Summer’s over, but the recession isn’t. At least, not just yet. If you follow the news, you may have read that we are nearing the end, and that better times await. Meanwhile, the economy’s still a mess, and IT departments are faring no better.
IT departments become “garbage cans” of problems, solutions, opportunities and decision-makers.
Here’s a roundup of some notable news from the week: some is bad, some is good, and the rest is a little bit of both.
IT: Future-Focused or Stuck in Crisis?
Computerworld ran an opinion piece this week that should be mandatory reading for CIOs. In it, writer Thornton May makes a case for keeping the future in mind, even while in a recession.
May’s organization, the IT Leadership Academy, looked at more than 200 large, multinational enterprises in 20 markets and found that 61 percent of their IT departments have set aside thinking about the future as they try to make it through the present.
May advocates for a style of leadership that follows the principle of Harvard Business School’s Alfred Chandler: Structure must follow strategy.
“But in most enterprises,” he writes, “senior management is incapable of replicating the single-mindedness of a commander in the field who tells his troops, ‘Take that hill.’”
That kind of thinking occurs only in crisis situations, May concludes, when the enterprise’s existence is threatened (like the current economic situation). Without such a crisis, IT departments, and organizations in general, become “garbage cans” of problems, solutions, opportunities and decision-makers.
World’s Carbon Emissions Drop
Meanwhile, as businesses have been sorting through the economic flotsam, Planet Earth has been breathing a little better. According to a Sept. 21 article in the New York Times, global carbon emissions are expected to post their biggest drop in more than 40 years this year. The culprit is the recession, which halted economic activity and cut energy use around the world.
Where’s the Social Media ROI?
Now back to IT garbage cans: A recent survey written up on Mashable.com reveals that although a large percentage of companies are using social media for business, few of them know how to measure its return on investment (ROI).
In the survey, which was conducted by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, only 16 percent of those polled said they currently measured ROI for their social media programs. More than four in 10 respondents did not even know whether the social media tools they were using had ROI measurement capabilities.
That’s hardly future-focused.
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