Are We Nearly Ready to Let IT Roam Free?

Everyone in your entire organization has IT on speed dial. A relative newcomer on the business org chart, the IT department has come to be integral in most other departments’ operations. Be they outside consultants or internal employees, your friendly office IT folks know just about everyone in every department. We’ve become very comfortable with this relationship of dependency.

Dependent on IT

But this dependency always included inherent challenges. How often do you have to stay your hand from dialing the IT guy when you have a minor challenge? Aren’t there more important things IT should be doing than waiting on people?

A question on many efficiency-minded managers’ minds is, “How can marketing, HR and other departments manage their own (damn) platforms?” Resolving this challenge would free up IT resources and empower these departments with control of their own destinies. Yet, does this create more walls, isolating departments even further? In essence, yes. But in practice, we may soon be experiencing a simultaneous resolution to both challenges – greater control & less isolation.

Breaking the IT Bond

The IT workload has been slowly relieving itself, driven by factors including the emergence and commoditization of cloud data storage. On-premise servers for every function are becoming a thing of the past. Software maintenance and updates are now readily available thanks to cloud vendors.

But the most important development for departments across the enterprise is more intuitive, self-sustaining software. Partially driven by the software-as-a-service model, this development has simplified how marketing professionals manage their websites; how sales professionals manage new business information; and how HR professionals manage employees—CMS, CRM, KM and HRIS platforms, respectively.

Most of these platforms exist independent from each other. For some enterprises, IT departments (or outside developers) are currently tasked with creating bridges between these solutions, especially as big data begins to become a viable and rich resource. So when will enterprise applications be more accessible to business units that need them most? The answer may be found in the way those end users learn to engage with the technology, forming a stickier, more intuitive experience.

The Social Enterprise Could Be the Answer

Imagine a single hub for communication and storage, where communication and collaboration takes on a social bent. Achieving these objectives is just some of the promise of the emerging social enterprise. For most professionals, online social skills are innate. Even those of us with weak interpersonal skills have become apt at using social media.

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Enterprise managers that understand this and find ways to implement it may have an operational advantage.

Whether you believe it or not, it can be productive to add a social layer to, say, analytics. A conversation, occurring right next to the data, could reveal some interesting interpretations. An account manager with an analytical mind might bring a new perspective. You have a place to capture adjustments or new ideas for the next round of data capture.

To clarify, the “social” lies in the interaction, not the subject. People use social media often because it’s easy to use. Applying those concepts to the enterprise opens a whole new world of collaboration and makes software use more intuitive. And with more intuitive, useful software, we can manage our own processes and let IT spend time on more pressing initiatives.

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