I love the Dilbert comic strips because they point out the humorous side of our daily business lives. They can be biting at times, and certainly they exaggerate enormously, but like a lot of humor they are funny because they often ring true.

IT has received its fair share of attention from Scott Adams, the creator of the strip, over the years and that seems to be stepping up recently as the disruption accelerates. In just the past week or two, for example, Dilbert’s world has poked fun at IT monitoring employee Web sites, the proliferation of passwords, and inattentive tech support. It’s good to laugh at these caricatures sometimes and see the light side of the bureaucracies we inadvertently create. At the same time, we should be careful that life doesn’t imitate art in this case — and that IT is solving business problems, not creating new ones.

Oddly, perhaps, I thought of Dilbert when I read a recent white paper published by Accenture’s prestigious Institute for High Performance, which raised a very serious question: Can Enterprise IT Survive the Meteor of Consumer Technology?

It’s an excellent position paper that lays forth several premises about the consumerization of IT — something we have all heard about and are experiencing daily. Fundamentally, Accenture says: “As consumer technologies become ever more powerful and useful, IT leaders face difficult questions about how to adapt. While definitive answers are elusive for now, they must be grappled with today if enterprise IT is not to be pushed completely to the sidelines in the next few years.”

I would include cloud computing along with the consumer technologies that line of businesses are adopting on their own, often circumventing traditional IT purchasing processes.

Accenture is not alone in considering these issues, of course. In a report late last year, McKinsey also concluded that “fully networked enterprises are not only more likely to be market leaders or to be gaining market share, but [they] also use management practices that lead to margins higher than those of companies using the Web in more limited ways.” Smart Enterprise Exchange has featured companies that are implementing these practices, as well, such as Procter & Gamble’s e-commerce efforts, and Schumacher Group’s dive into mobile technologies this year.

Yet Accenture’s paper seems most significant to me because it focuses on the CIO and the IT department transformation that’s taking place. Its analysts pose very provocative and direct questions when they ask: “Is it inevitable that IT will become irrelevant over time? For that matter, is it possible that the CIO has already lost the control he was fighting so hard to keep?”

Smart Enterprise magazine and the Smart Enterprise Exchange community will be taking an in-depth look at these critical IT issues in the coming months. Specifically, how are collaborative and consumer platforms disrupting business and repositioning IT in the enterprise, and how can CIOs get ahead of the curve?

We will speak with CIOs at businesses such as Kaiser Permanente, CorePLUS and JetBlue Airways who are not only embracing consumer technologies in their global enterprises, but are finding ways to use them for competitive advantage, revenue-generation and customer satisfaction — exactly the IT topics that Dilbert and others have criticized in the past. Perhaps it is by seizing the opportunities new platforms represent that IT will not only maintain its relevance, but grow even more important to the enterprise.

In addition, we’ll highlight the results of two in-depth, global research studies that CA Technologies conducted with IDC. The first, with more than 1,000 consumer-tech user responses describes “the booming adoption of mobile and online/cloud technologies for personal and business use and consumers’ expectations of much higher usage going forward.” The second, surveyed more than 800 enterprise IT executives to get their perspective and strategies in light of the rapid pace of consumer tech usage. The key recommendations? Offer support and focus on automation, management and security. [See related article here.]

We also invite you to help lead our online discussion and offer your experiences, opinions and solutions foryour peers.You can begin by taking this poll and also by leaving a comment on this blog. You can also create a discussion thread on the site’s Web 2.0 in the Enterprise Group or on our Linked In group.

Paula  Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

I hope you are enjoying some downtime and taking a holiday break this month. Here at Smart Enterprise Exchange it’s been especially busy as we enhanced and migrated to the new community platform. Please take a virtual tour of the site and visit our new discussions, blogs, groups and content.

As you travel the site, you will find reports from our recent European live events in London; Mannheim, Germany; and Rome, as well as slides from our Bangalore, India, Live Exchange. This month we will host events in the U.S., including Sacramento, Calif., Phoenix and Chicago.

Additionally, be sure to tune into a recently conducted audiocast panel discussion on the topic of Optimal Automation with IT executives in the healthcare, human resources and financial services industries. Later in the month, we feature a series of video interviews with your CIO peers discussing collaboration trends. You will find insightful best practices from public-sector CIOs in Canada and private-sector executives in New York that reflect the global thinking of our membership.

In case you missed Tom Davenport’s July column on Optimal Automation, Tom offers a calm, practical voice in hectic times like these. He builds on the basics — process automation and knowledge management, for instance — yet finds new twists and approaches to adopt. His perspectives about corporate decision making should resonate with all business leaders who are struggling to make sound choices and plans amid uncertainty. In particular, his four-point call to action requires CIOs to become active partners in the decision-making process and provides tools to keep the company on the right path. For all these reasons, I’m pleased Tom will be available on the site to answer questions from members for a few days in September. Look for more details and dates soon.

If you’d like to participate more actively in Smart Enterprise Exchange, please join one of our existing special-interest groups — such as public-sector CIOs; members who are based in London or India; or anyone interested in mainframes, service management or Web 2.0. If you have other topics of importance, form your own group, ask a question, post a blog or download a presentation from one of our events.

As you can tell, there are many ways to get involved in the new Smart Enterprise Exchange, and we hope you’ll find it to be a uniquely vital business tool and a vibrant community resource.

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

Peter Cochrane, this month's Smart Insight contributor on the topic, The Collaborative CIO, has published and lectured widely on technology and the impact of IT on business. A seasoned consultant and a former IT executive at BT, Cochrane writes that once CIOs embrace Enterprise 2.0, instead of trying to stop or limit it, the new capabilities "will increase the span and speed of business and lead to new forms of virtualization." Moreover, he expects Web technologies to finally deliver the long-sought collaboration that businesses crave. It's a pretty powerful endorsement.

And Cochrane is not alone in his enthusiasm. A research survey of 860 global CIOs, conducted earlier this year by United Business Media's TechWeb division, found that "moving the company closer to customers via Web 2.0 and other technologies" was one of the top six priorities listed by respondents. They see collaboration with global partners and suppliers as an increasingly critical need. You can get more details on the Next Practices Research report here.

One reason I'm so interested in how CIOs view professional networking is because I am becoming a personal stakeholder in the technology. Next month, Smart Enterprise Exchange will migrate to a new online collaborative platform. The goal is for our 1,300 global members — and those who join us in the future — to collaborate with one another as well as with our subject-matter experts. For more than a year we have offered a broad range of fresh, expert opinions, IT best practices and resources that we hope you are using to run your daily operations. Now it's time to make the community a true 'exchange' with more real-time conversations and multimedia formats. We also know that you are experimenting with collaborative networks inside your own companies and that you understand the value they bring to professional environments.

We've made sure that you will continue to have private, secure access to stimulating, insightful perspectives and content. In addition, you can choose to exchange insights with your peers or post information — or not. We will be sharing more details about our plans in the coming weeks and hope you are as enthusiastic as we are about the potential that professional collaboration tools hold for you as IT executives, as well as for your enterprise users.

Paula Klein
editor@smartenterpriseexchange.com
Editor
Smart Enterprise Exchange