Thanks for your comments and I will try to build out these ideas on a few other posts.

Mark

For Point 2, business performance as categorized by staff productivity – effectiveness and efficiency. Can less staff do more without impact profitability?

For Point 3, the mind-set change to look at things incrementally, in a deep-dive mode, is hard. I like your building metaphor because it’s about the people inside – not the building itself and many IT folks sometimes forget it. The IT guy/business architect built “the Matrix” but needs to know how his “subjects” are running around in his world.

Using another analogy, CIOs need to see the forest for the trees, yes. But now, the CIOs do need to know what kind of eco-systems are running about in his “forest”.

Cheers,

Thanks for your comments and I apologize to all readers as I dashed this blog entry off during symposium and it should have been clearer and better written.

The basic argument is this.

1. IT created tremendous value for its first 30 or so years by implementing technologies that transformed manual and unstructured processes into processes that are automated and structured. This was a long term goal for IT and the world was expected to be different when this happened. I am arguing for many companies, this has now happened with their core processes. There will always be some portion of processes that are poorly automated, but the major ones are automated for most companies.

Note: that is the ‘war’ I was talking about, there is no war between the business and IT just a war on non-automated processes. It was an unfortunate metaphor.

2. The rules for running IT when the name of the game was automation centered on effectively managing IT and tech resources. As IT completes automating processes the power and effectiveness of these rules begins to decline not because they are wrong but because IT work has changed from building out automation to changing business performance.

3. The new rules of IT are associated with changing business performance to increase the return or yield on IT investments. this means that increasingly you cannot build your way to success, but rather need to lead and manage IT differently.

4. Those new disciplines are the subject of future blog entries.

I hope this helps.

Accept the analogy [for argument's sake only] that there is a “war” between business and IT and that IT won the last decade. The import of the accomplishments you cite, 90% of major processes automated, integrated, web-enabled, is that all competitors have this and thus the accomplishment is not strategically distinctive.

It was for those who got there first. Since “we’re all here” there is no distinction. A business can’t afford to let the capabilities lapse, but unless there’s something new to come from IT the cannot be on the driving edge of a company’s strategy. That spot is always reserved for that combination of “process and function” or “people, process and technology” or “fill-in-you-model” that makes a material competitive difference.

ps – One comment above suggests that CIO self-rating of 90% automation may be overblown (cites medical industry) does not come as a shock. The number screams “piffle.” Perhaps they’ve automated 90% of what USED TO BE strategically distinctive…. maybe. Even then the number is too large. Its like an Iranian election.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by Gartner_inc: RT @markpmcdonald: (Gartner): The rules of IT are changing and for good reason, blog post at http://tinyurl.com/yf6pkxl...