Another proof that CIOs are out of touch with today’s business imperatives comes from Sierra Ventures CIO Network. At a recent CIO Summit, the venture firm polled the roughly 40 attendees as to what were the most overhyped and underhyped technologies:
Arik Hesseldahl, CIOs Brand Enterprise Social Tools as Most Overhyped Technology of the Year
The answers were pretty clear and, at least in the overhyped category, close to unanimous.
The most overhyped, in their view, were social tools aimed at the enterprise. This would include products like Jive, Microsoft’s Yammer, Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Moxie, VMWare’s Socialcast and a host of others.
Their reasoning, as Al Campa, a partner at Sierra Ventures put it, was equally simple: “They don’t feel there’s any evidence for a return on investment or ROI,” he said. “It just didn’t move the needle for them when compared to other technologies they looked at.”
It’s a kind of predictable answer where CIOs are concerned, but not chief marketing officers, or CMOs, said Tim Guleri, a managing partner at Sierra Ventures. “CIOs are all about controlling spending and driving down their costs and finding money to fund innovation elsewhere,” he said. “That’s different than CMOs, who are trying to drive branding and reach. They feel differently about the social tools” and are therefore more willing to experiment with their growing tech budgets.
There’s two ways to parse this:
CIOs just don’t get the fact that the business is moving away from communication structures that follow the form factor of industrial age businesses. The 40 CIOs in this group are likely to have come from larger companies, where IT groups are slower to change. Note that CIOs have come under the gun recently for being out of touch with the real needs of the business. In IT leaders are out of sync with the enterprise’s new priorities I looked at research that aligns with the Sierra Ventures’ results: IT leaders dropped collaboration tools from 4th place in 2012 to 12th place in 2013. But they also only thought that business agility deserved to be in 6th place while the CEOs thought it was 2nd. They just aren’t getting it. There’s other research about that (see Why CIOs will screw things up in 2014).
It may be that the current crop of ‘collaboration’ tools haven’t yet made a deep impact on the way business is getting done. As I wrote yesterday in Beneath the chatter about the Future Of Work lies a discontinuity,
We will see more cooperative work, supported by loosely connected, small and simple apps, a break with the model of enterprise software vendors. Not because people want apps that remind them of Snapchat or Foursquare, but because people are doing work at local social scale, not across an enterprise, in general.
This is the largest discontinuity. Instead of conceptualizing the company as broken into managed units, with managers leading each unit and subordinates doing their piecework, we need to conceive of the company as a world — an ecology — built-up from each individual connecting to other individuals. And stringing these together into an interconnected whole involves associations like sets, and discernible elements like scenes, but increasingly, nothing like brigades and squads.
And broadly-conceived one-size-fits-all ‘collaborative’ software solutions will increasingly be viewed as something like the obligation to wear a company uniform to work rather than something to unleash creativity, cooperation, and innovation.
The companies asking CIOs to deploy social tools and the CIOs themselves can’t expect dramatic increases in whatever key metrics the company uses to measure progress — innovation, agility, performance, or customer satisfaction — by simply deploying tools that reinforce old ways of doing things in organizations doing things the old way, except with social tools as a sidebar.
So the CIOs at the Sierra Summit where right and wrong: they aren’t getting a payback on social tools, but that’s because the company has to use social tools as the core infrastructure of a new ways of work, not as an add-on to 20th century operations. But then, the change to a new form factor of work is a larger challenge that CIOs can take on.
via CIOs think social tools are the most overhyped technology today — Gigaom Research.
CIOs think social tools are the most overhyped technology today
