Apple did something ingenious when it came up with the idea of a Genius Bar in 2001 with the opening of its first Apple retail store. At a time when many other vendors left consumers to sit and stew while technical support staff in far-off places attempted to solve their problems over the phone, or via a painstakingly slow chat function, Apple got personal. Specifically, it let its buyers belly on up and have a real-live, face-to-face session with an Apple-trained tech right at their local Apple retail store.

This idea has apparently caught on with some CIOs who want to make their own IT staff more accessible and approachable to internal users, too. The Seattle headquarters of Starbucks, for example, features a Tech Café IT help desk modeled on the Apple store: InformationWeek reported that under direction of CIO Stephen Gillett, employees can come in, browse computing equipment they want to use, or connect with an IT staffer at the coffee king’s own version of a Genius Bar.

That’s a good first start, but I’m guessing that the Genius Bar concept can be taken even further. In fact, I think there’s an opportunity for each party — IT and business users — to have a chance at playing Genius. IT has valuable information to impart about technical support and a lot more. But the consumerization of IT has made business users not only more vocal about what they want, but also more savvy about the goals. In other words, the “bar” could be an exchange of ideas for both sides.

IT and Espresso

Having a physical Genius Bar already in place is not a prerequisite for fostering a deeper discussion between IT and the users it serves, however. It’s great if you have one, as far as ambience and meeting logistics go, but there’s nothing to stop IT leaders from booking a conference room and renting an espresso machine for regular bimonthly or even more frequent meetings with various invited segments of the business-user community.

The idea is to keep it informal, not to have business unit leaders or department members presenting ideas to the IT staff. Rather, it is about giving IT an opportunity to pick their brains about how they — and maybe their customers — would like to use new tools and technologies. Ideally, the goal is to make those dreams come true.

And the timing couldn’t better. Here are a few recent trends that might help you kick off a Genius session or two at your enterprise:

• The new Apple iPad is here. Research company GigaOM recently posted  a blog by Stacey Higginbotham pointing to research showing that 64 percent of mobile workers now carry a tablet. The blog focused on network and security issues, but your Genius session with your tablet users — which should include as many frequent traveler execs and field workers as possible — might focus on getting as much value out of these devices as they can, every day. Chances are, they’re already familiar with applications out there that help them do their jobs better. IT can learn about those apps in the context of nuts-and-bolts concerns such as security and volume-licensing opportunities. But perhaps even more valuable is the chance for IT to see whether there are ways to boost user experiences and build some good will.

• The new Apple iPad is here. Yes, I know I said that already, but there’s so much going on in the tablet world that surely you don’t expect to cover it all in one Genius session! So also plan to set up some Genius time with your marketing crew. Last October, The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, in collaboration with The Economist Group, provided impressive figures about tablet adoption: It reported that 11 percent of U.S. adults own a tablet and 77 percent use it every day. For its part, ChangeWave Research, a service of 451 Research, in a survey Your marketing folks should be exploring ways to exploit tablet use for enterprise customer and consumer advantage.

Another recent survey from Equation Research, reports that 41 percent of the tablet users have experienced slow load times and crashes, poor page formatting, and other issues that may mean it’s time to think about optimizing websites for the new format.

Chatting up Social Media

• Social media — that one’s here too. Companies are still struggling to make sense of it. If your company is like many others, marketing probably has led many of the efforts to figure out how to use social media to promote the brand and respond to customers, but it’s been a difficult proposition and one that’s getting ever more so. You want to bring the marketing folks to the Genius Bar (again) so you can better understand what they’re doing and what obstacles they’re struggling to surmount — and it’s guaranteed much of it will have to do with a very big, very unstructured, data analytics problem. They can’t go it alone, and they need your IT department to be aware of the importance of coming to grips with the challenge — even if your team is still struggling with that itself.

Enterprise 2.0 collaboration has been long promised, but is as yet largely unrealized. I urge you to read the whole of a blog I’ll excerpt here. It’s at Beyond the Cube and was written by Laurie Buczek, who formerly managed the internal social collaboration efforts for a large global enterprise, and who watched those efforts fail to achieve what she had hoped for. One of the points she makes is that: “We managed to do the normal IT deployment model — the very model I fiercely advocated for us not to do. We deployed just another tool amongst a minefield of other collaborative tools — without integration. To make it even harder, we underinvested in transition change management.”

That’s a fate Laurie thinks can be avoided. I do, too, especially if you set up a Genius Bar gathering for social business strategy managers as well as those who have carved a name for themselves in social media. As Laurie notes, these folks can explain how internal social media communities need to feel natural and part of the workflow.

I’m sure there are plenty of other topics you’d like to engage in more deeply with the business over a cup of cappuccino or tea, so I’ll leave you to take it from here. Let us know where you think your own Genius Bar might go — and enjoy!

What is the state of enterprise adoption of consumer-driven IT? By all indications, it’s a very mixed bag right now. While leading-edge businesses are forging ahead with trials and rollouts to meet user demand and to “do something,” a great many more enterprises are still in the early stages; following others and figuring it out as they go along. And then there’s the sticky issue of who is steering these efforts — IT, the business or consumers. If, indeed, there is a cohesive plan, what is the CIO’s role?

These were some of the key topics discussed at a recent executive forum sponsored by CA Technologies, Consumer Driven IT: Thriving in the New Normal. I wrote here about the assertive mobile and social media efforts of First Data, Coca Cola Refreshments and Spectrum Health, represented at the multicity webcast last month. At the same time, polls conducted during the event, as well as comments from leading analysts, indicate that there may be a gap between IT and other parts of the business when it comes to implementation.

When the audience was polled about IT’s  approach to cloud or mobile applications and services, online social networks, rich media and smart  devices, the largest percentage of respondents (36%) said they are “following the market,” versus 24 percent who said they are “very proactive” in their efforts. Interestingly, 22 percent were still in the planning stages, and 11 percent of the businesses had “little or no formal IT involvement.”

CA Technologies, audience poll, Feb. 2012

Everyone agrees that a huge shift is taking place where consumers not only influence the type of technologies used in the workplace but the format and delivery of information that businesses must generate. As Mark McDonald, Group Vice President and Head of Research in Gartner Executive Programs, said: “Traditionally, we’ve kind of blocked those people out. But increasingly, allowing them access to information, to apply it the way they want, is really part of being responsive and being business focused.”

The poll data confirms what many of us already suspect: IT execs are not leading the charge as strongly as they could. Andi Mann, Vice President of Cloud Strategy at CA Technologies, noted: “IT has the ability to drive initiatives focused on new or expanded revenue sources — not just responding to new devices, social networks and other disruptive technologies, but providing new IT services across any and all platforms, devices and geographies.” Yet, “only one in five IT executives surveyed recently is being proactive in leveraging consumer driven IT to get ahead of this trend.”

Lead or Be Left Behind

In Mann’s view: “if you’re not actively pursuing consumer technologies, you are being left behind. If your customers can’t come to [IT leaders] for it, they’re going to go to someone else.” In the past, businesses used to run the business and set the strategy three, five years in advance, he said. “But now consumers are saying, ‘Well, I want something else now.’ In six weeks’ time it could change again. You’ve really got to have constant course correction because consumers are driving so many of these activities.”

But there is clearly hesitation about how to meet these demands. When the audience was asked, “How confident are you in your current ability to meet customer and end-user expectations with regard to IT services,” nearly half (48%) said “somewhat confident,” versus 34 percent who were “very confident.” Fifteen percent were “not very confident” that they can achieve the goal at all.

CA Technologies, audience poll, Feb. 2012

While some say CIOs are losing ground and missing opportunities, others suggest that it doesn’t matter who leads the effort, as long as you jump into the fray. McDonald might have been speaking directly to these reluctant CIOs when he said: “If you view [non-IT sponsored efforts] as something you have to compete against; where they are taking mindshare or budget share away from you, then you’re creating a lose/lose opportunity.”

Even though a recent Gartner survey showed that 38 percent of the average technologies spend is outside of the IT budget, McDonald advised IT not to “look at that as a terrible risk. Actually, it’s a wonderful opportunity because the innovation really does come from the edge … from insights that are outside. Being open to that is absolutely critical for being a successful business partner.”

Perhaps IT will have a key role to play pulling together all the disparate parts. As McDonald said, “You’re seeing a real transformation of what it means to have technology and what the relationships are between customers, trading partners and others that are really creating a new environment.”

Breaking Down Silos

Moreover, McDonald said that much of the agility that organizations lack “is actually self-inflicted. They lock up resources in functional silos; they make it very difficult to move resources from project to project. And so breaking down those silos and really working in that environment to raise productivity, to raise throughput and to reduce cycle time is absolutely essential.”

What is your role in consumer IT? Are you steering the implementation as well as the conversation? Are you working across silos with the business and your customers to help the business grow or standing by and seeing how it unfolds? Please share your strategies with your peers on Smart Enterprise Exchange.

View the full webcast here. 

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

CFOs have said to me that CIOs want a seat at the executive table, but unfortunately, the only thing they offer is cost cutting. Make no mistake, lowering the cost of IT is important, but these days it’s table stakes. You’re expected to do that. So how do you earn a seat at the table? Think new ideas; think about what it means to use technology to truly transform a service business.

You’re most likely the CIO of a service company. Eighty to 90 percent of the U.S. economy is a service economy. So what does that mean? What is service? Is it answering the phone nicely from Bangalore? Is it flipping burgers at In-and-Out burgers? No. Service is delivering information that’s personal and relevant to your customers. Whether that’s asking the concierge at the hotel you’re staying at for an affordable Thai restaurant within walking distance and getting the right answer, or having your doctor say that based on your genome and lifestyle you need to be on this drug and start exercising, service is information — personal and relevant to you.

The Amazon Lesson

Why is that important for you as an IT professional? I’m going to use Amazon as an example. When you log on to the Amazon website, it’s trying to deliver information that’s personal and relevant to you. Now try to locate the transaction-processing system. If you haven’t found it, it’s that little shopping cart in the upper right hand corner — pretty hard to find, right? So how important is it? Not very. Like many of you, I’ve spent my career making transaction processing more reliable, available and scalable, whether those are ATM systems or implementing an order-to-cash business process flow. But how important are these going forward? Not very.

Let me draw your attention to your favorite financial services website. Of course, you have to log in, but from that point on you are interacting with a “shopping cart,” a transaction processing system. You can debit, credit, purchase or sell a stock, reliably and with data integrity, but does the system deliver service — information that is personal and relevant to you? Could it say, “People like you bought a particular stock today,” or “People like you refinanced their mortgage today”? Could your financial services firm deliver information that is personal and relevant to you?

Or consider this scenario. Four weeks ago, you bought some royal blue tiles at a big box home improvement store; three weeks ago, you bought a vanity; last week you bought a sink. Of course, you’re remodeling your bathroom. Why, then, isn’t anyone sending you an email or an instant message telling you that a certain toilet is available today in royal blue at a 10 percent discount and you can pick it up with  her compliments? Service is information, personal and relevant to you.

Making IT Relevant

The challenge today is not a lack of information. Your company and every company have at least 10 or 100 Internets full of data. The challenge now is to make that information personal and relevant. Why is this so hard?

The first thing you need to realize is that you’re a victim of the SQL hammer. If having a hammer means everything is a nail, then it’s the same for SQL. Imagine, for instance, that Google’s search engine (which is trying to deliver information that is personal and relevant to you) was built by a group of SQL engineers. First, they would have designed a global data schema for all the information on the planet. Then they would have used the extract, transform and load (ETL) process and data-cleansing tools to bring all the information on the planet into their global SQL database. Finally, they would write reports such as: “Places to camp in France,” or “Chinese restaurants in Hickory, N.C.” After 10 years and tens of millions of dollars, the team would probably have given up. Fortunately, Google didn’t take that approach.

New Service Technology

The point is that you need new hammers — and new approaches — to reach these new goals. The whole conversation about the consumerization of IT is taking you in the wrong direction. Sure, debating whether your employees should or shouldn’t be posting to Facebook at work, or how to block access to Dropbox, are warranted. But the bigger discussion should be about how you bring the technologies born in the consumer world and apply them to the challenges of delivering information that is personal and relevant to your customers and suppliers.

My advice? Start studying up on Hadoop, Lucene, Hive, Mahout and Cassandra. These technologies are being used by consumer applications to make sense of and deliver super-large volumes of information [a.k.a. Big Data] that is personal and relevant to you. Start a simple project that uses one of these hammers to build a service system for your customers and suppliers. That’s how to earn a seat at the table. When you’ve figured out how to deliver information that is personal and relevant to a retail, education, financial services, health-care, high-technology or government customer, then you’ll be welcome at the head of the table.

**********

Timothy Chou teaches cloud computing at Stanford University. He is the former president of Oracle On Demand, a founder of cloudbook.net and author of Cloud: Seven Clear Business Models. This blog was adapted from an article in CFO magazine.

* Etch A Sketch is a registered trademark by the Ohio Art Company

Read more about the new era of consumer driven IT at: www.ca.com/cdit.

- Cartoon is under Creative Commons liscence (Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works)

Read the complete post at: http://bit.ly/uD5EJU

Originally posted, October 28,  2011:  http://bit.ly/t6h1KJ