Moving from Information Technology to Business Technology

Posted by: Rachael King on September 28, 2009

Guest blogging today is George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, who for 30 years has been advising CEOs on the impact of technology on business. He also blogs at The Counterintuitive CEO:

For the past four years, I have been preaching the gospel of converting information technologists into businesspeople. I call this concept “moving from information technology to business technology — or IT to BT.”

At its core, I define BT as measuring your usage of technology with business metrics instead of technology metrics. The message is for IT to measure itself using business metrics that matter to the COO, CEO, and board of directors, instead of assessing its success with a technology yardstick, such as network availability or server uptime.

It’s not the mean time between failure or server response times that matter. If you change that one word from information technology to business technology, you begin to change the way IT people work and the way they think about their jobs.

Although this mental shift is happening slower than I figured, a generational change in IT and business leadership is beginning to force the issue. Now we’re seeing the older baby boomer generation beginning to retire, and for the first time, we’re getting CEOs of Fortune 500 companies who had an Apple II when they were 12. So now you have CEOs and presidents who are far more technology-focused. We’re no longer seeing so many people who are getting emails printed out — instead, these top execs actually read them. You know, business leaders actually use these IT devices today — maybe an iPhone or BlackBerry or Kindle —and now you have technologists who had an Apple II as a kid. Both groups of execs understand the evolution of technology out to people — technology populism, if you will — that we all have high-tech devices, and there’s now this new way of thinking and working.

Since the last technology recession from 2001 to 2003, CFOs have been looking more closely at IT spending, which accelerates the shift to BT. The overspend on technology in 2000 was so large — it was about $60 billion in the US — and that was the death knell of runaway technology expenditures. At that moment, CFOs and CEOs said, “We’re never doing that again. We’re going to have tight linkage here, higher return there.”

We’ll look back at this decade as a series of learning moments, and the real turning point from IT to BT is the two recessions, the customer moving clearly to the center stage because of the Internet, and the generational change in senior execs.

I’ll talk more about this at Forrester’s Business Technology Forum in a couple of weeks, but there are three questions companies should ask themselves before transitioning from IT to BT. First, you need to ask, “do we have the right CIO?” The CEO has to look in the eyes of the CIO and make the judgment “Is this person good enough to understand the business?”

Second, you should ask, “do we govern in the right way?” If the decision-making goes from the CEO to the CFO, or maybe to the COO and then to the CIO, I don’t think you’re ever going to get this IT-to-BT change to happen because the CIO is too far removed.

Third, you need to ask, “do we have the right business executives?” The onus is not just on the CIO; we need higher IQ in technology across all of the business executive levels.

If you answer “yes” to those three questions, then you have to ask, “how do we get there?” There’s no technology god that says you’ve got to be BT. The CEO and CIO have to go have a drink someplace, and they’ve got to say, “We’re not doing this right; let’s change our focus and make IT about the business.”