The emergence and adoption of alternate technologies is hard to ignore. Employees find technology to support their needs (such as desktop search tools, blogs or wikis for collaboration), explore what they can do and teach their colleagues how to use the tools so they'll have a way to work together, but these sorts of technologies are not supported by most businesses' IT organizations.

A technology subculture is evolving. CIOs concentrate on costs, business processes and governance, while employees say, "just do it!" If my kid can carry on discussions, swap homework and post pictures on the Web, then why can't I do comparable things at work?

The gulf between the employee's and IT organization's view of corporate computing is growing. The CIO has the responsibility of keeping the company's computing infrastructure healthy and secure, and keeping back-office operations running, while employees are concerned with figuring out ways to streamline their work processes, make them more interesting and exploit new technologies to help them. Many of these new tools are easier to use than what the company provides - if not actually filling a void the company does not address altogether.

Although some IT departments are beginning to think about these resources and ask us, for example, if folksonomies can be used internally to the corporate advantage, we don't hear the question often, and we hear about deployments of such social technology even less often.

The two views - MIS-centric vs. employee-enabling - need to converge if a company's IT resources are to be aligned.

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Interesting post. However, it's also critical to remember who is the servant, and who the master. The CIO and his/her staff need to focus on making sure that the other employees are able to do their work; that is the raison d'etre of the entire IT system. More and more, employees are asked to be innovative, get the job done, increase their productivity, reduce their expenses, do it faster and smarter and better; and more and more, the IT departments are sluggish in responding, don't provide training, operate as though they should dictate the outcomes of the use of IT instead of that role belonging to the employee-user. If one thinks of the outcome of employees' work as being a meal, then the fridge (IT department) shouldn't be dictating to the cook (employee-user) what the menu will be and what ingredients it, the fridge, will or won't accept.

I agree with your comment but at the same time have to protect the network. It is great when employees find innovative ways to increase their efficiency, but if that means exposing the IT system to potentail viruses and holes in the firewall, need to find a process to review these ideas quickly.

The problem is describe, but what could be the solution? How can IT provide the users with a save environment and a playground at same time? How can IT take up new promising ideas and pull them into operational mode? Who should decide what to pull up and what to push down? What would be the citeria the decision should be based on?

I belive giving every user a playground today is technical no big deal, if the IT infrastructure is ready for deploying virtual machines (vm). Educating every (interessted) user in the use of vms is not that easy.

Ok, if we have the playground IT should walk by regulary watching carrefully and asking questions. May be even helping out if the user is in trouble.

Trouble? - What kind of trouble can that be? What impact could the trouble have on the overall performance of the user, the IT or even the organisation? Could this approach lead to a situation where the user has improved his working space and feels really good, but the overall performance is effected negativ? I bet it can! Lets assume the perfomance of the organisation depends on the distribution of knowledge within the organisation. To my knowledge not that uncommon today. The user is unhappy with the software used by the organisation for knowledge sharing. He knows there is something better, cooler. He installs it on his vm. He starts using it for his daily work. He gets his work done, the work that his boss will look at. He moves up the ladder. To be continued by your imagination.

The problems arise from the hidden deliverables of a process. The ones that might have been taken into account as the process was defined but were forgotten.

So should the playground only be opend for the improvement of processes by users who knowns all the deliverables? Who can know all deliverables? That is not a way to go.

So what can be done?

The time it takes to implement a new computerized prozesse successfull is correlated positively with the knowledge about the dependencies
* between the process and other processes
* within the process
* between the process and the IT infrastrukture
* within the IT infrastrukture

So how can we gather the nessary information, transform it to knowledge and make it effective? Not by change, but as an ongoing movement to improvment?

The rapid growth of SaaS allowing users to access collaboration tools and wikis through a browser means that the job of the IT department has changed: They don't have to worry about testing for compatibility, scheduling implementation or even concern themselves with who is paying for the party. Instead the focus of the IT department must shift to security and managing the firewall: with more and more SaaS applications and unified communication solutions, managing access to systems and data seems to be where the IT department can make a difference in the future.

The initial point that, "...the two views, MIS-Centric Vs Employee Enabling need to converge." is valid, but it is not where to focus our efforts. The two views tend to be polarised because the role of IT is compromised between supporting technology and delivering functionality.

As a result the views of 'the business' and 'IT' are driven apart and will only converge once the technology we use enables IT to resume its natural role, which is to deploy and support technology.

Factonomy's Framework is a great example of how this can be done. It has a declarative XML environment where employees can create functionality which is schema driven and therefore complies with development standards. IT's role is to provide infrastructure support.

In this situation, because the role of the user and IT are distinct then views naturally converge because IT don't get dragged into business issues.