Gartner Tells CIOs to Embrace Social Media
By Laton McCartney, Editor at CIOZone
Has someone been putting strange substances in the drinking water at Gartner’s Greenwich, CT headquarters?
Some of their analysts are beginning to sound like New Age gurus on a mission to bring peace, love and harmony to the corporate world.
Consider these words of wisdom recently imparted by Gartner analysts to clients at an Orlando conference:
“Banning access to social media from the corporate network is futile. The world we live in is digitally enabled and socially connected.”—Carol Rozwell, a Gartner vice president.
Here’s Rozwell’s view of the socially connected workplace:
“While a job may be viewed as an economic transaction, the human brain thinks of the workplace as a social system… (social networking) can make employees feel valued, a part of the community.”
Now here’s Peter Sondergaard, a senior VP of research at Gartner:
“We’re moving from control to greater autonomy…”
The “we” being presumably corporate America and specifically IT. Sondergaard, of course, is speaking about a virtualized, shared services computing enviroment.
Let’s forget for a minute that in the past Gartner was effectively saying that social media use within the enterprise was about two steps removed from letting the inmates run the asylum.
Not so now, Gartner is telling us. CIOs need to stop being such control freaks and embrace the new, open order.
Fine, I’ll go with that up to a point. Likely, CIOs, I don’t really give a damn that those crazy kids in marketing text message each other about the previous night’s episode of Mad Men.
That’s not the CIO’s problem. Nor is their concern to make sure the new purchasing agent feels valued.
They also probably well aware that it’s a digitally enabled, socially connected, far more autonomous world than it was even a year ago, thank you very much.
They don’t need Gartner to tell them that.
What CIOs might find highly useful, however, is a road map to help them make the transition into the future.
For the past decade of so IT chiefs have been told again and again that their number one priority is aligning IT and business.
So now we have highly disparate, often grass roots, increasingly autonomous technologies that need somehow to be harnessed into alignment.
Gartner needs to advise its clients how to go about doing that, instead of concerning themselves about emotionally fulfilled employees.
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Laton McCartney is a former editor-in-chief of InformationWeek. He has also been a top editor at several Ziff Davis publications, including Smart Partner. Laton has written for The Washington Post, Fortune and other national publications. He also the author of a number of books, including the best-seller “Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story.” His latest, “The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country“, will be published in February by Random House.
CIOZone.com is the first of its kind online meeting place for CIOs. It is built upon the foundation of social networking and combines user generated content and expert editorial together around an open source platform.
The Publisher gives permission to link, post, distribute, or reference this article for any lawful purpose, provided attribution is made to the author and to Information-Security-Resources.com
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Comments
2 Comments on Gartner Tells CIOs to Embrace Social Media
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Social Engineering and Enterprise Security | CIO – Blogs and … | Enterprise Engineering Addict on
Tue, 2nd Mar 2010 2:49 pm
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John Marke on
Tue, 2nd Mar 2010 3:56 pm
[...] Gartner Tells CIOs to Embrace Social Media : Information Security … [...]
Good for Gartner!
If CIO’s don’t find a “road map” useful in helping them make the transition to the future, perhaps a dash board, with appropriate color codes and a tasty reward for pushing the correct button?
The concept of… “(the) increasingly disparate, often grass roots, increasingly autonomous technologies that need somehow to be harnessed into alignment” is itself flawed and grounded in the 20th century industrial engineering. I am not sure how technologies align, but people are notoriously unpredictable and full of surprise (a hallmark of complex adaptive systems).
Here’s a simple axiom that may help the beleaguered CIO: people first, ideas second and hardware last.
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