In my last article, What to Do When Your Business Model Changes, I concluded by stating I would define the emerging focus and need for ‘platforms’ to provision and manage the use of technology within an enterprise in a later article. However, first it is necessary to add one more demand, or requirement, that is linked to the change in business models and relates to another of my articles, Free Your Users (or They Will Free Themselves). The subtitle for that piece is The Vexed Issue of Social Media and BYOD in the Workplace, which leads to this article about the biggest driver for change – people – and the manner in which they are using technology to work in new ways.

An important element in the article on business models that I want to build on is the concept of “Inside-Out” versus “Outside-In”. These terms define the difference between internal business processes focused on supporting some degree of external web access, Inside-Out, versus externally focused cloud, mobility solutions, apps, and of course, social tools (all which need restricted internal access), Outside-In.

After over twenty years of optimizing internal processes and workflows, the manner in which people work inside the business is fully understood. Linking the business activities of the back office with the Inside-Out focus of technology helps to bring technology and business together.

The disruptive technologies of cloud-based applications, delivered through browsers and apps to a variety of devices, are all part of the external environment and linked to the role of front office. New business models are focused on taking these external capabilities and redefining how to find, win and deliver new forms of competitive offerings.

Front office environments are focused on people who create value through external interactions to win and deliver business, people working Outside-In. This is unlike the back office where the focus is on process removing people and cost.

Outside-In technologies enable the people in the front office to find and share the resource they need to improve their performance within these new business models. “The Future of Work” is a term used to describe the manner in which these new technologies are deployed in new optimal ways.

Much of the confusion about the increasing use of social tools, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs, and trend to bypass the IT department to use external cloud solutions, arises from the disconnect between the Outside-In work practices of the front office and the Inside-Out practices of IT’s traditional back office deployments.

Understanding this and refocusing on the new working practices of the front office is a necessary break through in reacting to the inevitable changes already under way in most enterprises.

Whether it’s called BYOD, Shadow IT, Business-Technology, or Consumer IT, there is a common change in the younger generation from around 35 years of age down who have grown up with technology and see it as a lifestyle tool. This is markedly different to the generations before whose relationship with IT was most likely forced on them, directed to use a locked down enterprise PC with a narrow selection of relatively unfriendly monolithic applications. The difference in approach to technology can be broken down into nine common attitudes to different aspects of work.

Source: Adapted from IBM report ‘Driving Workforce Productivity by Enabling Social Connection’ (June 2009)

Of course nobody is an exact fit to all the nine behaviors but this table goes a long way towards explaining some of the internal tensions in an enterprise.

Front office roles tend to employ younger people whilst senior people controlling the enterprise through its back office processes tend to be in the older two groups.

Most of the senior management will have reached their current level through the business model revolution called Business Process Re-Engineering during mid 1990s when Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) was developed to make integrate the disruptive technology capabilities that networked PCs introduced into the mainstream of the business.

Business process engineering and the redesign of a firm’s business processes, workflows and the technology that supported them highlighted the need for a new form of enterprise communication along the new processes, the introduction of email! The redesigned business processes deliberately crossed and broke up the old departmental management structure substituting a process based management structure in its place. Email was seized on as the replacement for the office memo and an efficient means to communicate with the known and named people in each process.

Today email has become one of the most significant tools used to manage an enterprise.

Actually, we should probably say “manage back office defined processes” because as many front office staff would be quick to point out it doesn’t help them to try to find answers to external questions, events and opportunities. The ‘structure’ of email and the mapping to names, rather than knowledge, is exactly what Inside-Out back office needs. A senior manager will want to know who is responsible for what in the core processes. However, for a front office worker the limitations of this are severe; after all if their role is externally focused they simply will not know who they should send which question on what topic to if it doesn’t fit with the enterprises internal processes.

The new Outside-In business models, supported by social tools and collaborative working, need answers to questions based on their topic or content, without having to determine which person to address an email too.

The issue is to integrate these tools and work practice into a business in accordance with the nine characteristics of the ‘technology conscious generation’. This almost certainly requires the front office staff to adopt BYOD and the Outside-In model.

At this point it should be clear as to what, where and why a change is taking place in the tools being used by employees. The strategic nature of this change, from an enterprise point of view, should also be clear.

The new focus for an enterprise is to reform the front office capabilities to enable it to support new competitive market demands. As such, the adoption of new working practices will be a given.

More particularly, it should enable a thoughtful CIO to decide when and how to accept the introduction of new technologies, using the concepts of Inside-Out and Outside-In as the basis for technology separation.

Its been a big topic to cover but hopefully it brings out the key issues, relating them to the immediate tactical needs to address the issues being raised by the use of new technologies by employees, usually backed by their younger business managers. However, it also raises some very critical issues about enterprise management and the governance of its technology empowered employees. This is where “platforms” enter the equation.

Creating a new business platform is the strategic answer, a platform that will enable the management of people and their use of apps and devices in enterprise business activities, all in accordance with business rules established by management. That’s the topic for the next article, bringing together all the elements of my previous three.

As a closing thought, this is the beginning of a longer journey that will see radical change in the manner in which an enterprise functions. Businesses will become truly driven by the need to find optimal responses to external market events, opportunities, and requirements. Thought leaders are already actively providing research papers and presentations that really address a whole redesign in what and how we work in the long term. To understand exactly where this may take the future of work, listen to John Seddon make a series of logical connections that make it hard to deny the manner of the change.

The fundamental question we need to ask ourselves is not “What is the role of the CIO and the IT department?” This is something that is already well defined and understood. The question we need to ask ourselves is “What role should technology be playing in the business?”

Digital Business

In previous articles I addressed the questions of Must the Business Always Bypass IT When It Wants to Innovate? and Free Your Users (or They Will Free Themselves): The vexed issue of Social Media and BYOD in the workplace. Both questions focus on the challenge of responding to new business drivers coming from outside the traditional requirements and role of the CIO (and of the IT department), as we would usually understand them, based on the role and experiences of the last 20 to 25 years.

This piece asks the question “What role should technology play in business?” This is a larger question than the one currently hanging over the role of the CIO and the IT department. This is a bigger question, a question that starts by asking what role technology is will play in the new “innovative” business models that are emerging. 

In short, we need to approach how technology will fit into what some call Digital Business, with fresh thinking based around a set of new and very different business requirements. At the core of this change is the pervasive nature of technology in society, which has resulted in people using technology to redefine their lives. This is not just shopping from a website; it’s a lifestyle change in where and how we find information and how we choose to act upon it.

This shift in our attitude to technology is frequently called “Consumer IT”. The reality is that people are driving the uptake and use of technology in business to do business rather than IT professionals. This was at the core of my last article, Free Your Users (or They Will Free Themselves).

In this piece I want to move on to the theme of “innovation”, currently a popular term with as many interpretations and mismatched understandings as the technology elements that go with it.

Innovation, but not as we’ve been doing it

Most IT departments pride themselves in being innovative and can rightly point to a track record in assessing and deploying year by year continuous improvements by “innovatively” adopting new technology. However that’s not what a business school would mean by their use of the term. Instead they would add two key words that provide some increased clarification: Innovation in Business Models.

This difference can be clearly expressed if we go back to the arrival of Amazon and compare it with the then US leader Barnes & Noble response to the emergence of the internet.

Barnes & Noble added a website enabling customers to order books online. For their existing business is concerned with increasing channels to market for incremental business, with the majority of the business model still being unchanged, focused physical locations carrying stock for walk in customers and browsing.

Amazon fundamentally rethought the business model of selling books and changed it from being based on bookstores with their overheads and limitations on stock carried.  Amazon took advantage of ubiquitous use of technology in the hands of consumers to allow them to browse and buy in a manner that opened up a whole range of new possibilities.

You can argue that the final point in the revolution was the advent of the Kindle and dropping physically printed books for electronic editions, that truly is an ‘innovation in the business model’.

Amazon still has an internal back office carrying out processes under the best processes of IT, but its business model to find, win, gain orders and more particularly create long term customer relationships with repeat business is based on using technology “outside” the “internal” focus of operating the business associated with IT.

New business models break old assumptions

In the first article in this series – Must the Business Always Bypass IT When It Wants to Innovate? – I provided a breakdown of nineteen recognizable core business models that are frequently used as references for the possible digital business options and their innovative business models.

Source: Mark W. Johnson (2010), Seizing the White Space, Harvard Business Press

There are a number of ways to define digital business. The major points are:

It is interactive between participants to shape what is achieved.

• It is collaborative in the manner that people interact to share experiences and comment on products or experiences.
• It depends on apps, browsers and clouds.
• It occurs outside the firewall and away from the enterprises internal systems.

You can add a lot more to this list, but these main points tell us why the hard won experiences of delivering internal enterprise transactional processes safely isolated from the external world by the firewall on client-server technology simply don’t transfer well, if at all, to the new world and the support of innovative business models.

McKinsey tell us in a recently published report Bullish on Digital  that 30% of major businesses have, in recognition of this, appointed Chief Digital Officers (CDOs), though there are several other titles around that equate to the same role as well with Chief Innovation Officer being the main one. You can learn a great deal more about the role and actions of a CDO at their association website CDO Club.

Does hiring a CDO change anything?

However, you are reading this as a CIO so thus far this is not an encouraging message! Let’s recognize that the CDO is effectively just another manager in the business who needs technology to make their operational and strategic requirements to happen. Okay, so they are a technology literate manager with a strong grasp of the topic, but the question is how to define roles and responsibilities within an enterprise to make it coherent and operational successful.

A little over two years ago I wrote in my CTO blog on the Capgemini site about this topic around the title “Inside-Out” versus “Outside-In”. The ideas in the post appeared in a full Capgemini white paper at the beginning of 2012 entitled The Cloud; Time to Deliver which is available on Slideshare. Rather than rewrite the paper here, can I suggest that this white paper should help you to understand and build a realistic approach that combines both.  More recently an interesting update on Inside-out and Outside-in, linked to SAP and ERP, has been posted on the Capgemini Capping IT Off blog site.

Innovation in technology vs. innovation in business model

So let’s end with a summary of what this means and the link to the opening paragraphs of this blog about “innovation” in the IT operations versus “innovation in business models”.

Firstly “Inside-out” defines the traditional role of IT in providing the systems to support the “internal” or “inside” the firewall operations, with a secondary focus on providing a limited and controlled set of accesses externally, or “outside” the firewall. The new business models depend on using technology externally or “outside” the firewall, with a secondary concern to provide limited access internally, or “inside” the firewall.

If we now apply this to cloud technology “innovatively” then its role in conventional IT in “Inside-Out” is to improve the virtualization and flexibility of computing resources by enabling greater efficiency in operating Client-Server enterprise IT.

Conversely cloud computing in “Outside-In” is the ability to obtain and use flexible computing resources that exist outside the firewall and are safely separated from the enterprises own systems. In addition the role and type of use required is unlikely to be client-server based; instead it will use the browser and app model.

The first is innovation in using technology to enhance the current operations and business model and the second is innovation in the business model based on being able to use technology in entirely new ways than was previously possible.

Source: Andy Mulholland

In the next article I plan to go into this more deeply by introducing how Enterprise IT should be planning, deploying and operating an Enterprise Platform to successfully underpin an Outside-In Digital Business with an auditable set of management tools. To wet your appetite for this I suggest you might like to take a look at the Open Group who are widely respected for their work in developing the TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) architecture methodology for Enterprise IT, and are now starting to address the need for what they call Platform 3.0. Why 3.0? To differentiate from the term Web 2.0, which was popular some years ago.

What role do you think technology will play in the new digital businesses that are emerging? What role do you think the IT department will play? And what opportunities do you think that this creates for technology professionals?

In my last piece on CIO of the Future, Must the Business Always Bypass IT When It Wants to Innovate?, it was pretty clear that I believed that people, and I don’t mean just IT department staff, were a key factor in the issues that come from the introduction of new technologies and new business uses for technology.

I then posed the question as to whether Line of Business (LoB) managers must always bypass the IT department when they want to innovate, and suggested that this is both the right course of action as well as being acceptable from an IT departmental systems risk basis, providing the activities were indeed truly isolated from, and unconnected to, the IT systems. Why? Because these new externally oriented and innovative uses of IT have nothing in common with the use made of IT in the internal environment.

I stated, however, that there are new risks to be clarified and managed around what, where, and how an enterprise’s people actually use these new powerful and often publicly visible capabilities.

The new front office

We look to managers to add their personal value in the form of experience and knowledge that they bring to their role. These roles are those of the Front Office staff whose interactions outside the enterprise, principally with Sales and Marketing, but also with Service Engineers, Purchasing, and Logistics staff, allows new value to be created. By value we mean increased sales revenues, more market share, and new types of products, all of which improve operational results.

This is quite different to IT’s traditional role of enabling the Back Office to operate internal processes at lower cost and with greater efficiency. IT staff don’t readily appreciate this important difference, or why paying for this out of non-IT budgets based on very different justifications makes sense.

The old saying was that half of all marketing spend is wasted, but we don’t know which half. Today marketing spend is on building online, interactive relationships with customers and potential customers, so we no longer quite have this problem.

People are in these externally facing roles for their ability to optimize the outcomes from events that are outside the control of the enterprise, calling on their personal judgment and experience to make the difference. Two decades of IT focused on optimizing internal processes has been able to offer little to help them beyond using mobility to allow them to access internal IT processes.

All too often mobility for the IT department has meant the ability to deliver accessibility to selected enterprise applications from outside the enterprise firewall. In connection with this new external environment, using new technology for the front office ‘mobility’ has a totally different meaning. Cloud suffers from the same challenge in understanding too.

Mobility should mean allowing people to be able to truly work differently by using social tools, services and apps together with a variety of different devices, including BYOD, to achieve ‘mobility’ of purpose, activity, and circumstance.

The new role for CRM

CRM is an excellent example to help us understand the issues and why conflict and confusion occurs.

CRM was introduced initially to make better use of the data created by transactions in enterprise IT applications, and as an internal tool it helped IT to align Sales with the rest of the business.

CRM then moved forward with new capabilities based on increasing use of websites to help enable sales to identify customers buying habits better.

Now CRM is being redefined from the direction of the customer, or even potential customer, to allow an enterprise to hear what the customer wants and then to try to match the customer with its products and services.

Embedding consumer technologies in your organization

As society as a whole moves to become increasingly composed of Digital Natives many industry sectors and enterprises are seeing these new technologies as ‘embedded’ in their business model: think of music, travel, personal banking, etc.

The diagram below breaks the journey from automating the back office to empowering the front office into three stages – Aligned, Enabling, and Embedded – but it doesn’t bring out the dynamics that this reality introduces.

Source: Andy Mulholland

Most IT departments are organized to operate (indeed it is essential that they carefully maintain) the data-centric transaction integrity of core internal processes, but find themselves increasingly being asked to connect to the middle box in the diagram to support various online business initiatives and are rightly wary of the risks, and indeed difficulties of this.

The Line of Business managers are working from a totally different perspective. They are coming from the top right box, driven by the need to compete innovatively in new ways in a market that is synonymous with, and can only exist because of, new technologies.

The new front office is focused outside the business

In Must the Business Always Bypass IT When It Wants to Innovate? I focused on why innovation could happen in this Embedded environment. Rapid experimentation is reasonably safe providing it remains isolated from the aligned environment.

The current conflicts occur when either or both sides try to move together into the enabled zone.

Both sides have good reason for their entrenched positions and both are currently almost irreconcilable, though in time new middleware and integration products and methods will come into play to allow this necessary scaling step in reintegrating an enterprise to occur.

But, and it’s a big but, this reintegration will occur around a different business model. This is an outside-in model, the so called ‘innovative business model’, which tries to match the operating model with how with how customers and clients want to buy and consume the company’s products. This is opposed to the BPR model of ERP that emerged in the early 90s, using technology to design the business model from inside out to restrict variation in favor of reducing costs and improving efficiency as the means of increasing competitiveness.

Inside-Out, referring to the role of IT inside the enterprise and firewall with a limited secondary role outside, versus Outside-In meaning that the new front office is focused outside the enterprise and its firewall with limited access to the IT systems inside. It’s a key point to fully grasp and understand, but do so and most things become clear.

Social Tools and BYOD are key tools for embedding IT in the business

Social Tools and BYOD? These are the key elements that support people-focused embedded businesses, and as such they are the tools that free users from the necessarily constrained environment of IT.

Let’s illustrate this by remembering that email was introduced to support the business model change that PC-based Client-Server introduced as Business Process Re-engineering. As the business processes changed to flow across the enterprise, rather than being contained in departments, a new model was needed to communicate with the people along each process: email! Now we are adopting an event-responsive business model we need a new communication model that frees the constraints that process based email imposes; that’s the role of the collaborative social tools.

It’s hard to let go of users and the mentality that goes with it. But it’s also necessary to understand who should be set free, and why. Failure to do so proactively and properly, merely means that they will escape anyway.

So the lesson is that a controlled and managed release of people equipped with the right training, risk management and indeed using new discovery tools to dynamically understand is the best method to ensure risk and security of the existing systems stays intact, and that your enterprise has people trained to make the most of powerful new technology to innovate with a reduced risk.

Otherwise your users will escape what they will see as the ‘dead hand’ blocking much needed moves to compete. And the problem with escapees is that nobody knows who they are, where they are, or most of all what value or risk and cost they pose!

Quite a few years back, in fact I have trouble remembering exactly when given the pace of technology change and the rate of uptake by the general population, I used to ask audiences a few questions. I asked them for a show of hands from all those who had a better PC and Internet access at home than work. I could be guaranteed to see an overwhelming majority. I’d ask if they had ever actively chosen to go home because their home PC enabled them to do a particular task more effectively than their work PC. Another overwhelming majority would put their hands up.

This shows that even ten years ago that many Line of Business (LoB) managers were already finding the constraints of “enterprise IT” a challenge to be bypassed.

Come forward to around two years ago and I was asking a similar question about ownership and use of Apple iPads (and for the business community this is overwhelmingly the tablet of choice). LoB managers couldn’t get their hand up fast enough. Unless they were in the finance or IT departments, where all their work was going to be internally focused on the enterprise IT systems.

Add a question to see if they were using their tablet for business use, and the simple answer was that the iPad enabled them to access information and services that IT didn’t, or couldn’t, provide.

At this time the iPad almost certainly was not in any way intended to be “connected” to enterprise IT. It posed relatively little risk (or even, from the perspective of IT, maybe no risk) and therefore a LoB manager felt that it had nothing to do with the IT department.

At this point two things should have become clear.

First is that this is unlike the introduction of mobile phones where the focus was on email, as email required an interactive connection into enterprise IT.

Second is that these users are deploying a new generation of technology and devices for a new generation of business requirements. These solutions provide a completely different set of capabilities, capabilities that the existing generation of client-server based enterprise IT applications does not provide.

Now throw in the key question to our audience: do you have online banking and are you able to manage your own budgets and financial matters more simply and easily than before? The answer is of course “yes”. But now try asking: are you using this to bypass your enterprise’s financial systems? The unanimous reaction is “definitely not”. The fiscal management of an enterprise is recognized to be a professionally managed and legally defined responsibility.

Now move the discussion towards how far the LoB managers should be allowed to take their use of technology. The discussion will initially position the IT department in the role of technology support, and the LoB managers’ ability to be able to use these new consumer technologies without needing this support.

The reality we need to bring the discussion towards is the role IT plays in providing an auditable and compliant enterprise operating environment that underpins operations across the business, just as critically as the financial systems, systems which after all depend on IT anyway!

Yup, thought provoking isn’t it?

LoBs instinctively recognize the financial no-no, but equally instinctively have a first reaction that it’s okay to do what they are doing. That is until they really start to think about the implications of all LoBs across the group adopting this behavior, or how reliant they are on common, shared trusted information rather than the challenge of “trash and treasure” in “Big Data” usage. And that’s before we get to the point of auditable traceability!

The CIO role in the new business model of the early 1990s

CIOs of a certain age and with long memories should at this point cast their minds back to the adoption pattern of PCs around 1990, back when the enterprise computing service was based on mainframes and minis running terminal-based applications.

In those days, when PCs represented the new and disruptive technology, business managers also bought their own PCs, even their own departmental networks, all for exactly the same reason as now. Namely, to use a new generation of technology to deploy a new generation of business capabilities that lay outside the capabilities of the existing enterprise data center with its mainframe/mini computer terminal-based systems. At first these were also standalone applications, as a younger generation of LoB manager introduced spreadsheets and other simple applications, and shared data via discs and then local area networks, LANS, etc.

Not surprisingly, given the benefits obtained within a matter of a few years, the enterprise was soon full of PCs, small separate departmental networks, and many, many applications, all bought from LoB manager budgets. These solutions were mainly incompatible and resulted in spiraling operating costs and, most important of all, obscured the overall understanding of the enterprise operation, to the chagrin of auditors.

There was a tipping point in most enterprises when so called “safe standalone working” had become a confused mass of activities. Even more concerning were the multiple copies of key data spread around these desktop PCs, leaving little trust in the integrity of any enterprise level results.

The huge business benefits that the early adopting LoB managers had gained in their individual work or departmental activities were becoming insignificant as, at an enterprise level, the stability of the entire business was being called into doubt. The good news was that the early adopters had accelerated the understanding and the ability to create value using these new technologies by being able to move quickly with relatively minimal constraints. The bad news was that as momentum and scale of use had built up, making the new technologies and business functions mainstream within the enterprise, professional management was sorely needed.

So how was it all resolved? How was the CIO role created? And how was the way forward to the adoption of ERP created?

The answer didn’t lie in the technology. It lay in the business’s adoption of a different organizational model; one designed around the use of PC client-server systems. Organizations were redesigned around business processes that run across the business, rather than as a string of separate departments: Business Process Re-engineering (BPR).

BPR was as big disruption to the operational models of the time. This is similar to today’s teaching on business model innovation that introduces the idea of constant reaction to external opportunities and circumstances. But BPR also introduced the necessary definitions of roles, responsibilities, and operational methodologies that made ERP the competitive necessity to create the enterprise as we know it today.

The role of the CIO, and of the enterprise IT department as we know it, is based on the business model of BPR. It’s a role designed to administer and automate internal business operations through best practice. At the heart of this is transactional data integrity built around the structured data created and managed internally by recognizable, auditable business processes protected inside the firewall. Not surprising neither the role, methodologies nor even the responsibility/authority works for or fits with the new disruption in technologies and their business use!

Our LoB managers are not using PC based client-server technology on internal enterprise applications. They are using tablet-based browser-cloud technology externally to be part of an environment that has been created by consumers via the mass adoption of cloud-based solutions.

At the stage this mostly means that the solutions they are using are not transactional but interactional. As long these solutions are completely separated from enterprise client-server systems they are reasonably safe. The challenges are when some degree of integration is requested, or made demanded. Importing traditional structured data into these solutions, or integrating internal and external data as part of Big Data analytics, challenge the integrity of the internally managed structured data.

This is the point where CIOs are right to express serious concern.

Right now in most enterprises early adopters are blazing the trail to find the winning and losing propositions, and expectations are rising for the opportunities that these new solutions will bring. Most importantly, these activities are taking place at a scale where they are still contained enough to be “standalone” and safer outside of IT.

That is not to say that you should ignore them. It is to say that you should accommodate them via a policy that apportions an appropriate level of responsibility to the LoBs, a policy that has been agreed with the CEO.

The CEO and the new Digital Business Model

The CEO is becoming the key to managing the shift to a new (IT) operating model. Business school teachings are recommending that CEO take direct responsibility for their enterprise’s digital strategy, and with it the redesign of their business model.

This is the much talked about, and little understood, topic of business model innovation; a topic that, together with business strategy, has been exercising the minds of business school professors for some years.

Today business model innovation is well-developed set of principles (defined by Mark W. Johnson) taught to business managers that explain nineteen prospective business models that can be used to position a product or service with customers, as shown in the table below. Think of it as the new BPR to suit the capabilities of new technologies deployed outside the firewall, and outside the internal processes of IT. Business model innovation brings with it a new set of business values focused on taking new products to market, wining new customers, increasing market share etc. None of which are justified around internal cost reductions. All of which could be expected to be funded from budgets other than ITs.

Source: Mark W. Johnson (2010), Seizing the White Space, Harvard Business Press

So where is the CIO in this brave new world?

The choice of the phrase “outside the role of IT” was deliberate. It doesn’t, however, mean “remote from IT and the internal business processes”.

There will at least need to be alignment across lines of business and, as the new business model develops, there will need to be integration to allow interactions and connections to take place on an end-to-end basis across the enterprise. A customer engagement should result in a customer order, and that requires integration to be managed successfully.

When will this occur? There are two distinct answers.

The first is as business-as-usual, with no new business model applied, hits a natural barrier and the law of increasing chaotic cost of operation starts to consume the new technology’s benefits. This point was identified for the PC client-server era in the book “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore, when the rising curve of expectations hit the trough of disillusionment as enterprise wide operational issues revealed the serious challenges to be faced. To cross the chasm meant to adopt new levels of maturity in what products and methods were used to deploy the new environment. In short, it’s the moment when the second answer below becomes unavoidable!

The second answer is for the CEO to understand the need for an enterprise to consciously understand the opportunity that digital business will bring, and to set out to redesign the business model before hitting the tipping point. To address this properly will mean clarifying how technology will operate across the business and outside the business, and how the IT department be involved in the business activities.

It’s a huge shift and a big responsibility as by now the auditors will have woken up to the need to be able to follow and understand how the digital enterprise actually functions, who has what responsibilities etc.

It’s a return to the time for professional management of technology, its use, its purpose, risk management etc. This is a big organizational role requiring a mix of business and technology understanding as well as knowledge of the enterprises current systems and compliance obligations. It’s also a role the CIO should be the right choice to fill, based on their experience and profile.

Current Realities for the CIO to address at this stage?

Sadly there is no magic bullet to immediately gain “control” of the LOB managers, their technology and business deployments. As they currently stand the CIO and the IT department are neither equipped nor empowered to solve this problem in this new environment. But that doesn’t mean blocking or stopping deployments; that’s simply not commercially feasible in the face of the increased competition and customer demand for digital based business.

Instead the answer is to work on ensuring that the separation and isolation of the new deployments from the IT environment is understood and fully observed.

LoB managers who want to be early adopters should be encouraged and supported to grasp that the real risks that they are accepting. Risks stemming from the manner in which their people use the technology and their ability to commit the company to unintended consequences. Organizing “awareness” training and guidelines for “online” behavior and hazards are both practical assistance and will create relationships that allow monitoring of what is happening to build experience.

This approach also allows for clarity in who is responsible for the impact and behavior, and that means not only for the CIO but also for LoB managers. It even means the CEO and CFO.

More importantly, it formalizes an enterprise wide management involvement that will be required as the organization develops an understanding of the good and bad impacts that the new digital environment is creating. In time this will be the group that reacts to the possible tipping moment and creates the business model and management changes necessary for the mature adoption and integration.

Are the lines of business in your organization experimenting with browser-cloud solutions? Has your organization already hit that natural barrier when the increasing chaotic cost of operation consumes the new technology’s benefits? Or has your business already set out to redesign its operating model before hitting the tipping point?