…many vendors today say it is IT that makes the difference to enabling business innovation. Mark Twain’s response to such a claim would likely have been to repeat another of his famous remarks: “Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she has laid an asteroid.”

Dan McLean of Globe and Mail analyze in his recent article one of the usual claims made by IT vendors. Today: IT driven innovation.

In their pursuit of selling another bottle of “snake-oil” SAP turn around a survey of “Canada’s leading IT executives” to show the link between IT an innovation.

Dan digs a little in the survey read it correctly:

The telling point may be what respondents ranked as the top benefit of IT. Operational efficiency was voted No. 1 by 36 per cent and business productivity came out on top in the minds of 26 per cent.

By comparison, business innovation ranked No. 1 with only 6 per cent of respondents — behind the IT benefit of mobilizing work forces, which was cited by 8 per cent. And yet, SAP’s press release announced the survey results under the headline: “Canada’s Road to Business Growth and Innovation Runs Through the IT Department.”

IT can do a lot for any organization, but many times it collapses under the pressure created by vendor hype. If you read the marketing materials you’ll think that every vendor has laid out an asteroid.
IT is a tool, a very powerful tool, a very smart tool, but only a tool. A tool cannot be smarter than the one using it.

Thanks Dan for the head up and people, go read the original article!

The short answer: with your eyes wide open.

The long answer:

Like many of my CIO colleagues, I am a big consumer of analyst services.

Silicon Valley Guy put it very well:

IT managers simply do not have the time or energy to systematically gather information including talking to many of their peers, vet blogs for accuracy and synthesize conclusions. So tens of thousands IT organizations outsource market, product and management technique research to analysts just like they outsource PC help desk outsourcing, hardware break/fix and janitorial work. Why do 20 or 40 hours of research when you can read a couple of research notes and do a 30-minute phony inquiry? Yeah, they might be cutting corners, but that’s life.

Still….your analyst (be it Gartner, Forrester, AMR or whatever) report is not the holy book. You can question your analyst conclusions; you can question whether or not they apply to your country or your industry.

Do your own homework: learn about your company, learn about your country and your region, learn about your industry, and talk to your close peers.

Don’t get scared by “the brave new world” and the “unprecedented speed of change”. The ground rules of management still apply!

Read the ARmadgeddon blog from time to time, and join (or start) your local CIO Council.

Quoting Tom Peters:

Even—especially?—the “unprecedented” “change”/”speed of change” argument is suspect. In General Grant’s day the arrival of the telegraph was as radical, I think you could argue, as the arrival of the Web. “Unprecedented change”? My Mom, who died in 2005 experienced, among other things: the arrival of radio, long-distance phones, TV, computers, the Web, cars, flight (Wright brothers to 747s to Neil Armstrong), WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, the Cold War, the Korean “police action,” Vietnam, Gulf Wars I & II, the scourge of HIV, etc, etc. By her standards, I’ve (we’ve) experienced a cakewalk!

We keep hearing that our time in unique, that our challenges are unique… Is that it?

Read the full post of Tom here.

How many times when we think about stress we think only about negative events? How many time times when we think about resistance to changes we think only about bad changes?

Wikipedia define stress as “the sum of physical and mental responses to an unacceptable disparity between real or imagined personal experience and personal expectations”.

I reminded the hard way about the stress involved in good events. I recently move to a new house. The whole week I was very stressed. In the beginning I don’t understand why: nothing bad was happening. Only the end I realize how much the stress such an event can produce.

We tend to help our people to cope with stress. We design workplaces that minimize stress. We develop change management programs for restructuring or outsourcing projects.

How about helping a coworker who just married to cope with stress? This a case of stress caused by a good event, but still a strong stress. How about helping someone to cope with stress induced by a promotion?

Usually we tend to ignore this kind of events: after all they are good events.

Try this: next time when one coworker passes a major event (especially a good one) apply all that you have learned about copping with stress and change management.

You may be amazed by the results.