If you look at the greatest inventions of our time, you will note that each of these inventions has gotten better, and more efficient as people have tinkered at them, given time.
 |
| Ford Model T |
The ENIAC 1 computer of 1946 was financed
by the military and contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 6,000
manual switches and 5 million soldered joints, all covering 167 square meters
of floor space, with a “tonnage” of 30 tons and consumed 160 Kw of electric
power, enough to cause brownout in adjacent towns. In comparison, Samsung
Galaxy S III is consumer oriented, has a 1.4GHz, Cortex A9 processor, covers 91
square centimetres, weighs 133 grams and its power consumption is miniscule
going at 4.9kWh per year, and please note its processing power is superior to
the ENIAC 1.
According to a report done by Opower, smartphones
are quickly displacing our use of clunky, energy-intensive devices, people are
using smartphones to do things they have historically done on computers,
televisions and gaming consoles and thus using much less energy than the larger
devices they are displacing.
As the demand for increased user
satisfaction and higher qualities of service increase in the corporate
environment, it almost seems that the CIO needs to be at the cusp of
technological breakthroughs, and be able to communicate and educate the
business on these developments, at the same time, in a clear and concise manner
in order to add value to conversations held around the corporate strategy.
It is no longer acceptable to think that
the traditional approach to service delivery of an IT department will be
satisfactory. The term Return on Investment
(RoI) has become such a cliché term that it ignites a defensive pose when
mentioned, there is need to clearly and astutely define the value that any new piece
of technology will bring to the firm and also define how this value will be
measured.
With the current Mobile Computing era,
which Yankee Group expects to dwarf the Internet era, it is anticipated that
close to 10 billion devices will be interconnected. The forces being totted to
drive this era are:
·
Consumerization of IT, where
users are allowed to use their own devices to perform their work thus
essentially enhancing their user experience. This trend has been triggered over
the last few years as development in the consumer technology space (e.g. smart
phones) has outpaced developments the corporate technology space( e.g. PCs),
prompting the users to bring their own technologies to work.
·
At the same time, mobile device
sales have firmly surpassed PC sales, with Apple 5, selling more than 5 million
units in its first three days of debut as testament this advent.
·
There are routing technologies
that are integrating the 802.11n with 3G/4G networks progressively making Wi-Fi
the primary corporate network of the near future.
·
Lastly we now have cloud based
unified communication solutions with Mail, Document Management, Video and Web
Conferencing now being possible with smart phones.
What this confirms in the end, is that the
IT leader needs to, have more dialogue with his environment, strive to be do
more with less, reduce costs of operation,
offer better and superior services to the business, while educating the
business so that it becomes more IT smart.
In a survey by Harvard Business Review,
“How IT-Smart is Your Organization?” 75% of business leaders said they viewed
IT as critical to competitiveness or essential to managing business risks and
costs, and yet according to the survey:
·
Only 30% identify IT needs when
developing business strategy and take the lead on justifying and gaining
approval for IT related investments.
·
Only 25% manage IT enabled
initiatives and drive IT enabled business changes
·
Only 8% are held accountable
for delivering IT-enabled business value.
What these statistics impute is that
business leaders don’t know how to work with IT, and indeed the survey stated
that only 27% of business leaders feel smart about IT. They said they want to
learn more about how to:
·
Get the most out of the systems
in place and what current technology can do and where it is headed
·
Make IT-enabled strategy and
invest responsibly
·
Deliver complex solutions
·
Work with IT
The fact of the matter here is that
business leaders can’t learn if no one is teaching them. Most IT leaders are
still focussed on getting their own teams business smart and haven’t considered
the importance or impact of getting the other parts of the business IT-smart.
According to HBR, you need to imagine the
impact of having everyone in the business 10% smarter about IT? It’d do a lot
more good than making everyone in IT 100 % smarter about the business.
Article done for CIO East Africa November 2012 issue
@edwin_moindi
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