How to really “Get Your Communications Off Life Support”

It seems that in the past couple of years, there has been a noticeable slowdown in innovative thinking within companies as it relates to IT. I realize that this is a strong statement and perhaps not everyone will agree with me. I’m OK with that, because I’m not the only one and I can see this becoming a growing concern in the near future.

Google’s General Manager and Vice President of Enterprise, Dave Girouard knows enterprise software architecture and he knows data management. Girouard heads up Google’s efforts to bring the simplicity and management of consumer software to the enterprise and is so far succeeding (at least in my eyes). His group has so far released the Google Apps “suite” of products and I’m sure there is more innovation on the way. Our team here at IV uses Google for email (at ivforbusiness.com), for shared spreadsheets, calendar and Google Talk for Instant Messaging. Because I don’t have to worry about managing an email server, Office applications and backing up and storing all of this information, I have the ability to concentrate my efforts instead on innovation for IV and more importantly for our clients.

Speaking at yesterday’s keynote address for the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s annual meeting, Girouard voiced his increasing concern with the limited innovation happening within corporations’ technology departments. He stated that “75% to 80% of IT budgets (are spent) simply maintaining the systems they have already,” according to Jon Brodkin at Network World. With such a heavy concentration of time and energy spent on maintaining existing infrastructure and the status quo, what percentage of a CIO’s time, energy and budget are left to create innovative processes and procedures for his or her organization? Has a CIO’s job description become “head fixer-upper” or is there anything left relating to “Information Management?”

Girouard went on to state that IT organizations and companies should, at a strategic level, take another look at the way they manage technology and consider outsourcing its day to day management, even if your internal departments are fully capable of handling the workload. The idea here is that hardware and software break-fix work, installs and the associated ongoing management is a commodity service in itself. Why use the majority of your internal resources to manage a commodity? Why spend all of that time and money on training your staff and keeping them up to date on the latest and greatest, if you can do so more cost-effectively by outsourcing these tasks?

‘“A lot of things that people think of as core IT functions need to disappear into the ether so that the IT organization can properly focus on the value-added [activities],” he said. “Information security, as critical as it is, needs to be taken care of by organizations who live and die by it, who invest the money, time, resources and staff. Why should every company in the world have to build up their own expertise and have to maintain servers and provide security?”’ (Jon Brodkin of Network World)

Instead they could be creating new and improved processes and strategically aligning your technology to your business. So, does innovation still exist within a corporate IT department? I hope so, but let’s help give it a jumpstart by creating the right conditions for this to happen. I guarantee it will pay off. For more on Dave Girouard and Google Apps, here is a pretty good CIO Insight interview with him.