Process

By Andy Mulholland, CTO, Capgemini

For the three decades that I have been in IT, users have been the driving force behind every part of technology that became widely accepted—whether it was PCs, mobile phones, or personal digital assistants. In each instance, users saw the value of an advance long before the corporation figured it out. If a corporation's IT doesn't align with what people want, the people find a technology that does.

Web 2.0—this new manifestation of Web technology that encompasses social networking, user-generated content, and other personalized aspects—represents a significant leap into people-centric computing. This is a stage where technology is secondary.

That's a crucial development in terms of rethinking and reshaping the world around us. In the traditional business model, you invent something and then figure out how to develop a product line. Now, however, people suddenly can decide not only how they want to buy things, but also how those things should be designed. We're a long way from the days of Henry Ford and his famous (though probably apocryphal) claim about the Model T: you could get it in any color you want, as long as it was black.

But I'm talking about more than custom manufacturing—I'm really talking about a custom experience, the way users choose to do things and see things. It's like the difference between buying a home and renting one. The latter experience may be transitory, but it leads nonetheless to a heightened awareness and understanding of the world. Use of a product is no longer inextricably linked to ownership of the product.

This is not as high-minded as it sounds. It's just that people's desire for the exception is becoming more important than their desire for the prosaic. There's a significant shift underway. We see a new generation of people who, by their very nature, assume that technology allows them to behave and experience the world differently.

In pursuing that idea, we have the opportunity to think about the world differently. Consider a Web site such as www.threadless.com, where people can post T-shirt designs for sale, and consumers can order them as they are or in different colors. That business model is very different from a traditional one, in which someone makes the products and then distributes them to retailers.

Now the primary question is: What roles do IT and the chief information officer have in an organization whose users and customers are technically literate and can demand such flexibility from technology? It takes a significant forward leap in thinking to grapple with this—nothing less than rethinking the roles of the enterprise and the individuals it, and the relationships among themselves and with others outside the company.

The question for IT becomes not which PC or access technology should be deployed, but what information should and should not be shared. It becomes more about how people jointly create value. Value is whatever your job dictates it is. The system handles the routine, and you decide how to create value.

The value of IT, then, stems from its ability to create and manage an environment in which people come together when, with whom, and in whatever way they need to create value. If you follow that model, you get something like threadless.com, which makes the right clothes for the exact number of people who want them, without waste. The world becomes an interesting link to the increasing awareness of using resources sensibly.