Getting over IT

Recent trends in communications networking and applications management suggest that IT's reign of terror could be finally approaching an end.

“IT departments used to be the evangelists of technology. In recent years they've become the governors of technology.”
— Eric Mann, executive director of business development, Broadband Office

It's safe to say at this point that everyone has had some negative internal IT experiences. Even if you're lucky enough to work for one of the fastest and highest tech of high-tech fast companies — the kinds that give all employees high-speed access at home even if they never work from home and still manage to maintain full stocks of Starbucks coffee and Veryfine juices — chances are there has been a day when you've felt the frustration of an e-mail server on the fritz, a crippled PBX, a severed Internet connection or a desktop mysteriously wiped clean of software. And chances are you felt a twinge of irony, given the industry that surrounds you and the kind of work you do.

For service providers coveting the small and medium-sized IT budgets of small and medium-sized businesses, the feelings of frustration and the twinges of irony are likely to be even more intense. Not only do you have to navigate the IT quagmires of your own organizations, you also have to expose your sales forces to the bull-headedness of customers' IT managers whose motives often lie far outside the realms of financial responsibility, employee productivity and common sense.

IT departments, as Eric Mann of Broadband Office notes in the comment cited above, have evolved from being cheerleaders for technological innovation to dictators that rule communications operations with iron fists. To be fair, Mann went on to point out that a certain degree of regulation is necessary because of the complexity of IT. Still, though, even the governance and maintenance of complicated systems requires an ability to discern practicality and usefulness, and to evaluate by applying economic parameters as well as technological ones.

But recent trends in communications networking and applications management suggest that IT's reign of terror could be finally approaching an end. For many service providers, the sale of communications services and hosted applications is often not pitched to the IT department, but rather directly to the executive suite. In some cases that may be attributable to cost-cutting (or morale-boosting) measures that have eliminated IT departments altogether. In other cases, however, it's a sign that businesses are recognizing the increasingly central role communications technology plays in the financial and operational health of their organizations.

That is particularly the case for the application service provider mode of delivery. Broadband Office, for example, is beginning to add ASP-delivered desktop applications to the suite of voice and data services it currently offers to business tenants of the buildings on its network. Mann points out that there are both business and emotional sides to selling ASP services — the business side being the one that appeals to the sensibilities of the chief financial officers or CEOs much more than it does to IT managers.

A large part of the emotional appeal for a company's executives is simply the strong financial case that often can be made for outsourcing software as a service to an ASP, given the savings gleaned from not having to purchase servers and software licenses for various applications. For them, cost savings is certainly an emotional experience.

For emotionless IT managers, on the other hand, the ASP model is often viewed as a threat to the security and stability of the corporate network. They have the threat part right — although the real threat is to the need for IT departments at all.

Contact Jason Meyers at jmeyers@intertec.com