For us the biggest issue we try to think about and research is the fact that IT is now pervasive really in every part of the firm and that is very different in the past where all of the things tend to run through central IT so the challenge for many organisations today is how do you manage technology in an environment where it touches every employee, every process and every function of the firm and what does that mean to the central IT function. The traditional IT function was very much a back office function, it was focused on financial systems, inventory systems, management and control systems but it was very much not focused on what we call today front of the firm functions, what is going on in the market place, what is going on with the customer, what is going on with the innovation of the firm and now that is really the focus of technology in the market today. What’s changed is just over time how much more powerful technology has become and we look at that through really two main dimensions – that technology has become consumerized so everybody has it with them at all times in all places and that certainly wasn’t true 10 years ago and just the growth of the cloud and the internet environment and its capabilities to be able to provide just about any technology service anywhere in the world for a very effective internal price has really made it much more easy to try things and do things and just greatly increase the speed of innovation.  So consumerisation and the cloud have just really changed the shape of the IT business over the last decade.

We have done research in technology and the board and the CXO suite and when we did this a few years ago one of the things we found is that the time the boards spent on technology issues was very much internally focused and had to do with things like returns on investments and CIO successions and compliance and the auditing function and all these sorts of things and they spent very little time on these sort of more strategic things of how technology might change their business and industry and in just the last couple of years we have seen that change to a significant degree but still a good ways to go but a lot of boards now are at least making an effort to have people in there who have a more first-hand feel for digital issues than they would have done a few years ago, but still it is a real problem in a lot of senior boards that we work with and see. We don’t see any industry where information technology is not a hugely important issue. In fact we did a survey just a few months ago and only two percent of the business leaders said that IT was not an important issue for their firm so technology effects customer relationships, product designs, competitive issues, pricing issues, service issues, so it effects everything that companies need to care about and so you are no longer in this position where executives can say well technology is not my thing, that is for somebody else to do and IT doesn’t matter, I don’t need to know about that.  Those sorts of things that you used to hear quite often, you really don’t hear very much at all anymore because people realise that stuff is not a good thing to say.

I think all of our CIO clients embrace the fact that technology is becoming essential and strategic to their firm and want to play an enormous role in that area, the difference is that some of our clients are successful in moving beyond the huge back office and efficiency requirements that they have always had and finding the resources and band width to embrace these emerging needs and others have not.  Others are so preoccupied with all the things they have to do – all of which are still important – that they tend to be falling behind and the rest of the firms might be moving faster than IT can keep up with so the opportunity is enormous but some are definitely capitalising on it better than others. There is an enormous challenge to essentially revitalise the enterprise IT skill set in our clients today that many of our clients have a lot of people with traditional skills in programming and networks and data centres and servers and maintenance and support and help desk and all of these areas that are in a relative state of decline and they need much more skills in social media, mobility, analytics, cloud acquiring services rather than building them and that is an enormous shift for the IT professional community and definitely one of the areas we try and help our clients manage.  

Double deep is a term that we created to give people a sense of the employee and executive of the future and what we mean by that is that you can look at almost any profession or role in a firm – marketing, sales, engineering, finance, manufacturing, whatever – you have all the traditional skills that come with that role, but to be a valued employee today, to be the most employable employee it is very, very helpful and increasingly essential to be able to blend that existing role with technologies impact in that role and to know what you are supposed to do and what the relevant technologies are to do that well in today’s world and those people that have those double deep skills are the ones that we see at most demand in the market place and in contrast the people who don’t do that – who are traditionally single deep; a marketing person who doesn’t understand digital marketing or search engine optimisation or internet ad servers – those people are often the most likely to find difficult to find work.

We think the Outside-In movement is very real, that when we look at firms today we see more and more things being pushed outside of the firm.  The core technology infrastructure whether it is employees bringing their own devices or cloud computing or software service, all that infrastructure taking place on the internet, but increasingly also many things on the value side.  You see the growth of open source communities, you see people embracing the customer experience, you see the user generated content and reviews and ratings, you see all of these things that are taking place on the web and really are not controllable by the firm and it is those companies that can harness those Outside-In, those external activities that we think will be in best position for the future.

When you look at Silicon Valley today they have a strategy to empower the consumer and the internet of things in just about every industry and therefore we don’t see a single sector that is really immune from these changes.Take a good example in the utility industry. For decades they have talked about smart metering systems and trying to build a smart grid, and the companies couldn’t do that on their own, but now you see something comes along; The ‘Nest’ thermostat - A simple device made by a company that is designed for the internet, that a consumer can operate for themselves and all of a sudden that little device becomes the end point to make that stuff happen and it has to be done, something at an industry level that no one firm could make that happen because they were thinking what they would do in a traditional sort of metered approach. So that is a very good example of just a small change.  I can give you a couple more if you want, it is probably useful.  If you look at health care today, the whole generation of consumerised testing – so you can take your own pulse or blood pressure, there is a company that we work with called Theranose which is trying to basically change the cost of traditional blood tests from hundreds of dollars and many tests to a single test for ten dollars  that will check all of those things, that can be done at a Walmart or a Boots and so all of Silicone Valley right now is trying to essentially empower the edge, the outside of the marketplace with new capabilities that then feed back into the firm.  There is virtually no industry that we have seen that doesn’t have a very real Outside In story.

Increased digital engagement is creating more data, which can be very useful for marketing as David Moschella discusses in this TV show.

Digital engagement is more powerful that marketing messages

Well increasingly the information at the edge, in our view the information created by customers prospects, the community at large, is the single most influential part of the buying process in a lot of firms. And many of us won’t buy anything or stay in a hotel until we know what trip advisor or Amazon and others are saying. And that content comes from customers and their rating system. So community content and that information that comes from the marketplace is far more powerful than say the marketing messages that your own firm can put out there in most business we work with.

If you are interested in issues around digital engagement bookmark Connected Economy TV video and keep an eye out for more videos.

The digital economy is changing business strategies from technology centric to information centric as David Moschella explains in this TV show.

Digital economy and data

Well we often say that the challenge today is to put the I back into IT. That a lot of IT professionals really are technologists at heart and build systems and really give secondary preference to the actual information and the value of it. And whether the system even does what it was supposed to do in terms of satisfying the market. So, you know, it’s been a technology centric industry. But now as you move into the big data business and this concept of information at the edge being your smartphone or in and out. There’s much more focus on the value of the information itself and in using information in new ways. And therefore we think the I is very much going to be put back in IT and that’s why the future of the data to us is a very bright one.

If you enjoyed this video about the digital economy why not watch more TV shows on Connected Economy TV?

IT strategy is important. Every firm has highly sensitive data, applications and systems. In this TV show David Moscella  discusses controlling only the most important aspects.

IT strategy - Protecting your systems

In world we envision in many ways the only thing that will remain closely held internally will be the things that need to be, those highly proprietary systems and data that most need to be protected. And one of the things you see when that is, when you shrink the amount of stuff that it’s really important to protect. You can protect it much better than trying to protect everything which is what a lot of companies are doing now. Trying to protect everything is sort of like trying to control all the conversations your employees have with all their customers and all their partners. In the end you have to trust that the things going on outside on the edges of your organisation are being done responsibly by your employees. So we’ve always not had full control of what’s going on. But this is now just being extended to the use of technology. ___________________________________________________________________ Bookmark Connected Economy TV and look out for more opinions on IT strategy.

Technology management within a business structure has changed as employees often have more knowledge than CIO's. In this TV show David Moschella offers his perspective.

Technology management - The consumerisation of  IT

Yeah, enterprise IT in our view grew up in what we call the IT nanny state. And that basically controlled all of the use of technology in the firm, and in very many ways looked at the employee in almost a parent child relationship. But as IT has become consumerised many employees do things with technology that CIOs don’t know about and don’t understand nearly as well as the people doing them do. So they’ve had to come to accept that we’re now in a much more what we call a co-creation environment where employees who know a lot about technology are extremely valuable to the firm and therefore they need to be supported. _________________________________________________________ The Connected Economy channel has plenty more shows that consider technology management and other technology issues.

The internet of things is the next step in the revolution of the connected digital economy, as David Moschella explains in this TV show.

What is the internet of things?

Yeah, to us probably the next great wave of what’s going on is the so called internet of things, which is bringing computer technology and sensors to all kinds of physical objects. You see it now in this whole explosion of healthcare devices that check your blood pressure, your diet, your sleeping patterns, your fitness patterns. You see it now in doorknobs even, that wherever you are, will show you a picture on your phone of who’s ringing your doorbell. Virtually every product now can have a connected intelligent item. And you see it just really reinventing the whole idea of products and manufacturing in the same way that that information has been reinvented in the last 10 or 20 years. Connected Economy TV is very interested in the internet of things and technology's potential. We have plenty more expert discussion to come.

Business innovation skills can be brought in from outside an organisation. David Moschella discusses changing the structure of a business to incorporate external capabilities:

Business innovation skills are everywhere.

We talk a lot in our work about this shift from an inside out to more of an outside in organisation. And what we mean by that is really quite simple. That traditionally firms were very focused on their own internal resources, internal capabilities and skills and had their own internal value chain of how they did things. But today there’s so much capabilities outside in the marketplace of cloud services, the knowledge of employees, partners, the emerging eco systems, that firms need to in many cases look first to the outside world to find resources, capabilities, transient issues, and secondary to their own organisations. And that’s a big shift particularly for enterprise IT people who have grown up in a world of internal systems, internal procedures, internal processes and internal controls. Connected Economy TV will continue to follow ideas about business innovation skills and we will have more videos from David Moschella.