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We did a survey of over 1,000 business & IT professionals last month, and almost a third of them said that they “hardly ever” have discussions between IT and the business about changing business technology needs. Pretty scary. (Full story in this coming week’s InformationWeek, http://www.informationweek.com, November 5 issue)

When IT (now ITS) starts to realize that it’s not about “did we build it?” but rather, “did we help our customer,” they won’t approach things in the “no police” mode, or retain the “not invented here” mentality. Once the business realizes that ITS is here to help, not harm, and ITS _proves_ it, then the business will WANT the ITS department to vet any business technology decisions.

It’s all about the framing of the discussion and the purpose and mission of the folks who are responsible for business technology at your organization.

[...] follow up posts by Jeremiah Owyang, who grounded everything in reality and next steps. Here are one and two great posts that I hope spur more devotion to making social media fit into everyone’s [...]

[...] The Challenges of Social Media in the Enterprise, why Business and IT need to align – [...]

[...] The Challenges of Social Media in the Enterprise, why Business and IT need to align Jeremiah is doing some good work. He has added a lot of depth to Forrester’s social media coverage. no book to work on- he can live the web life. (tags: forrester socialmedia) [...]

[...] Winer and Jeremiah Owyang both chipped in with their respective takes on the reasons users in large organisations bypass IT and embrace some of these tools, and how IT [...]

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/10/25/the-debate-rages-on-should-it-be-involved-in-the-business-side-of-social-media-or-are-they-just-support/

[...] conversation took a sudden turn in the comments of my recent post: ” The Challenges of Social Media in the Enterprise, why Business and IT need to align” I was attempting to highlights the danger of IT being separated from the business. (Please [...]

[...] clipped from http://www.web-strategist.com [...]

Josh said: “There are IT folks who focus on “support”, there are also IT folks who focus on web design, UX, process design, strategy development, sales, R&D, business continuity, the list goes on and on.”

Sure, don’t disagree. My point is that lumping anything “digital” into a single “IT” category, then treating that category as a single internal unit is wrongheaded.

[...] IT Hates Me 24 10 2007 After reading and responding to Jeremiah’s Owyang’s post about how Business and IT need to align in terms of social media, I was reminded of some very current struggles I’m having in the workplace. Since I seem to [...]

I’d mention another thing “IT” is short for “Information Technology” – certainly, web applications, internet, and external media count under that umbrella as well. If they were not the purview of the technologists, then we’d likely be calling it TI – for technology infrastructure.

IT doesn’t just include support – it also includes development.

Your looking at IT as infrastructure support. Yes, that is a component of IT; however, that does not define IT.

If you look at the 15+ history of IT that you mention you will find that a large majority of IT employees were created out of the depths of business schools at US universities. They were trained in “business application support” which traditionally were accounting and HR systems. They have MIS degrees, not computer science degrees. To say that IT for the last 15+ years knew nothing about business is to say that sales knows nothing about the products that they are selling.

There are IT folks who focus on “support”, there are also IT folks who focus on web design, UX, process design, strategy development, sales, R&D, business continuity, the list goes on and on.

Any organization actually looking to deploy social media technology needs to have the IT department support them. Not doing so would be a waste of time, money, and resources. If you can’t get the support than you are selling the wrong people.

Step 1. develop social media concept
Step 2. implement pilot on your own time
Step 3. sell your management on the idea
Step 4. leverage you management buy-in to develop corporate strategy
Step 5. use corporate strategy to get funding and prioritization for IT
Step 6. bring project to IT for company wide implementation

If you make it to step 6, you are well on your way to a good implementation. Keep in mind step 4 & 5 are the hardest!! Convincing senior management that your little social media/collaboration project is just as important as business continuity or an ERP implementation will be hard. The data from the pilot will be critical. The buy-in will also be critical.

Then again, you could skip the IT department, implement it yourself, and become an IT support person yourself instead of a strategist or innovator….

The core of this discussion (or at least the discussion starter) comes from a desire to have any and all project scalable, long-term, and deeply connected to all other parts of the business.

I’m not sure that always needs to be the case. In fact, I wrote about the “Disposable Camera” model being applicable to many types of social media projects.

http://tinyurl.com/23mtrm

Additionally, Enterprise 2.0 discussions tend to scrub the conversation on the Participate vs. Create issues. Someone mentions “Enterprise 2.0″ and the conversation tends to turn 100% to building our own, corporate versions of social media tools, where that might not be a very good solution. The “IT” question brings the conversation to privacy, scalability, etc. as an immediate and primary discussion point.

Sometime in the next couple of days I’m going to approach our local IT guy about a social networking tool that I’d like our office to start using. I fully expect him to receive the proposal with deep suspicion. I hope he does, because looking at new technology with deep suspicion is his job.

First of all IT Departments, Heck IT any Support guys dont like clients carrying out random acts of software delivery and implementation because its the very same IT guys who are reached for when it stops working or wont share or wont export or wont do a whole host of things which werent considered when the “New and Shiny” product is implemented.

Youve covered most of the above paragraph about 2/3rds of the way through your talk.

I will tell you this though: Its My Dirty Little Secret. I am following you , I am moving from IT to Marketing and Web Strategy , because after 17 of IT Support, Management and Distribution the very same problems we are supposed to be solving and delivering are still UNSOLVED.

I have started moving my clients into what I call Short Term Data dumps. Create ideas and product and information but dont go for duration of data warehousing and management information but go for delivery and results and then drop it all and move onto the next job/project/idea.

Web2.0 Makes that all very easy to do since Users approach to a browser is far more confident than they ever will be towards a Computer.

They dont see it as the same thing and they see the “Internet” as something utterly new and different than their computers.

Thanks for reading.

Infrastructure costs are often treated as overhead or support costs that, by definition, are spread over multiple business goals and processes. Performance measurement in such instances is related to cost control, not to revenue enhancement. In such situations IT is something to be minimized. As a result, your pet new project employing shiny new technologies is going to get shortchanged.

It’s a vicious circle that in some companies has led to so much IT outsourcing that providing support for new technologies can’t happen without the involvement of outside contractors.

The risks that I see of “IT moving at the speed of business” include the derision that is caused when an IT solution is prescriptive and inadequate. All that does is encourage those on the ground to come up with their own solutions, workarounds and tools which starts the cycle all over again.

Chris Brogan imagined a social media enabled workplace: http://chrisbrogan.com/social-media-inside-the-firewall/
This workplace may be realizable in a small to medium size org, but what about the behemoths with >100,000 employees? A unified strategy in those environments is stifling by definition of its highly generalized requirements.

See, that’s the issue right there. IT Departments were created, trained, and staffed in a time before the Internet, or when the internet was new and IT was the only “techy” people capable of understanding the stuff.

The reason we’re even having conversations like this, 15+ years after the introduction of the commercial internet is because we’ve not properly redefined the roles in a new world.

As mentioned above, IT (as a general “thing”) is primarily responsible for infrastructure. They’re the group that keeps the phones on, the internal mail servers functioning, and the firewall secure. They’re not, by default, business support. The same group of people dealing with firewalls shouldn’t be be designing Web sites and activities. The marketing people aren’t calculating production line times in their downtime; the in-house lawyers aren’t taking customers service calls between writing briefs. Why do we expect something different from IT?

Because most people in an organization don’t see a distinction between firewall and web site like they do with legal brief and customer service call. The people who actually work in the IT departments look at the web work and often lust to do that rather than fix the latest Windows bug on a user’s desktop. So they fight hard to create the illusion that anything geeky is their domain.

I’ll be honest, I’m surprised we (the industry overall, I mean) are still having this conversation. I’ve been part of these discussions for 12+ years now, and I’m wondering if this is one of those perennial issues that will never go away.

All that said, I do agree that there needs to be strategy about how your web tools build up. If it’s externally facing, however, a typical IT team should NOT be the group put in charge of that activity. When it comes down to priorities, keeping the Exchange server online is ALWAYS going to trump launching a new marketing-related web project. So why are choices like that even being considered?