THORNTON A. MAY
IT Needs to Aspire and
Really Make a Difference
IT should
aspire to
more than
keeping the
lights on.
VICTOR HUGO, the great writer of 19th-century France, said, “You can resist an invading army; you cannot resist an idea whose time has come.” The same can be said of technologies. Currently, four transformational technologies define the IT agenda:
Thornton A. May
is author of The New
Know: Innovation
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and executive director
of the IT Leadership
Academy at Florida
State College in
Jacksonville. You
can contact him at
thorntonamay@aol.com
or follow him on Twitter
(@deanitla).
big data, social networking, mobile and cloud
computing. You can’t resist these technologies,
but the question is whether you will deploy them
resignedly — that which can’t be resisted must be
accommodated — or exploit them aspirationally,
in ways that really make a difference.
In the pattern of technology adoption called
“mirroring,” an organization identifies a new
technology, “sandboxes” its properties via a series
of controlled-risk internal experiments and finally
applies that technology to existing work processes. The new technology is deployed to mirror the
existing way of doing things.
When it comes to transformation and aspiration, this is about as low as you can get. If you
don’t see that, think of the classic case of mirroring: As Americans transitioned from a nation
of radio listeners to one of television watchers,
the initial rollout of the new technology featured
radio performers reading scripts. The only thing
that changed was that the technology had moved
beyond the microphone to include a camera.
With the hindsight of several decades, we can
all easily see how that approach underutilized the
potential of television. But can we see as clearly
how we are underexploiting the new technologies
now available to us? Do we really need to take baby
steps with these powerful and potentially game-changing tools? Shouldn’t we change our mindset
and aggressively explore what previously impossible things these new technologies allow us to do?
I believe we should. IT should aspire to more
than KTLO (that’s “keeping the lights on”). But
too often we don’t. A management framework
in widespread use today divides IT investments
and technologies into three buckets: running,
growing and transforming the business. On
average, 65% of IT spending goes to running the
business, 25% to growing it and a mere 10% to
transforming it. This has to change. Are you the
leader who can make that happen — who insists
that transformational technologies be deployed
aspirationally?
