Bevil Wood­ing

Keep­ing pace with the re­lent­less march of tech­nol­o­gy is one of the top chal­lenges for or­gan­i­sa­tions. Few cor­po­rate lead­ers can de­ny that tech­nol­o­gy is in­creas­ing­ly set­ting the agen­da when it comes to defin­ing how busi­ness gets done. The spot­light is on tech­nol­o­gy ex­ec­u­tives to help or­gan­i­sa­tions adapt to to­day's dig­i­tal mar­ket­places.

From fire fight­er to fu­ture-cast­er

To­day's IT ex­ec­u­tives have a tough job. They are con­stant­ly be­lea­guered wave af­ter wave of new tech­nol­o­gy trends and op­tions. From the cloud ser­vices and bring-your-own-de­vice (BY­OD) boom; to big da­ta, so­cial me­dia and mo­bile. All this while hav­ing to al­so deal with peers and sub­or­di­nates who of­ten think they could do a bet­ter job.

It has al­ways been a chal­lenge to bal­ance the de­mands of man­ag­ing ex­ist­ing sys­tems with the need to keep abreast of emerg­ing tech op­por­tu­ni­ties, in­no­vate and even fu­ture-cast. Add to the mix the re­al-world re­al­i­ties of un­car­ing, or out­right re­cal­ci­trant, CEOs, re­sis­tant col­leagues in the c-suite, or a cul­ture re­sis­tant to change, and it is easy to un­der­stand with to­day's tech ex­ec­u­tives are in the prover­bial hot seat.

The chal­lenge is to ne­go­ti­ate a dy­nam­ic bal­ance be­tween two un­yield­ing forces, viz: the need to main­tain smooth op­er­a­tion of cur­rent IT sys­tems, in­fra­struc­ture and ser­vices; and the need to con­tin­u­al­ly in­no­vate and evolve the or­gan­i­sa­tion by cre­at­ing or ap­pro­pri­at­ing new tech­nol­o­gy.

Main­tain this bal­ance is no easy task. Many IT ex­ecs spend more time out­ing op­er­a­tional fires than they do plot­ting strat­e­gy or track­ing tech­nol­o­gy trends. And with in­for­ma­tion now just an In­ter­net search away cor­po­rate users, are sel­dom con­tent to wait on IT to find the so­lu­tion to line-of-busi­ness prob­lems.

In fact, it's in­creas­ing­ly com­mon for in­di­vid­ual non-tech­ni­cal em­ploy­ees, de­part­ments or di­vi­sions to ush­er com­pa­nies in­to tech­nol­o­gy so­lu­tions for crit­i­cal ar­eas like cus­tomer-cen­tric mo­bile apps, so­cial en­gage­ment plat­forms, dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and on­line ad­ver­tis­ing, Web-con­fer­enc­ing, and oth­er high-val­ue, high-vis­i­bil­i­ty emerg­ing busi­ness tech­nolo­gies. The con­sumeri­sa­tion of IT is push­ing cor­po­rate IT re­search and -mak­ing away from cor­po­rate IT-ex­perts to cor­po­rate end users.

Bevil Wood­ing is the chief knowl­edge of­fi­cer of Con­gress WBN (www.con­gress­wbn.org), a val­ues-based, in­ter­na­tion­al char­i­ty and the ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of Bright­Path Foun­da­tion, a tech­nol­o­gy ed­u­ca­tion non-prof­it or­gan­i­sa­tion. Reach him on Twit­ter @bevil­wood­ing or on face­book.com/bevil­wood­ing or con­tact via e-mail at tech­nol­o­gy­mat­ters@bright­path­foun­da­tion.org.