Creative Reaction

This recent Fast Company interview with Gartner (IT) researcher Tom Austin articulates something that I’ve been preaching for years – IT is a business tool that should enhance human interaction and collaboration. Favorite Quote (italics mine): “There’s a recognition that if you relax some controls — not all — you’re probably going to get more creative behavior out of the individuals than if everything is locked down. The organization gets far more flexible as well.” WARNING: This article contains cringe-inducing buzzwords.

A recent study by Gartner Research finds that only 20% of IT money is helping businesses grow or gain a competitive advantage. They call the other 80% “dead money” since all it does is keep things running; in other words, it’s an expense.

Personally, I think their methodology is wrong, since there’s no attempt to measure the value of the systems in place, which may *already* be leveraging IT for success. It is possible that these systems already bring value to a business in terms of efficiency and service marketing.

The study, however, brings up some great points:

• IT managers must understand businesses.

• IT should take the lead, providing a strategy for a business.

• IT must demonstrate the value it brings to an organization.

The takeaway:
Everything IT Departments/IT Managers do must add value to a business, first in terms of a dependable infrastructure, then in terms of simplifying business (efficiency), and finally, in terms of providing a competitive advantage. (For creative businesses, this usually means better creative, faster.) Otherwise, you have something worse than “dead money”; you have dead weight, *dragging the business down*.