For too long now, the collective talents of the IT department have been hidden, focused primarily on keeping the lights on. Focusing on making the operational stuff run smoother (and cheaper). This is still important, but my argument is that we’ve reached a point based on the opportunities that present themselves all around us; the economy, the changing workforce, the developing built environment and technology – the changing world of work – where we need to find a better way forward.

The future of our success lies not in making the existing IT run smoother, but it is back where we all began this journey, helping those around us be more successful as a result of their use of technology.

We should be embedded at the heart of every aspect of our respective businesses, providing leadership, guidance and support to those that seek to find a better way.

After all, it is only we that are in a position to be the true enablers of transformation inside any organisation and we simply cannot get there from the confines of the IT Department.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying for a minute that this is about a “free for all” where everybody has access to everything and can do anything they want – that’s not what I’m calling for at all.

But this should be a great time for us, we are sat on top of some incredibly powerful technology with a bunch of people who increasingly want to do more, be more efficient and dare I say it, even enjoy themselves in fulfilling their role. Instead we often find ourselves playing the role we all used to hate – we’re in real danger of being to the business what the IT security guys were back in the mid/late 90’s – the people that “just say no”.

It’s actually quite ironic, we’ve spent years nurturing this environment, creating a place where it can grow and be successful, and now that the time is right for us to start to pull back, to create an environment where we have empowered our people to be safe, productive and successful in their use of technology. Instead we often struggle to relinquish some of the control that we have fought so hard to establish (and which was so desperately needed way back when.)

What is needed now however, is for us go right back to our core principles and instead of providing everything, provide the environment from which people are empowered to drive their own solutions.

Our job in IT is not so much about our success, as it is about how we enable the success of others – understanding this subtle yet key difference is the key to our future success.

We should be the facilitators of success, empowering our people to be productive and free to chose the way in which they fulfil their roles but all the time, providing that safety net that ensures that they are able to do so within an environment that is supportive and protective in how technology is used to make us all more productive and successful.

I think the change that has been brought about by the consumerisation of technology has put us in a really difficult position in how we manage technology across an organisation.

Think about how the role of the IT department has changed over the last 50 years.

We’ve gone from being computer scientists in lab coats

Data processors running around with punched cards trying to help people make sense of the world

The heady days of success where we had the advantage – we were the only guys that could finally unlock the knowledge economy that exists inside our organisation

And what’s next?

Well that’s kind of up to us, we have a choice, continue to be hounded by people who want more (but care less) or should we get back to our roots, reaching out into the business and getting back into the business of enabling our organisations and people to be at least as productive at work as they are at home?

At lot of the feedback I get when talking about how the world is changing around us, is around the scepticism that any of this makes a damn bit of difference in our world, especially when it comes to public services.

Well, maybe you’re right, but it’s so easy to pass this off as a fad, or only of interest to a minority audience – and I think that’s quite simply a mistake.

The feedback I hear most often is that this is “all about the kids” especially when it comes to social media. Many studies have shown that actually, the biggest growth areas of use of social computing are not where the media would have you think, spotty, bottle bottom glassed weirdo’s in their bedrooms that never see the light of day, but actually are in the older generations, and just to be inclusive, when I say older generations, I mean people who grew up without a computer in their home. That’s people like me and you folks.

Increasingly older generations are finding that these social tools can make a real difference in how people live our lives. Whether it’s simple things like people creating a more interactive experience from traditional one-way events like watching QuestionTime and interacting via the QT hashtag on Twitter or more serious uses where older people can open up a whole new social world that provides them with critical contact with the outside world providing far great success with Assisted Living programmes.

Quite simply, these technologies make a real difference in our lives – if we can make the most of them – and that seems to be a big if…

We’ve spent so long worrying about how to make technology simpler, safer, more secure and efficient at work that we’ve forgotten that people too are evolving in their needs and understanding about what technology can do for them at work.

Many organisations block these tools at the firewall, I understand some of the reasoning for this, especially around security concerns, but far too often it is used to hide issues around poor management. “People will waste their time on these things” is the answer I hear all too often.

You see, what you are saying to me as an individual is that you simply don’t trust me to be professional and productive in the way in which I carry out my work for you. It’s the wrong argument and one I find inconsistent. If you are really worried about my productivity, then either you shouldn’t have hired me (or you should have provided me with more support to become productive) or actually, you should also ban telephones newspapers, Sudoku books and water coolers as these too can be exploited to drain resource away.

It’s a bit like when the internet first arrived – do you remember when there was just one guy/terminal in the office with internet access? What do you think would happen to your business today if that was still the case? Social media will be no different just a few years from now.

The other side of this is that increasingly, these tools are where your customers exist. Blocking access to them is just cutting yourself off from an increasingly significant portion of your audience. Remember, over half of people connected to the internet are on Facebook – it just makes no sense to me that you would chose to ignore the portion of your customers that chose to communicate in this way.

Finally, we’ve got to deal with this concept of the “dumb user” once and for all. This out-dated concept is increasingly irrelevant in how we think about managing change within our organisations.

Now before you get all upset, I’m not saying you can ignore the issues around IT literacy, it’s just that they’re no longer as acceptable (or believable) as they were even a few years ago.

Those of you with kids will likely understand what I say, where increasingly it is just unacceptable as Dave Briggs puts it – to wear your IT ignorance “as a badge of honour” – in a modern society, that’s almost like being proud of the fact that you can’t read.

Our success will come from empowering the individual within the context of the organisation – give your people the power to work the way that works best for them, measure outcomes not process.

In the next part of our series of posts looking at how the world is changing around us we look at how the work environment is changing around us. With the evolution of mobile technologies and the ever increasing bandwidth that is available to us (in terms of both location and capacity) we are afforded truly different options in how we work.

The Hybrid Organisation studies showed that on average we spend only 45% of our time at our desks – that’s an incredible statistic, not only does it provide a hint at areas that we may make some major savings, but it is also incredibly telling about the way in which we now carry out our professional lives.

We’re moving to a world where the term “work” no longer defines a location, but is centred purely in the activity itself.

Working in this way offers not just greater flexibility for us in how we blend our personal and professional lives, but also provides a great opportunity for us to spend more time outside with our customers, peers and even strangers – all of which combine to make us more successful and more innovative and better still, more effective both at home and in work. The days of the binary work life balance are gone, some people seems to think this means working 24/7 but to me it’s about empowering individuals to choose where and when they want to get things done – equipping your people to be productive wherever they chose (or have to be) is the first big step down the path of success.

In our Dutch office, we reduced office space by 30% effectively pushing our people out into the big wide world – the results – 50% increase in sales and a much happier workforce.

How dull would I be (or rather as my wife reminds me, how much more dull would I be) if all I did was spent my time within the Microsoft bubble? I’m a far richer, more innovative and productive individual if I get out a bit more and spend time with people like you and your teams – even with people who care less about technology, it’s all constructive input and food for thought that goes to make me far more useful and valuable to my employer.

But companies need to change in order to truly get the most from this opportunity, especially in a knowledge based economy, we need to move to a more outcomes based measurement, far too often, we measure people on process not on what they achieve – this alone forms one of the major barriers between those that will taste success and those that don’t.

I was recently involved in a roundtable discussion (first of series) that aims to try and dispel some of the myth that surrounds Cloud Computing and attempts to get the focus away from the technology and more to the business outcomes it affords.  For my part I was asked to write a pre-amble to frame the discussion which I thought some of you may enjoy…

“I signed up for a career in IT because I was a dreamer (and maybe I watched a little too much Star Trek as a kid). My dream was all of the great things that technology could enable in a modern society. 20 years on, I’m still here and I’m still living the dream – great things have happened, massive change has taken place and technology is pretty much a pervasive part of the way we each live, work and play.

So when a couple of year ago, we began down the hype curve of cloud computing being "the future of IT" you can imagine my interest, what is this thing that could be so important and yet so elusive to describe, understand and in some cases deliver? I set out on a quest to find out the transformative outcomes that cloud computing would enable.

If cloud really was the future, I wanted it to solve world peace, find cures for major medical problems, save the planet, hell, I also secretly wanted it to give me that hoverboard I’ve been promised in so many late night low budget sci-fi films.

But as you all well know, and as I now understand – cloud computing in itself is not an outcome, it is merely an enabler, a quiet, yet substantial, aid to let us be better at doing what we do.

Starting a conversation with cloud computing is a bit like standing up at the beginning of the movie and declaring "Bruce Willis is a Ghost!". Ultimately that’s the destination, but in itself it’s meaningless. Without understanding the context of where you actually are and, more importantly, really getting underneath the outcome you want to achieve, you’re going to struggle to make sense of why cloud is even relevant, never mind so beneficial that it could completely transform the way you do business.

As technologists, our job is to make technology as transparent as possible, we must resist the temptation to lead with the solution. I firmly believe our job is to ensure that people are focused on the actual task in hand not on how to operate the tools – the less people have to worry about how the technology works, the more they can focus on whatever it is that is important and unique to them.

To do this we really need to stay focused on the (holistic) outcomes that our customers are looking for, and then find the right way to make technology as transparent as possible to ensure their success and in a way, this becomes one of the key strengths of the cloud approach. Like so often in this game, we tend to view everything in a binary manner – all or nothing. When talking about cloud, we assume it’s everything to the cloud or nothing at all. In reality it will actually is much more fluid than that.

There are four key pillars that provide the cloud platform for our success, each are important and relevant, but for different reasons and applications. The pillars start on the far left with the traditional on premise datacentre, next the same but virtualised. For the third we make a big leap out of the organisation to a private cloud and finally on the far right, our old friend the public cloud. The important thing to recognise is that each of these pillars are essential in the delivery of a technology foundation and what is really required is a way of seamlessly moving from left to right as the solutions and economics allow. Public cloud has a lot to offer, by sheer virtue of the economies of scale, at the other end, the on-premise data centre is still important for some who may have more significant demands around control and performance. Many organisations get lost in this discussion, spending countless hours debating where they want to be on the scale. The simple truth is that the economics of each pillar should actually make the decisions obvious. Ideally all the commodity, infrastructure stuff should exist where it’s cheapest and all the complex, unique stuff where you have more control. Ultimately the answer will be that organisations will exist in multiple places, creating the concept of the hybrid cloud.

One of the other common problems stemming from the ambiguity of "cloud computing" is the confusion between infrastructure and innovation in how we procure and design cloud based solutions. I think of cloud computing as a spectrum, at one end there is the infinitely scalable, ultimately agile promise that has received so much of the cloud computing limelight and at the other end, there is the no-frills, black box, commodity service – IT’s equivalent of the electric grid. All too often we see customers trying to be agile and innovative with a no-frills commodity service and ultimately getting frustrated with the results. This is not helpful and it adds to the confusion and concern about the viability of cloud computing in any context. If we identify and separate out the areas where we want basic, commodity vs those where we want the agile and flexibility cloud also affords, we will enable far greater success not just in the use of cloud computing, but in the ultimate outcomes our customers are looking to achieve.

I suspect that in 10 minutes, I’ve not managed to help clear any of the confusion or ambiguity that exists around this critical area, but I do hope that I’ve at least managed to set the stage for what promises to be a fascinating debate.

Finally, all to often when I’m talking about cloud computing I’m reminded of a conversation I had as a kid with my Dad, an engineer of some repute who wanted me to follow in his footsteps but was obviously frustrated at my lack of talent in the key areas of thermodynamics and thrust co-efficients – he used to watch me, bumbling my way around the workshop, hammer in hand looking for things I could hit, he would simply smile and say "Dave, when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Cloud computing represents a very powerful hammer – our responsibility as technologists is to make sure it strikes home on the right nails…”

This is a piece originally published by Reuters as part of their Great Debate series, given all that’s happening right now around “finding the 40%”, I thought it might be worth resurfacing…

The British economy may technically be out of recession, but it is still not creating the jobs and growth needed to turn back the clock to the upbeat days of the past. And with a looming fiscal crisis, it’s not hard to see why some commentators are predicting the terminal decline of the British economy. I don’t think the situation for Britain is dire — yet. But if businesses want to regenerate economic engines in the future they do need to change.

Astute business leaders know that dramatic social, economic and political changes — in addition to changing workforce demographics, globalisation and rapid developments in social and business technologies — are now fusing together. Ultimately, they will affect every aspect of UK private enterprise – and competitiveness.

Having spoken to prominent industry figures and the Institute of Directors, I am more convinced than ever that the solution to this change is a move to a “hybrid” business model. That means UK businesses need to change their thinking, structures and operations and adopt a more flexible approach or lose out to more nimble competitors in the future.

A looser hybrid model has many benefits, although it isn’t without challenges. In the hybrid business, fixed office space is rejected in favour of giving staff access to shared space in bureaus. Such structural changes have huge benefits, including increased profitability (reduced rental overheads), greater responsiveness to shifting demand and more intense collaboration between workers – not to mention improved agility as businesses quickly spot and exploit market opportunities.

It’s not all sweetness and light though: less fixed office space can put off employees and create a sense of insecurity. But it’s become clear over the last few years that the notion of the office is changing and employees want a flexible approach to work. There is a noticeable move towards sharing in cities such as London, Manchester and Birmingham where office space — as well as coffee, light and power — are shared.

A hybrid approach to business is far more employee orientated. In my view, it recognises the blurring demarcation between work and home life. That involves recognition from businesses that as part of expecting staff to be on call 24/7, they must also be able to access modern communication tools — such as social networks and online shopping tools — in the office at all times.

This is liberating for workers, and it makes easier for employers to retain them amid a highly competitive global pool of talent. Company loyalty — not to mention control over the various workers operating from multiple locations — will remain an important aspect of business. There is a danger that an overemphasis on flexibility could actually lead to chaos, lack of creativity, miscommunication and ultimately poor service.

An overemphasis on flexibility is a real danger – one that all companies seeking to implement a hybrid model should be keenly aware off. But it is a risk worth taking because the harsh reality is that whether you like it or not, our foreign competitors are already implementing aspects of the hybrid model. From Shanghai to Seattle, workers are increasingly diffused, IT systems are being accessed via the cloud for a fraction of the cost, and businesses are moving quicker than ever before to exploit new opportunities.

In short, determined foreign competition means that unless we change with the world, the overall competitiveness and agility of UK plc will suffer. I don’t want to see Britain relegated to global economic irrelevance, which is why I passionately believe a move in this direction is a good move for our businesses, economy and society.

Working off the back of the Hybrid Organisation reports we recently released, we were invited to talk with Peter Whitehead from the FT’s Digital Business podcast to discuss the concepts that we think will shape the way in which we live, work and play in the future.  It was a great opportunity for Prof. Michael Hulme, Philip Ross and myself to discuss the reports focusing on the potential impact and those all important 20 golden rules for business in the digital age. 

It’s a great overview and expertly edited _down_ to a mere 16 minutes – genius!

You can find the podcast here…

A few months back, I was approached by a colleague that had been thinking about the collision of a number of key events: the turbulent economic environment, political uncertainty, changing workplace dynamics and the consumerisation of IT – individually, these topics have all been visited here at the Envisioners and yet the bleedin’ obvious had, until now, escaped us – what happens when you bring all of these events together at once?

We know that each one of these topics is enough on it’s own to start a conversation around how the business world needs to change (in both public and private sector) and yet here we are, presented with a once in a lifetime opportunity (I hope) where the convergence of compelling events in each of these areas create the mother of all incentives to become more agile and effective in the way we live work and play.

The Hybrid Organisation work comprises of three studies by distinguished thought leaders in their field; Prof Michael Hulme on the impact of current social change, Philip Ross on the opportunity provided by changes in the “built environment” and finally Ken Wood from MSR and myself on both the current and future potential offered by technology.

Alone, each one of these studies mark an incredible insight into each specific area, yet combined they create an incredibly compelling view of how organisations, leaders and individuals need to change in order to take advantage of the opportunities being offered and more importantly, how to stay relevant and competitive in our changing world.

To help organisations and individuals understand how to make these changes happen, we’ve created a final summary report which outlines the key themes from each of the papers and outlines 20 things every organisation should do on it’s journey to becoming hybrid.

I know all the cynics out there will be rolling your eyes and saying, “we’ve heard all this before” and that it doesn’t matter – well two things spring to my mind:

1. The unprecedented convergence of the recession, the election, workplace demographics and IT consumerisation is something that _cannot_ be ignored.
2. Read the reports and judge for yourself – Look at the 20 point plan and ask yourself (honestly) where you and your organisation stand…