“Sales staff have bought a pile of iPad’s!” wailed a senior executive last week “they didn’t get authorisation through IT, there are all sorts of security and business risks!”
This echoed the comments I’d heard a few weeks earlier while doing a workshop on cloud computing, that people were running software as a service applications alongside their businesses’ software without telling their management what they were doing.
All of this is reminiscent of the spread of personal computers in the late 1980s where IT departments, such as they then were, banned the use of IBM compatible or Macintosh computers because they were outside the control of the organisation.
The prevailing view was that computer systems were the domain of a select few, running the payroll and doing complex calculations in batches at two in the morning. There was no reason why the average worker should need this sort of technology.
Eventually, managements realised those subversive personal computers running programs like Wordstar and VisiCalc improved productivity and made businesses more flexible. Within five years few businesses didn’t have computers on the desks of every office worker.
We’re at the same stage now with cloud computing, social media and portable devices as many of today’s managers see them as at best toys and a threat to their organisation’s integrity. Quietly though, groups within are using theses tools to improve their teams’ effectiveness while not letting IT or senior management know how they are doing it.
These dissenters are an organisation’s innovators and in a perfect world they would be embraced by managers, directors and shareholders alike as the future of the company.
Many large organisations though don’t see it this way, as their view of the workplace is that innovation and new ideas have to be signed off by seven layers of management after being cleared by legal, HR and the facilities department.
This is where the opportunity lies for the smaller, smarter companies. These tools make organisations faster and more responsive to threats and opportunities which is perfect for the nimble and flexible enterprises.
If you have staff who are smuggling in these tools and devices into your business, consider sitting down with them and getting them to show you how these products improve their work. You may be surprised and it may save you some time in writing stern memos which will be ignored anyway.
The beauty of these tools is you don’t need to throw out your existing equipment and methods as often these new innovations sit happily alongside the legacy stuff. Cloud services are good example of this where services such as Salesforce and Google Apps work with and often plug into the older, established tools.
Because they play nice with existing business tools it’s easy to introduce or evaluate new systems by encouraging the innovators to set up groups or pilot projects within the organisation, which is probably what they are doing anyway without telling you.
In a competitive world, your dissenters are one of your greatest assets, by questioning how and why we use the tools we do, these folk are figuring out how businesses will run in the connected economy.
The question is, do you want your business to be succeed in this new economy?