IT Can No Longer Afford to Ignore Its Users
by Aaron Levie | 12:00 PM November 14, 2013
The history of enterprise technology has been fairly unforgiving to the people intended to use it. For the past half-century, most information technology models propagated two unassailable truths: that enterprise technology was purchased by a select few, and the technology was bought for the company. As for the delight of the individuals using the technology itself? They’ll deal.
It was a clear, if inelegant approach. But it was an approach that worked for a period when information technology was relatively scarce, cumbersome, and often extraordinarily expensive. During these decades, IT organizations retained nearly complete control of the technology architecture, and with little to challenge them. Bob in Finance simply didn’t bring his own mainframe to work. Sure, end-user software would occasionally go viral (Visicalc, anyone?), but no matter how easy it was to buy a computer at your neighborhood CompUSA (R.I.P.), the complexity and cost of enterprise software ensured that the IT model remained enterprise-centric.
Fast forward to today, and several trends are upending the traditional IT approach. People who have been using computers since before they could walk are now entering the workplace by the millions, employees of all ages are bringing their own devices and software into the office, and cloud adoption is shifting computing workloads out of the enterprise’s data center.
New workers. New devices. No more servers. Usually a single inflection point is hard to grapple with. Today’s enterprises have three.
The old model is no longer sustainable. Work is changing, and IT needs to change along with it.
It used to be that the IT department’s job was to define and standardize on a set of systems, processes, architectures and technologies for the organization. But how can an enterprise standardize on a dimension like mobile that’s always one hardware cycle away from changing dramatically? Or how can an enterprise implement a mobile strategy leading with iPads, but continue to support software vendors that don’t play well with Apple?
Some call this “consumerization of IT”, but this descriptor mostly misses to the point. It’s not about consumer apps being used for work, and it’s not just about enterprise apps taking on more consumer-like characteristics.
The enterprise architecture of the future needs to invert traditional thinking. Instead of looking at the world as a series of systems, networks, and data schemas from an enterprise top-down view, start looking at the users’ needs first and expand outward from there. Geoffrey Moore describes the need for a “social contract” between IT and end-users, one that’s built on a foundation of fundamental principles: applications must run on any device, identity can extend anywhere, and data is always accessible.
In this new world, IT organizations focus on enabling productivity. User interfaces are no longer regarded indiscriminately, but weighed heavily. Control of information is no longer prioritized over making sure the right people can access it. CIOs who don’t empower their workforce become disempowered.
This is going to be a hard change to swallow for many IT groups, with new skills to learn, strategies to develop, and processes to implement. But there are many examples of it paying dividends. Ralph Lora, the CIO of Clorox, riffing off the antagonistic concept of “shadow IT,”, has implemented an approach he calls “Shallow IT.” This allows for the wide testing and nurturing of consumer-grade and adopted solutions in the enterprise, done in a calculated but flexible way, proving out all new enterprise apps to help power the $5.5B company. Eduardo Conrado is shifting Motorola Solutions toward User-centric IT, distinct from a traditional operationally focused view. Mike Kail, the CIO of Netflix, leads his organization by focusing on what IT can provide, instead of what IT can control.
And as the IT function evolves, technology vendors must keep pace to remain relevant. When decision-making power was concentrated at the top of an organization, software vendors reflected this reality by prioritizing features and functionality designed to be “bought” instead of “used.” But today, users and individuals have more influence over the technology they will use than ever before.
Today, a new set of companies are flipping legacy thinking, with Workday, Salesforce, Zendesk, GoodData, Asana, ServiceNow and others delivering simple, open, and platform-agnostic solutions. Vendors that don’t support the multi-platform world we live in with a user-centric mindset will be locked out. Software that isn’t used gets shut off.
For those leaders and organizations that do make the leap, IT will become more competitive and valued than ever before. Fewer user complaints, server reboots, and compatibility issues. Employees get the tools they need, the enterprise gets massive productivity gains, and the cycle repeats. Ultimately, there may be little choice in the matter. With the technology inflection points we’re facing today, the IT organizations that will thrive going forward will be those that can navigate these shifts by putting the user at the center.
Aaron Levie is co-founder and CEO of Box. Follow him on Twitter at @levie.