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Why CIOs Should Encourage Rebellion Among End Users

Web 2.0 tools and consumer technology can foster creativity and business innovation.

By Abbie Lundberg

June 08, 2007 — CIO — How does a corporate CIO foster “rebellious insightfulness”? And why would he want to?

That was a big topic of conversation at last month’s annual Finnish CIO conference in Helsinki, where I shared the stage with IDC Chief Researcher John Gantz (IDC is a sister company of CIO’s publisher) and Nokia CIO John Clarke. The event was put on by the newly launched Finnish edition of CIO.

Gantz talked about four explosions—of data, devices, transactions and risk—and predicted that everything on the IP network will eventually end up in the CIO’s domain, driving IT’s responsibility beyond the traditional boundaries of the organization and deeper into its employees’ briefcases, pockets and homes.

This “hyper-disruption” (as Gantz calls it) is what’s driving the need for “rebellious insightfulness,” according to Nokia’s Clarke, whose company has a lot to do with that explosion in devices.

CIO has written a lot about the incursion of consumer technology into the enterprise. (See, for example, Users Who Know Too Much and the CIOs Who Fear Them.) As Clarke put it, “The harsh reality is that the technology employees use at work is inferior to the technology they have at home.”

Clarke’s not fighting that reality; rather, he’s planning to harness it. But understanding what customers really want, not just what they say they want, requires a deeper engagement with them, he believes. The challenge is how to collaborate with people who are not part of your own organization. Clarke thinks the answer is to create an ecosystem where people can share, collaborate, discuss and interact. In other words, the answer is Web 2.0.

To that end, Clarke is testing and supporting consumer apps, a broader range of devices and is developing more flexible security policies to create a platform for “managed consumerization” in the pursuit of rebellious insightfulness. He’s focusing on new collaboration tools. He has his staff creating mash-ups and exploring virtual worlds, using Skype and working with Amazon’s APIs.

His hope is that all this will ultimately lead to the kinds of breakthroughs Nokia and many other companies are looking for in this time of hyper-disruption.

Are you encouraging rebellion in the ranks? We’d love to hear how and why, and what you expect to get out of it.

 

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