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AMR and IT synergy
November 14, 2007

Yesterday, I spent the day in Boston, taking in the first half of AMR's annual two-day Executive Leadership Conference. I have to admit this year's theme, "The New IT Story," makes a lot of sense. In short, the theme is a cry for a greater involvement of IT in your business model. The firm encouraged corporate leaders to treat their CIOs with more respect than the proverbial red-headed stepchild of the boardroom, or worse, someone you only want to see when something breaks.

There was also a warning that leaps forward in communication are being hidden by generation gaps, with quite a few references to technology that pretty much everyone who bought the LP version of the White album when it came out, owned a "Frankie Says Relax" T-shirt, or drank "new" Coke at their high school graduation parties have either never heard of, or don't use nearly as much as their kids do.

The technology runs under product names like Second Life and Facebook, online communities that way too many people in the corporate world casually dismiss as the latest fad and a plaything of the young.

Those dismissers should note that Facebook, MySpace, various IM clients and other online social applications allow teenagers to communicate, share data, and collaborate on common goals across time zones and international boundaries without being hampered by differences in culture, currency or even language, as noted in an article in our magazine's October issue linked here. It's enough to make any CIO gnash teeth in frustration and envy.

And yet it's still easy to disregard this fact when you consider that this technology seems to be a young person's game, as evidenced by one presenter who remarked on Tuesday that he only had three or four friends on Facebook because they were the only people he could find there who were his age. 

Nevertheless  it's still a mistake to blow off this quiet technology revolution. If we assume most employees of CIO level or higher are in their 40s, that's little more than 20 years before they retire. Who will take their place? The people waiting in the wings are still in high school right now, and using this very technology that is, for all practical purposes, nonexistent at the corporate level. It's inevitable that teenagers will take the skills and lessons they have picked up from "frivolous" online communities and adapt them to their IT jobs in the future.

Rest assured, this adaptation of social networking software to suit corporate needs is coming. The only question is, do you want your company to be the first on board, or the last?

Posted by Sean Murphy on November 14, 2007 | Comments (0)