For those of you “non-technology” managers struggling to keep up with all the web/tech innovations, as well as those of us “closet nerds” stuck in a corporate job outside of the tech industry, Harvard professor Andrew McAfee has recently published an article in the November issue of Harvard Business Review, called Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology (available FREE till the end of the month).According to McAfee, the article is “…intended to help non-technologist managers make sense of the huge range of available applications and also to clarify their roles in IT efforts.”

Executives need to stop looking at IT projects as technology installations and start looking at them as periods of organizational change that they have a responsibility to manage…

…managers who distance themselves from IT abdicate a critical responsibility. Having studied IT for the past 12 years, I believe that executives have three roles to play in managing IT: They must help select technologies, nurture their adoption, and ensure their exploitation. However, managers needn’t do all those things each time they buy a new technology. Different types of IT result in different kinds of organizational change when they are implemented, so executives must tailor their roles to the technologies they’re using. What’s critical, though, is that executives stop looking at IT projects as technology installations and start looking at them as periods of organizational change that they have a responsibility to manage.

And along those lines, the basic premise of the article is that corporate IT can be broken down into three distinct categories, which McAfee first describes in detail and then proceeds to offer advice on how to manage the three types of IT, including an overwhelming number of case studies from various industries to prove his point…

1. Function IT (FIT) includes technologies that make the execution of stand-alone tasks more efficient. Word processors and spreadsheets are the most common examples of this IT category.

2. Network IT (NIT) provides a means by which people can communicate with one another. Network technologies include e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, and groupware like Lotus Notes. NIT allows people to interact, but it doesn’t define how they should interact. It gives people freedom to experiment instead of telling them what they must do.

3. Enterprise IT (EIT) is the type of IT application that companies adopt to restructure interactions among groups of employees or with business partners. Applications that define entire business processes, such as CRM and SCM—as well as technologies, such as electronic data interchange, that automate communications between companies—fall into this category. Unlike network technologies, which percolate from the bottom, enterprise technologies are very much top-down; they are purchased and imposed on organizations by senior management.

Across the three IT categories, executives have three tasks. First, they must help select IT applications that will deliver the organizational capabilities they desire. Second, they must lead adoption efforts that result in the creation of complements for those technologies. And third, they must shape the exploitation of IT by ensuring that technologies, capabilities, and complements stay aligned.

After reading this entire article, I must say that I was left wondering where McAfee was really going with this article. Don’t get me wrong—I am a big fan of his blog and highly respect the work that he’s done around Enterprise 2.0; but somehow, I think that the article wasn’t really quite as articulate as his usual blog posts or perhaps I just completely missed the point. Whatever the case, at least I know I’m not the only one who had some doubts about the article, as can be seen from McAfee’s initial explanations in response to reader commentary, as well as a slightly stronger response to comments after getting “Slashdotted.”

Having said that, I must admit that the link to the supplementary section called IT Dialogue was a very good, thought-provoking summary that lends itself towards “Getting’ ETech Support”. Here’s what it says:

Business and IT leaders should meet periodically to discuss the state of the company’s IT-based capabilities. During these meetings, the CIO’s role isn’t to unveil new technologies but to collaborate with executives on capability development. The discussions should cover organizational footprints: the geographic, functional, and divisional range over which the company will deploy new technologies. The expense, difficulty, and time involved in deploying IT—especially enterprise IT—increases as the footprint grows. The conversation can be broken down according to IT category and should address some specific questions.

Functional IT

• Will any of the new software on the market enable our engineers, scientists, analysts, and other workers to do their jobs more efficiently?
• Are our function technologies outdated? If so, why? What has changed?

Network IT

• How do our people collaborate? Do we know what technologies they’re using?
• Do we have ways of letting qualitative information flow horizontally and vertically within the company as well as back and forth with customers and suppliers?
• If we wanted to get broad feedback on an important topic, how would we do it?
• How do we know what our people are working on and what they think the hot topics are?

Enterprise IT

• In what ways are our current processes not supporting the needs of the business? Which ones need to be redesigned? Which ones should be extended to our customers and suppliers?
• Are there best practices that should be embedded in our enterprise IT endeavors so that they can be deployed more widely? How much more widely? Do they need to be adjusted at all for new environments?
• Are there important business activities, events, or trends that we should monitor? If we aren’t monitoring them, why not? Are the data unavailable or stored across so many systems that the information is difficult to assemble?
• What’s the most recent period that we could easily analyze? One hour ago? Yesterday? Last month? Last quarter?
  

It’s important for executives to know how long a proposed IT effort will take and what it will cost, but the ROI figure is nearly worthless. I’ve seen many business cases prepared to justify IT investments. Virtually all of them predicted increased revenues, higher profits, and lower costs. And all of them ascribed the benefits entirely to the technology, making it sound like a can’t-lose proposition. In reality, IT is never a sure bet because of the complex interplay between technologies, capabilities, and complements. Smart companies spend little time predicting the financial benefits that will accrue from IT efforts. They keep track of spending and milestones and constantly check to see if they are on track to gain the IT-based capabilities they desire.