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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 saving
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 feel 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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