions adopting business-led IT to the extend of an additional 40 cents for every dollar.

This additional spending is entirely against conventional IT's thinking. The rationale behind businesses going about implementing solutions themselves regardless of higher cost is very many. One of the main ones is that businesses while implementing or experimenting with new and innovative solutions they don't necessarily look for operational efficiency. Operational efficiency isn't a strategy for businesses running in innovation or R&D mode; instead it is only a tactic. Hence, the popularity for cloud in innovation centric organizations. The opportunity for IT/external consulting partners is enormous. If IT is equipped to capture this opportunity, CIOs will very well be contributing to the bottom line of the organisation by reducing overall spent towards external IT partners.

In a business-led IT world, it would help if IT speaks a language that focuses on the application of technology rather than the technology itself. IT professionals are traditionally too keen on speaking of the interesting capabilities of a new tech. However, business wants to hear about concrete scenarios where application of a certain technology could drive desired business outcomes; outcomes that the business leaders have thought about and the ones they never knew they wanted. This is possible only when the new age IT pros have multi-disciplinary skills spanning the business and the industry where they operate in, in addition to their knowledge of the tech industry.

Go cloud!

That's what I think, what do you think?

Originally published on LinkedIn