Yesterday, we called it “Information Technology.” It was a department of talented engineers and managers that could get the infrastructure in place and got really good at procuring the tools to ride on top of that infrastructure.
Today, IT is still important in larger organizations and industries who aren’t well served by mobile and consumerist cloud services. Fewer companies are investing in Information Technology the way they did 10 years or even 5 years ago.
Information Technology is quickly being replaced with Business Technology.
What is Business Technology? There are a few definitions out there that are fine, but I see it as this:
Business Technology is the combination of Information Technology and Business Practice into a single, holistic functioning mechanism that leverages the technology for achieving business goals directly.
In practical terms, it’s often the re-education of IT into BT. The world no longer needs shops of infrastructure experts – more and more infrastructure is headed to the cloud as shared services. Instead, it needs troubleshooters, analysts, project managers, trainers and a host of other roles to support the shift to less centralized and more democratized technology.
How businesses old and new interface and leverage technology is as chaotic and vulnerable as ever, despite continuous advances and improvements in much of the software and services available today. I fully expect that we will continue to observe companies make both disastrous and successful shifts into the Business Technology framework.
As you plan for 2017, it’s time to start thinking about how your business will transition to Business Technology from Information Technology.
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