The screen could certainly have been one controlled by touch, and it is likely a safe bet that a newer model of my car has that very feature. However, what was more noteworthy was the fact that this child was assuming the settings could be changed simply by passing a finger over an icon on the screen. My epiphany: for this child’s generation, a rotary button was simply old school.

This child is growing up in an environment where people are increasingly interacting with devices by touching screens. Smartphones and tablets are certainly significant innovations in areas such as mobility and convenience. But these devices are also ushering in an era that shifts everyone’s expectations of how we engage in the use of technology. Children raised in a world where technology will be pervasive will touch surfaces, make gestures, or simply show up in order for systems to respond to their needs.

This means we must rethink how we build software, implement hardware, and design interfaces. If you are in any of the professions or businesses related to these activities, there are significant opportunities, challenges and retooling needs ahead.

It also means the days of the mouse are probably numbered. Long live the mouse.

The good old days of the mouse and keyboard

Probably like most of you, I have never formally learned to type, but I have been typing since I was very young, and I can pound out quite a few words per minute. I started on an electric typewriter that belonged to my dad. When my oldest brother brought home our first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, my transition was seamless. Within weeks, I was impressing relatives by writing small software programs that did little more than change the color of the screen or make a sound when the spacebar was pressed.

Later, my brother brought home the first Apple Macintosh. This blew me away. For the first time I could create pictures using a mouse and icons. I thought it was magical that I could click on an icon and then click on the canvas, hold the mouse button down, and pull downward and to the right to create a box shape.

Imagine my disappointment when I arrived in college and we began to learn a spreadsheet program using complex keyboard combinations.

Fortunately, when I joined the workforce, Microsoft Windows 3.1 was beginning to roll out in earnest.

The prospect of the demise of the mouse may be disturbing to many, not least of whom is me. To this day, even with my laptop, if I want to be the most productive, I will plug in a wireless mouse. It is how I work best. Or at least, it is currently the most effective way for me.

For most of us, we have grown up using a mouse and a keyboard to interact with computers. It has been this way for a long time, and we have probably assumed it would continue to be that way. However, while the keyboard probably has considerable life left in it, the mouse is likely dead.

Fortunately, while the trend suggests mouse extinction, we can momentarily relax, as it is not imminent.

But what about voice?

From science fiction to futurist projections, it has always been assumed that the future of human-computer interaction would largely be driven by using our voices. Movies over decades have reinforced this image, and it has seemed quite plausible. We were more likely to see a door open via voice rather than a wave. After all, it appears to be the most intuitive and requires the least amount of effort.

Today, voice recognition software has come a long way. For example, accuracy and performance when dictating to a computer is quite remarkable. If you have broken your arms, this can be a highly efficient way to get things done on a computer. But despite having some success and filling important niches, broad-based voice interaction has simply not prospered.

It may be that a world in which we control and communicate with technology via voice is yet to come, but my guess is that it will likely complement other forms of interaction instead of being the dominant method.

There are other ways we may interact, too, such as via eye-control and direct brain interaction, but these technologies remain largely in the lab, niche-based, or currently out of reach for general use.

The future of HCI belongs to touch and gesture

It is a joy to watch how people use their touch-enabled devices. Flicking through emails and songs seems so natural, as does expanding pictures by using an outward pinching gesture. Ever seen how quickly someone — particularly a child — intuitively gets the interface the first time they use touch? I have yet to meet someone who says they hate touch. Moreover, we are more likely to hear people say just how much they enjoy the ease of use. Touch (and multi-touch) has unleashed innovation and enabled completely new use cases for applications, utilities and gaming.

While not yet as pervasive, gesture-based computing (in the sense of computers interpreting body movements or emotions) is beginning to emerge in the mainstream. Anyone who has ever used Microsoft Kinect will be able to vouch for how compelling an experience it is. The technology responds adequately when we jump or duck. It recognizes us. It appears to have eyes, and gestures matter.

And let us not forget, too, that this is version 1.0.

The movie “Minority Report” teased us about a possible gesture-based future: the ability to manipulate images of objects in mid air, to pile documents in a virtual heap, and to cast aside less useful information. Today many of us can experience its early potential. Now imagine that technology embedded in the world around us.

The future isn’t what it used to be

My bet is that in a world of increasingly pervasive technology, humans will interact with devices via touch and gestures — whether they are in your home or car, the supermarket, your workplace, the gym, a cockpit, or carried on your person. When we see a screen with options, we will expect to control those options by touch. Where it makes sense, we will use a specific gesture to elicit a response from some device, such as (dare I say it) a robot! And, yes, at times we may even use voice. However, to me, voice in combination with other behaviors is more obvious than voice alone.

But this is not some vision of a distant future. In my view, the touch and gesture era is right ahead of us.

What you can do now

Many programmers and designers are responding to the unique needs of touch-enabled devices. They know, for example, that a paradigm of drop-down menus and double-clicks is probably the wrong set of conventions to use in this new world of swipes and pinches. After all, millions of people are already downloading millions of applications for their haptic-ready smartphones and tablets (and as the drumbeat of consumerization continues, they will also want their enterprise applications to work this way, too). But viewing the future through too narrow a lens would be an error. Touch and gesture-based computing forces us to rethink interactivity and technology design on a whole new scale.

How might you design a solution if you knew your users would exclusively interact with it via touch and gesture, and that it might also need to be accessed in a variety of contexts and on a multitude of form factors?

At a minimum, it will bring software developers even closer to graphical interface designers and vice versa. Sometimes the skillsets will blur, and often they will be one and the same.

If you are an IT leader, your mobile strategy will need to include how your applications must change to accommodate the new ways your users will interact with devices. You will also need to consider new talent to take on these new needs.

The need for great interface design will increase, and there will likely be job growth in this area. In addition, as our world becomes increasingly run by and dependent upon software, technology architects and engineers will remain in high demand.

Touch and gesture-based computing are yet more ways in which innovation does not let us rest. It keeps the pace of change, already on an accelerated trajectory, even more relentless. But the promise is the reward. New ways to engage with technology enables novel ways to use it to enhance our lives. Simplifying the interface opens up technology so it becomes even more accessible, lowering the complexity level and allowing more people to participate and benefit from its value.

Those who read my blog know my view that I believe we are in a golden age of technology and innovation. It is only going to get more interesting in the months and years ahead.

Are you ready? I know there’s a whole new generation that certainly is!

Photo (top): Mouse Macro by orangeacid, on Flickr

Related:

• Mind-blowing, world-changing technology by the numbers
• 5 reasons why we still don’t have invisibility cloaks
• The expanding influence of apps and mobile
• Designing for the iPad: How it’s different from the iPhone and what you need to consider
• More CIO commentary and analysis

In 2010, on one particular web stack we had an uptime of 99.88% (translates to about 10 hours of an outage). But when he looked at our data for 2011 to date, we had 100% uptime. While clearly glowing with such a result, his confusion was based on the fact that we had not implemented any specific technology or fixes in this stack to garner such impressive results. He said: “I am very proud of these results. I just don’t know what we did to achieve them.”

In this instance he was asking the wrong question. It was not what we did. It was how we did it.

Doing things right

Our IT strategy is and will always be focused on doing the right things. Getting positive results is the bottom line. But while doing the right things is essential, it can be equally important to do things the right way.

It is my belief that a fleshed out IT strategy reconciles predictability with innovation. It will seldom fly to just have one or the other. Both are required and they must feed off each other.

The core challenge essential to implementing both is finding the right blend for your organization. I have written about it here. In the first year of our IT transformation much effort was expended on putting in place good process to support the right level of predictability. It’s a work in progress.

Getting the right level of process consistent with culture and organizational needs is a science unto itself.

The IT team made good progress in process areas such as IT governance, project management best practices, IT service management, business analysis and change management. It is in the latter that we gained particularly positive results.

Web 2.0 Summit, being held October 17-19 in San Francisco, will examine “The Data Frame” — focusing on the impact of data in today’s networked economy.

Save $300 on registration with the code RADAR

Managing change

At its core, change management is about moving from one state to another to achieve a desired result while being adequately prepared and managing to an acceptable level of risk. It is also an important vehicle for communications between individuals and across teams.

Put bluntly, change management is good business.

Change happens all the time within IT. What contributes to the definition of a world-class IT organization is how that change is accomplished.

As O’Reilly IT entered 2011, we decided to be very deliberate about change. We agreed that we would be hyper-judicious in the infrastructure changes we made. We became priority junkies. Every time a change was identified we asked questions such as whether it was a priority, if there were alternatives, and studied the consequences of not making the change (see the change tool later in the blog).

And as we did that, something extraordinary happened.

The IT operations team started to get the most important projects deployed. Distractions became manageable and the priorities process kept everyone on track.

But most of all, we experienced increased infrastructure stabilization.

Of course some stabilization occurred because the improvements that were being made were being applied through a rigorous change management process. But, moreover, there was greater stability because less unnecessary change was being applied.

Change management was helping us make changes successfully and it was also helping us to determine what changes not to make.

Good process still gets insufficient focus

In IT, most of the time technology gets all the press. We get excited by new innovations and start-ups that introduce cool new capabilities. We are thrilled when a big player disrupts the market with something really compelling. And we should. We live in amazing times and new technology is a big part of that.

But often lost in the enterprise is that while technology represents a part of change — albeit, a critical part — the processes to implement and manage that technology are as important (and often more) than the technology itself.

I would guess we have all seen a great technology fail in an organization because of non-technology reasons. At the same time, I bet we have all seen how good technology coupled with good processes has resulted in excellent results.

When my IT operations leader observed great things happening despite technology, he was inadequately recognizing how we were working. For all involved it provided a rewarding “aha” moment.

Quick tool to manage change

I will conclude by sharing a brief tool that both IT and business can use for managing technology-related change. These are the minimum questions that must be asked for every change. They are simple questions, but all too often one or more is omitted when embarking on a change that expends scarce enterprise resources:

1. Why [Governance]: Is the change aligned and essential to achieve business objectives?
2. What [Measurable Outcome]: Is it understood whether it is a technology or process (or both) that will provide the desired result? Can the outcome be measured?
3. Who [Resourcing]: Have the appropriate participants been identified for this change?
4. How [Methodology]: What approaches have been identified to execute and manage this change?
5. When [Prioritization]: Has sequencing been agreed to relative to all other objectives?

If both IT and the business are in agreement on the answers to each of these questions, you’ve just taken your IT management up a few notches. And you might just find a few people surprised by the positive results.

Related:

• Will your business survive the digital revolution?
• More CIO commentary and analysis

Google+ raises the stakes in the social computing space. With so many people and organizations already invested in other social platforms, Google+ is a manageable gamble with the potential for considerable consequence. Yet for the leading social media incumbents the risk may be existential. Fending off this kind of threat will likely require drastic and prompt measures.

When the entrant yields this much power in an existing market and elicits as a response the potential for rapid innovation, this is what I am calling the “G+ effect.”

The G+ effect is best defined by the introduction of Google+, but it’s not unique to Google; it is unique to our times.

What is the G+ effect?

The disruptive impact of introducing a new product or service is obviously nothing novel. What is new and profound is that the viral and light-speed distribution of digital information and capability across our connected planet can threaten existing businesses at a moment’s notice. The entrant doesn’t even have to be game-changing, but the outcome can be. The influence and reach of the provider can result in disproportional results from just incremental innovation (even whether or not the product succeeds). It is the innovator’s dilemma in overdrive.

The torrent of punditry that accompanies these introductions is notable alone. We are also seeing a significant intensification in rampant speculation prior to a release that can unsettle a market.

Of course, being incremental initially doesn’t rule out disruptive later. For example, in the case of Google+, what it becomes in the months ahead and what it may enable could certainly be game-changing. It’s far too soon to tell.

It would be easy to conclude that the G+ effect is a destructive phenomenon. Sure, there is something to be said for the uncertainty it can sow, and honestly it is impossible to know quite where it will take us. There is no doubt that existing business players will be challenged in unprecedented ways and some customers may be riled by the constant volatility. I also have to believe that at some point every one of us has a capped quotient for fickleness. But I argue that, at least in the short-term, a dynamic battle of ideas will remain a positive force.

At its core, the G+ effect is an economic phenomenon. Clearly there is an important technical component, but introducing a new product or service that can have rapid and far reaching impact, first and foremost shifts existing market behavior — even if temporary in nature. In some instances, for publicly listed companies, the business introducing the technology may experience a bump in stock value (as we have seen with Google+) and its competitors may see theirs experience downward pressure.

Web 2.0 Summit, being held October 17-19 in San Francisco, will examine “The Data Frame” — focusing on the impact of data in today’s networked economy.

Save $300 on registration with the code RADAR

The G+ effect and Google+

Despite only a limited early release, in just a few weeks Google+ has garnered over 20 million participants from across the world. If every one of them had only written the words “Hello World” in the status box, that itself would have been a notable event. Instead, billions of words were added with their attendant photos and videos. Pundits are already claiming the imminent demise of its competition; products that worked hard over several years to earn each subscriber, friend, and follower. (In my view, any notion of the competition’s obsolescence is far too premature).

With Facebook taking a significant lead in social networking, it has emerged to occupy a monopolistic position. A sudden injection of viable competition is a great catalyst for innovation. It is one thing for customers to complain about the limits of Facebook Groups and privacy and quite another for Facebook to respond to the potential competitive advantage that Circles in Google+ create.

Let me be clear, this isn’t a battle just between Google and Facebook — although it could be argued that it will be the early nexus of the action — no, the impact may be felt across the communication, collaboration, and sharing space.

The only good monopoly is the board game

In a topical and recent case study, for much of its young history commissions have sought to stop Microsoft from garnering a monopoly position. Microsoft’s huge footprint in the operating system market enabled it to exploit that position. Look at the innovation of Internet browsers and you have the tell-tale signs of stifled innovation as a result of market domination (remember the first browser war?). It was only when there was a viable alternative, mostly in the form of Firefox and most recently with Chrome and Safari, that we have seen an uptick in browser innovation. (Credit also goes to the various communities that work hard for standards ratification).

Had competition been more rigorous in the early days of the browser, would we be further along with web-based capabilities today?

Currently we see dynamic and healthy competition in the domain of smartphones. But it is also a fragile battle. Now largely dominated by Android and iPhone — solutions created by organizations with extremely healthy balance sheets — innovation is alive and kicking. But should one stumble, a dominant player could emerge and we could see innovation atrophy. Sure, it is speculative and there are plenty of participants trying their darnedest to play catch-up. In fact, with the average American replacing his cellphone every 21 months (source: Recon Analytics), this industry is a prime candidate for the G+ effect.

The G+ effect and the future

What the G+ effect might mean for businesses and consumers over the long-term has yet to be determined. Fortunately we can rely on the marketplace to help sort out what happens next.

At least in the short-term, as an IT leader I encourage rigorous innovation and competition as it helps to keep product and service costs low and accelerates the introduction of desired functions. I also want this innovation to restrict the ability for large corporations to create a closed web or to reduce the very freedoms that make it so empowering.

But with this level of innovation, I’m also concerned by the change costs both in dollars and those that manifest in user fatigue. It could also exacerbate the problems associated with playing catch-up.

For sure, the G+ effect has the capacity to elicit considerable change in the way many organizations operate and compete. Getting a head start on figuring it out might enable many to pursue the emerging opportunities.

Related:

• Google+ is the social backbone
• Will your business survive the digital revolution?
• More CIO commentary and analysis

With just these few observations it’s clear to all of us that technology is no longer just in support of our lives and organizations; it’s taking a commanding and empowering position. And it’s vital that we all fully understand just how profound these changes truly are (and will be). The very survival of your organization likely depends on it.

Are we at the start or the end of this technology revolution?

We observe these incredible events unfold and this may lead us to believe we’ve reached a new pinnacle of technological innovation. Many of us might believe that we’re peaking in our capacity to make amazing things happen. To them I say: we’ve barely even started.

From economics to democracy, from health to entertainment, from retail to education, and everything else in-between, something remarkable is happening.

In my view the events described here are just the beginning of a seismic shift in our human experience. Indeed, these innovations are not reserved for a single nation or continent. This technology-based revolution is the first to quickly reach and impact every corner of the planet.

Every generation believes it lives through remarkable and changing times. And that is probably true. But the large transformations, most recently like those of both the agricultural and industrial revolutions, don’t happen that often. These changes are a railroad switch that shifts the course of human destiny. Some have coined our era as the information revolution. But the emergence of the information age has merely been the precursor and a glimmer of things to come.

The true revolution is the convergence of many things. Revolutions require more than just a few elements to be in place. Historically they have required a unique alignment of qualities such as economic and political conditions, readiness for change, demographics and a catalyst.

We see much of that today. Of course, today the catalyst is the Internet. It’s also the ease in which so many of us can now produce digital innovation (creating new value through electronic, non-analog means). It’s also about the availability of low-cost, ubiquitous global communication networks with an abundance of devices connected. It’s close to zero-cost cloud-based storage. With low cost storage comes the easy retention of massive volumes of data and when it’s coupled with the fact there are so many opportunities to collect that data; new uses and value can be derived from it.

There is a new world order that is unique to our time that is also enabling this change. Not least the emergence of prosperity in many part of the world and the breathtaking rise of the BRIC nations and others. This prosperity is creating a new class of educated, global participants. This means more competition and it means more innovation. It’s all these things and more converging to produce a significant technology-based social and business disruption.

As this technology revolution unfolds, does your business have a survival plan?

Web 2.0 Summit, being held October 17-19 in San Francisco, will examine “The Data Frame” — focusing on the impact of data in today’s networked economy.

Save $300 on registration with the code RADAR

The evidence is clear

The signals are in both the destruction of existing paradigms and in the creation of completely new ones. We’re watching entire industries disappear or be reinvented through digital transformation: newspapers, books, movies, music, travel agents, photography, telecommunication companies, healthcare, fund-raising, stock-trading, retail, real estate, and on and on.

Digital innovation has few geographic boundaries, so the disruptor can emerge from almost any place on earth.

Completely new models are emerging: location-based services, mobile apps, gamification, payment systems and new forms of payment, cloud computing, big data analysis and visualization, recommendation engines, near-field communications, real-time knowledge, tablets and other new form factors, augmented reality, gesture-based computing, personal medicine, large scale global social networks, microblogging and more. Many of these did not exist five years ago and many more will exist in the next five years. In fact, the next major disruptor is probably already underway. This kind of change is equally exciting and terrifying for organizations.

Why it is different this time

When the Walkman became the Discman, the music industry flourished. But when the digital MP3 player was introduced, the music industry was fundamentally and forever reinvented. Digital transformations are not subtle or calm. They are equal measure painful, chaotic, and exciting.

When mobile phones were introduced they enabled people to untether themselves from a fixed wire and talk almost anywhere. That was useful and convenient. But when smartphones freely enable the coordination of people and events that facilitates the overthrow of a corrupt government, this is not business as usual. That’s a fundamental shift in how humans communicate and coordinate their activities.

It will be a rough ride

Sure it won’t all be rosy and bad people will do bad things using more of this technology. But that’s certainly not news. The vulnerabilities will grow but so will our ability to fight attacks. Opportunities in security will remain in high demand.

There will also be booms, bubbles, and busts. That’s a normal part of the economic lifecycle. In fact, outside of the obvious pain it causes, a bust can be a valuable response to irrationality in the market. We will see many of these cycles through this transformation, but I believe we will net out with a continued exponential growth in digital innovation.

The big stuff is yet to come

When you observe how digitization causes significant economic restructuring and the emergence of completely new forms of business, and you factor in an entirely new level of social connectedness, it’s hard not to conclude that big things are ahead.

It’s also easy to be unfazed by the digital change underway, particularly if you’re working deep within it. In addition, it’s equally easy to become fatigued and even cynical about further change. But stop, elevate yourself above the chaos and noise, and the digital transformation is a palpable societal disruption.

At the heart of this blog is not a regurgitation of change that many of us already recognize and embrace; moreover, it’s about urging each one of us not to underestimate this transformational shift. It’s also neutral on the subject — but recognizes — the social and economic negatives that may result. Big shifts like these do evoke, for example, strong feelings of nationalism (somewhat ironically). But I’ll steer away from this subject for now.

Failure to anticipate, prepare and respond sufficiently is a significant organizational risk. In other words, delivering your product or service to the market of yesterday and today without constantly exploring reinvention for the market of tomorrow may be certain business suicide. And while that’s largely always been true, it’s seldom been so necessary and urgent.

Once we recognize the magnitude of change that digital innovation is causing and may bring in the months and years ahead, it will help us to think bigger and to think in ways that may previously have seemed absurd.

As inventors and facilitators of the future we would do ourselves a great injustice to underestimate the change.

The digital revolution: my own personal experiences

Let’s just take a quick look at my world for a moment. In many areas of my life it’s fascinating comparing how I did things in 2001 vs. how I do them now in 2011. By the way, it’s worth noting that while I immerse myself in technology and innovation through my work, I’m not particularly unique in the way I use technology outside of work.

So let’s take a look at some of the changes over the course of 10 years: I no longer wear a watch. No need, I get time from my smartphone. I got rid of my landline phone. My phone is my smartphone. I never go to a bank. Done online. I don’t know anyone’s phone number by heart. I select a name and my phone dials the number. Outside of a radius of a few miles, I don’t know how to get anywhere anymore without my GPS. I never use a map. I barely mail a letter. My use for stamps is diminishing. I seldom print anything. Everything that can be reserved, I do online. I don’t watch scheduled TV. I watch shows off my digital video recorder or computer when I want (in HD, no less). I use my smartphone for less and less voice calls. I text. I read, take classes, post photos, write, research, play, watch movies, listen to music, comparison shop, order insurance, complain and more all online.

I’m pretty sure your experiences are fairly similar.

Perhaps it is a little bit of an exaggeration, but I mostly only emailed and consumed static content online in 2001.

Almost every one of these areas represents an industry. And as a result of these enabled behavioral changes over the course of a mere 10 years, within these industries many organizations have been created and destroyed.

If this kind of transformation can happen in the past 10 years, with everything we know about how things are trending, what might our lives look like in 10 years from now? While not necessarily a novel question, I’m simply suggesting each of us are being forced to think bigger and more innovatively than ever before about the realities and possibilities of the future.

So what should organizations do?

I’m confident most enlightened organizations have some form of a strategy in place. That’s good news. For those that don’t or are hesitant, it’s time to act. In either case, the following are just a few fundamentals worth considering:

• Recognize the magnitude of the digital revolution in acceptance and in action.
• Invest in understanding how your organization can anticipate and respond quickly to change.
• Monitor and interpret trends and new technology entrants.
• Audit your vulnerabilities and score progress and risk on a regular basis.
• Prepare by taking greater risks.
• Innovate as standard practice (this doesn’t just happen, you need a strategy).
• Make bold changes in order to continue to succeed when disruption is a certainty.

Technology used to be the domain of a few. Now it’s the fabric woven into how we all live, work, and play. Today it has the power to create and destroy value in an unprecedented manner. That’s a big deal for every organization.

It’s likely a very big deal for you, too.

Related:

• Mind-blowing, world-changing technology by the numbers
• The next, next big thing
• Big data: Global good or zero-sum arms race?
• More CIO commentary and analysis

Technology developments over the years have made software more hardware agnostic, such as the introduction of the web browser and Java. Personal computers have largely become commodity items and their reliability has significantly improved. Yet, despite these events, bringing your own computer (BYOC) to work has remained an elusive goal.

Why bring your own computer to work?

From an IT leader’s perspective, the reasons for supporting BYOC are pretty clear. In an environment where CEOs want more of the organization’s dollars assigned to value-creating investments and innovation, the ongoing cost of asset management continues to be an unfortunate overhead. From procurement and assignment to repairs and disposal, managing large numbers of personal computers represents a significant dollar amount on a CIO’s budget.

The second driver is the desire of employees to use the equipment they are most comfortable with to do their jobs. We know that for most, a personal computer is not simply a black box. From wallpaper to icon positions, a computer often represents an extension of the individual. If anyone needs more convincing, just try and pry an Apple computer away from its user and replace it with a Windows machine (and vice versa). People have preferences. Enterprise-provided computers are a reluctantly accepted reality.

Why can’t we bring our own computers to work?

With these compelling reasons and more supporting BYOC, why has it not happened? The first reason that comes to mind for most IT leaders is the nightmare of trying to support hardware from a myriad of vendors. It flies in the face of standardization, which largely helps to keep costs and complexity down. In addition, organizations have continued to build solutions that rely on specific software and hardware requirements and configurations. Finally, there is both a real and perceived loss of control that makes most security and risk professionals shudder.

With all that said, there are now some substantive reasons to believe BYOC may soon become a reality for many organizations.

Times they are a changing

[Many of you can skip this brief history recap] When the web browser emerged in the 1990s, there was some optimism that it would herald the beginning of a world where software would largely become hardware agnostic. Many believed it would make the operating system (OS) largely irrelevant. Of course we know this didn’t happen, and software vendors continued to build OS-dependent solutions and organizations recommitted to large-scale, in-house ERP implementations that created vendor lock-ins. At the time, browser technology was inadequate, hosted enterprise applications were weak and often absent for many business functions, and broadband was expensive, inconsistent, and often unreliable across the U.S.

Skip forward and the situation is markedly different. Today we have robust browsers and supporting languages, reliable broadband, and enterprise-class applications that are delivered from hosted providers. It’s also not uncommon anymore for staff to use non-business provided, cloud-based consumer applications to perform their work.

Oh to be a start-up! If we could all redo our businesses today, we’d likely avoid building our own data centers and most of our applications. This is one of the promises of cloud computing. And while there will be considerable switching costs for existing organizations, the trend suggests a future where major business functions that are provided by technology will largely be non-competitive, on-demand utilities. In this future state it’s entirely possible that hardware independence will become a viable reality. With the application, data, business logic, and security all provisioned in the cloud, the computer really does simply become a portal to information and utility.

Smartphones are already a “bring your own computer” to work device

The smartphone demonstrates all the characteristics of the cloud-provisioned services I’ve discussed. In many organizations bringing your own smartphone to work is standard practice. Often the employee purchases the device, gets vendor support, and pays for the service themselves (a large number of organizations reimburse the service cost). It’s a model that may be emulated with personal computers. (That is, if smartphones don’t evolve to become the personal computer. That’s another possible outcome.)

I believe fully-embraced cloud computing makes BYOC entirely possible. There will continue to be resistance and indeed, there will be industries where security and control is so inflexible, that BYOC will be difficult to attain. There will also be cultural issues. We’ll need to overcome the notion that providing a computer is an organizational responsibility. There was a time when most organizations provided sales-people with cars (some still do). Today we expect employees to provide and maintain their own cars, but we do provide mileage reimbursement when it’s used for business purposes. Could there be a similar model for employees who use their own computers? Today, for BYOC, some enterprises simply provide a stipend. What works and what doesn’t will need to be figured out.

So what now?

So what are the takeaways from all of this? First, BYOC is a real likelihood for many organizations and it’s time for IT leadership to grapple with the implications. Second, the emergence of cloud computing will have unanticipated downstream impacts in organizations and strategies to address those issues will need to be created. Lastly, we’ve already entered into a slow and painful convergence between smartphones, personal computers, consumer applications and devices, and cloud computing. This needs to be reconciled appropriate to each industry and organization. And it has to happen sooner than later.

When the dust settles, the provision of computing services in the enterprise will be entirely different. IT leadership had better be prepared.

Photo: Work Place by cell105, on Flickr

Related:

• Cloud computing’s fear factor: Acknowledge, reduce, move on
• Mobile in the enterprise changes everything
• More CIO commentary and analysis

Sure, we should give credit where it’s due. The IT industry is at the leading edge of innovation when compared with other industries.

I write here, not about the IT innovation that we see happening in businesses every day and not about the important incremental innovation that helps businesses move forward. I’m referring to breakthrough innovation — the kind of innovation that reinvents everyday things. Of course it happens eventually, but it takes a long time.

The reality is that organizations are only capable and willing to adopt technology at their pace. For many of us — suppliers, managers, and implementers of technology — it can be valuable to understand why this might be the case. No matter how much you fight it, the rate of technology adoption at enterprises is a throttle on the velocity of new innovation that can be introduced by technology providers. In my view, were this not the case, I imagine we may already have had pervasive teleportation and invisibility cloaks at our disposal.

Over my career working in and observing multiple enterprises, I’ve noted some consistent trends that provide rationale for their speed of technology adoption. It’s fair to say that there is a spread, but the majority in the bell curve move at a slow rate. Of course, there are always clear exceptions and we have to recognize those trailblazers, too. However, even the first movers are constrained by the majority. For example, with a social application: if your organization is the the only one using it, its value may be considerably weakened by the absence of the network effect.

While the title of this posting might suggest something more exotic, I believe it’s a fitting allegory for the real limitations that continue to exist in organizations today.

Below I briefly discuss five reasons why enterprises continue to have a slow adoption rate for innovative technology. I’ll admit there are no surprises in this list, and frankly they are quite obvious to most of us. However, I think they are worth calling attention to again, particularly since we are in an impressive period of IT innovation. I’ve also added my own thoughts on how they can be addressed.

1. Cost

Decision-makers have many choices when investing scarce dollars on IT projects. In most organizations it’s a prioritization process that nobody enjoys. But it’s essential. Many great ideas fall by the wayside and never make the light of day in favor of more pressing enterprise needs. In this context, broad implementation of new technology — not research and development efforts — can have real problems securing funds.

Additionally, a new solution is often more expensive because of the change that needs to happen. It’s a bigger proposition than an upgrade, an enhancement, or the roll-out of a commodity-type ERP. Other costs, such as risk and the implementation unknowns, can provide a disincentive to decision-makers already jaded by too many failed IT projects.

ADVICE: Despite these constraints, many enlightened organizations still commit funds to high-risk, new technology projects, often by using dollars set aside specifically for these special projects. Decide if all projects should go through a standard IT governance or determine whether there should be an exception process that is triggered by technology that meets a certain high risk, high uncertainty criteria.

2. Complexity

Today, fewer and fewer solutions remain islands among the IT infrastructure. There are often so many inter-dependencies that even a small change has downstream impacts that must be considered. Introducing new technology into these environments is seldom a trivial exercise. It’s also a reason why so many decision-makers prefer single-vendor stacks. Sure, standards have improved the situation immensely, but we’re still a far distance from a time when customizations aren’t required or are at least reserved to the administrative layer.

ADVICE: In many ways, this limitation is aligned closely with cost. Complexity becomes less of an issue if you’re prepared to invest in the effort. If possible, put some funds exclusively for this exploratory work in your budget. Think about investing in a lab environment where ideas can be safely explored. Prototypes are a great way to win decision-makers over.

3. Resistance

While both cost and complexity are largely qualitative inputs, there are a number of human factors that greatly influence IT decisions.

There is an unfortunate twist to our period of hyper-innovation. While we embrace and support it — we love new toys — there’s a more sober component to new technology introduction that cannot be overlooked. It’s similar to that moment at a buffet when you know you’d like to try more, but you’re simply too full. Humans have a cap on the amount of new technology they are able to consume. Introduce too many new applications and they will be rejected.

This applies to system improvements too. As we’ve seen so publicly demonstrated as a consequence of Facebook changes, make too many far-reaching modifications and you risk a user rebellion. That’s a recipe for failure.

ADVICE: Every CIO needs to understand, for his or her organization, the pace at which new capabilities can be deployed. It’s probably a lot slower than we all think. Spend time to discuss different views with a variety of stakeholders. Analyze historical trends. Monitor usage as products get deployed. Over time it will become clear what the tipping point is. Your users will quickly let you know.

4. Legacy

We are wedded to the past. It has a lot to do with comfort and trust. We like the things we know more than things that are new and unknown. There’s a reason we go back to that tried and tested Excel formula when we know we have the same capability in the latest ERP system. There’s a reason we continue to use email for seeking answers when our organizations have spent millions on elaborate knowledge management systems. There’s clear value in legacy systems.

New technology often has to compete with these older solutions. For many of your users, you’ll need to pry them away from the old applications kicking and screaming. In some instances resistance will be so fierce, you’ll be forced to concede.

The net effect? Legacy systems present a limitation to the introduction of new technology. It may not happen at the time of deployment. It’s just as likely to happen at IT project governance when the decisions are being made on what projects to invest in. A debate may ensue that argues in favor of the legacy solution and that will kill the new technology before it ever sees the light of day.

ADVICE: Really focus on the business case. And reinforce it over and over. Make sure you have air-tight evidence for the return-on-investment. Numbers talk, particularly dollars. Championing should come from many different leaders. Make a strong case, but ultimately respect the organizations choice.

5. Politics

Oh, the joy of organizational politics! It should come as no surprise that politics plays an important role in IT decision-making. Sometimes it can be an asset. For example, escalating up a hierarchy to leverage leadership perspective can often be a good way of getting tough decisions made. But it can too often be a liability. For example, individual or team self-interest can result in vendor selections that don’t reflect evidence gained in requirements gathering.

Reconciling organizational and individual interests is a messy business. And it’s highly complex. I imagine many of us can tell our own stories of how we observed decisions being made that had little basis in reasonable logic. We’d like to pretend it isn’t a factor, but all too often it is.

Negative organizational politics can hinder IT innovation. There is considerable value to the skill in those that can navigate within those constraints and turn them into a positive outcome.

ADVICE: Organizational politics shouldn’t be viewed as always being negative. It’s important to recognize the role it plays in the process of introducing new technology and then work to channel it into a positive force. Find out who your allies are and partner with them to help make a business case. Observe, listen and learn about your organizations dynamics. Make note of what works and what doesn’t and leverage that knowledge to navigate through the organizations politics. It’s not easy at all and an excellent skill for those that can master it.

These organizational constraints are presented not to suggest that new technology seldom gets introduced to the enterprise. Of course it does. The real effect of these limitations is that they slow the rate of introduction. I’m also suggesting that this slow rate when compounded at a macroeconomic level has a significant impact on the overall speed that new technology innovation gets integrated into each of our lives.

I recognize that this blog doesn’t explore the impact of new innovation in the consumer space on the enterprise (this phenomenon has been called consumerization). That’s certainly an important input. While many of the limitations I’ve discussed are still relevant, there’s a valuable research effort to be done to fully understand what the impact of consumerization will be on enterprise IT innovation over the medium to long term.

Just in case you were wondering, invisibility cloak research and prototyping is well underway. Just use your favorite search engine to look up the subject. You might be as surprised and impressed as I was.

Photo: Glacier des Bossons by r-z, on Flickr

Related:

• Mind-blowing, world-changing technology by the numbers
• Seldom a love story: IT and end users
• Why is IT governance so difficult to implement?
• More CIO commentary and analysis

Almost every business change has a technology impact

There are very few IT systems today that exist in isolation within an organization. Systems interact because they often require data from each other and they are interdependent in terms of sequential steps in a business and technology process. As a result, a change in one system invariably has a downstream impact on one or more other systems or processes. Often, the consequences of these changes are poorly understood by both IT and business stakeholders. Put another way: in interdependent complex systems and processes, there is seldom the notion of a small change.

Once both IT and business stakeholders recognize this, there is an opportunity to turn it into a highly positive outcome.

IT must be perpetual teachers and learners

As is the case in achieving many of the objectives of an IT strategy, it begins with communications. Every contact between IT and the business is an opportunity to teach and to learn. This is a reciprocal interaction. When I hear or read a sentence that begins, “Could you make a small change for me…” I know we’re already starting from a bad place. Unless the requester fully understands the internal complexity of all the interdependent systems and the potential impacts (which is rare), it’s presumptuous for him or her to estimate the scale of the change. Conversely, any IT person who minimizes the impact of a change without fully understanding the potential impact does a disservice in setting expectations that may not be met.

For IT requests, it’s best and safe to assume that a change will have impact, but the scale of that change will not be known until reasonable diligence is performed. That’s a much better starting point.

Let’s now assume that the change is not inconsequential. Two opportunities present themselves.

IT is an important business facilitator

First, stakeholders that are impacted by the change should be brought together to discuss the impact. I’m always surprised how these meetings reveal gaps in everyone’s understanding of business processes between departments. To me, this is where IT can shine as the connective tissue within an organization. More than ever, technology forces organizations to better understand and agree on processes — and that’s often well before the subject of supporting technology is even relevant to the conversation.

Use this opportunity to surface the entire process and for everyone to understand the impacts of any change. Improvements to the process very often emerge. IT has suddenly motivated business process optimization.

There is no such thing as too much process documentation

Second, assuming no documentation exists, this is the right time to map the process. If you’re like many organizations, your IT systems grew organically with little emphasis placed on business process design. My guess is that comprehensive, high-quality, current process documentation is uncommon. It’s never too late to start. If you have business stakeholders in a room discussing and agreeing on the current and future process, this is the time to document it. There is a burgeoning market for tools and support to help enable and simplify this work.

Ultimately, documented processes make it easier to build the right software and to make changes with less overhead activities in the future.

The essential roles of business analyst and solutions architect

It’s this emphasis and attendant benefits of understanding and documenting business processes that supports the expanded roles of both the business analyst and solutions architect. These two roles, and having the right amount of capacity for your organization’s demand, will be essential to succeeding with your IT strategy and in growing the business. In many organizations, the business analyst for this work may or may not be in IT, thus further blurring the lines between where IT starts and ends and where business responsibilities start and end.

Perhaps it’s possible that in the not too distant future we’ll look at IT as part of the business and not as a separate entity in the manner it is today. It just might be the increased emphasis on business process management that acts as the catalyst.

Related:

• Can good IT managers make great business leaders?
• Seldom a love story: IT and end users
• The impact of IT decisions on organizational culture
• More CIO commentary and analysis

Today, some of the core issues with existing knowledge management approaches can be categorized as behavioral and technical (I recognize the complexity of the subject and acknowledge there are many more qualities to examine; using the following two should be sufficient to support the points in this blog).

1. Behavioral

In order for a knowledge management system (KMS) to have value, employees must enter insight on a regular basis and they must keep the knowledge current (we can all agree that out-of-date information, which has reference value, is much less useful as the general desired state of actionable knowledge). Seldom are either of these behaviors adequately incentivized. By sharing tacit knowledge, many employees believe they are reducing their own value to the organization. In addition, updating the information requires effort, which is rarely a priority against the core responsibilities of the employee.

Psychic income earned on your own time might provide incentive for Wikipedia updates, but it doesn’t often translate to well spent effort on company time.

2. Technical

When presenting to audiences I often ask if it is easier for them to use a public search engine to find information about their organizations or use their own organizations’ websites for a search. As you might guess, the majority of the room goes with the public engine.

It’s remarkably difficult to organize information in the right manner, make it searchable, and then present it so the most relevant responses are at the top of the search results. In addition, organizational information is hardly the example of pristine structure. While public search engines benefit from counting the number of links between items (a good measure of popularity), internal systems have no such equivalent. Unstructured content is the king of the public web, whereas it is the bane of the enterprise. (Things will change in the future as new technologies, such as those that support the semantic web, are broadly adopted and implemented).

The situation is compounded when employees are disillusioned by the effectiveness and effort to use the KMS and resort to old habits, like asking colleagues or improvising in the absence of guidance (thus repeating mistakes or missing best practices). The system often fails to be adopted — or at best is used by a small proportion of the organization — and no amount of resuscitation is enough to bring it back to life.

Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2011, being held March 28-31, will examine key pieces of the digital economy and the ways you can use important ideas for your own success.

Save 20% on registration with the code WEBSF11RAD

Social media completely changes the existing knowledge management paradigm

It may be time to put down your tools in trying to make the old model of knowledge management work; social media is a completely new beast that changes many of the rules.

In the old world order, knowledge was usually created and stored as a point in time. In the future, organizational policy or insight may not be formed by an individual creating a document that goes through an approval process and is ultimately published. It will likely begin with an online conversation and it will be forever evolving as more people contribute and circumstances change.

Social media takes knowledge and makes it highly iterative. It creates content as a social object. That is, content is no longer a point in time, but something that is part of a social interaction, such as a discussion. It easily disassembles the pillars of structure as it evolves. As examples: content in a micro-blogging service can shift meaning as a discussion unfolds; conversations in enterprise social networks that link people and customer data can defy categorization; and internal blogs and their comments don’t lend themselves to obvious taxonomy.

The days of the single, authoritative voice are coming to an end. The community has prevailed.

The shift to the adoption of enterprise social computing, greatly influenced by consumerization, points to one emergent observation: the future is about managing unstructured content.</p.

Let’s consider the magnitude of this for a moment. Years of effort, best practices, and technologies for supporting organizational insight in the form of curated, structured insight has to be rethought. It’s an enormous challenge, but it may in fact be the best thing that ever happened to knowledge management.

There is an important silver lining to this story

In the long run, social media in the enterprise will likely be a boon for knowledge management. It should mean that many of the benefits we experience in the consumer web space — effective searching, grouping of associated unstructured data sources, and ranking of relevance — will become basic features of enterprise solutions. It’s likely we’ll see the increasing overlap between public and private data to enhance the value of the private data.

For example: want to know more about a staff member? Internal corporate information will include role, start date, department etc., but we may get additional information pulled in from social networks, such as hobbies, photos or previous employment. Pull up client data and you’ll get the information keyed in by other employees, but you might also get the history and values of the company, competitors, and a list of executives, gleaned from the broader repository of the public web. I’ll leave the conversation about privacy for another day.

It’s likely that social-media-driven knowledge management will require much less of the “management” component. Historically we’ve spent far too much time cleaning up the data, validating, and categorizing it. In the future, more of our time will be spent analyzing all the new knowledge that is being created through our social interactions. Smart analysis can result in new insight, and that has powerful value for organizations.

No doubt this is an enormously complex space and social media magnifies the challenges. The time is right to evaluate your knowledge management strategy. New value creation starts now.

Photo: Office, by ianmunroe on Flickr

Related:

• Yammer: Will viral work in the enterprise?
• The Benefits of a Classical Education
• More CIO commentary and analysis