Comments on: The New Chasm

By: Cyz

Cyz — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 08:37:42 +0000

I agree with Yared. In some cases IT play a RIAA-like role in the organizations: force to use their non-effective point of view (where IT is in the centre) and try to ban all non-internal (aka outsourced) solutions and web services.

Maybe it’s the relict of past days where IT was defined as a “important part of corporate strategy”. It’s still true – but only when IT manager commits to company vision and not his or her HW/SW playground.

By: Sean Murphy

Sean Murphy — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 07:05:26 +0000

While I am flattered that you linked to my presentation from 2006 I have to warn you that the books were not in priority order of any sort. I collaborated with Mark Duncan on a article that fleshed out the slide deck, it’s available here:
http://skmurphy.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/Marketing%20Concepts.pdf and the blog post that links to all of the books is here: http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2006/12/11/12-books-for-the-busy-ceo-tonight-mon-dec-11-2006-sdforum/

I found your perspective on the gap between end user and IT as the “new chasm” thought provoking.

By: Jan Z

Jan Z — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 06:50:53 +0000

There is an important distinction between business users and business owners at play here though.

Business users may not have direct influence over IT, but if you’re delivering enough value for the business overall (rather than the individuals working there) you eventually (or by design) engage business owners.

If you change your picture to show “business owner” instead of “end user”, a gap arguably still exists, but it’s a very different beast, particularly with the current economic pressures.

The question I think becomes how to relate, leverage and scale the benefits an individual innovator or early adopter brings to their team/business unit. (the gist of Roger’s more recent convergence model I think…)

Carr was prescient – IT matters less and less.

By: Peter Yared

Peter Yared — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 01:54:58 +0000

This is a great article. IT at a lot of organizations has become a calcified and completely ineffectual. I have noticed lately that business users don’t care about IT at all and just go around them. Hence the success of Saleforce.com and other cloud providers. Marketing organizations and their IT groups are the ones I am impressed with the most. They turn things around quickly, and outsource everything, even simple things like landing pages. Bravo!

By: NWenzel

NWenzel — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 23:52:45 +0000

I think the new Business-IT chasm also works the other way. IT often buys software applications that end users never actually use. Does anyone really use all the features of those super-copiers that can access a file server, email, and search the web? And budgets still get done in Excel before eventually entering numbers in whatever the budgeting software happens to be.

I’ve noticed two interesting relationships: 1) The more expensive the software, the greater the likelihood there will be an end user work around and 2) the more expensive and complex the software, the cheaper and simpler the work around will be.

Relevant article, though I see it’s already in your del.icio.us bookmarks.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/millennials_route_around_it_departments.php