Wirearchy

There is an interview at ZDNet this morning with JP Rangaswami, formerly Global CIO at BT (British Telecom) titled CIO Sessions:  BT’s JP Rangaswami which underscores and reinforces rather nicely Dave Snowden’s assertion in the recent podcast on Web 2.0 and knowledge work that the CIO role may be an endangered species.

I think the content of this interview also underscore the point that much of the Web 2.0 functionality and capabilities that will be used in Enterprise 2.0 work design rests, in laypersons’ terms, in layers on top of existing IT architecture and infrastructure.

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Rangaswami, who was formerly global CIO at BT, has been an early adopter of the Web, blogs, wikis and social networking tools. He even eliminated the CIO title as a way to better reflect the roles individuals play at BT. I asked him if that means CIOs are dinosaurs, headed for extinction.

"Perhaps not today, although believe it or not, at BT we’ve done away with the CIO title at our levels. We call ourselves MDs [Managing Directors] because we’re fundamentally managing directors of certain businesses and the head of BT design overall is actually called a CEO which reflects what the person does. Part of the reason to get rid of the CIO title was effectively to say that we represent disciplines far beyond just was in IT in the past or in IS, that we represent networks, we represent products, we represent processes. What we represent is design so it made sense for us to come together and converge on that title."

Rangaswami is also a strong advocate of Web 2.0 technologies, with significant internal use of blogs, wikis and instant messaging. He is also an advocate for using Facebook, in contrast to many of his peers who have taken a different approach to the social network upstart, banning it as non-productive use of company time and too far outside the compliance boundaries of corporate information systems.

Rangaswami views Facebook as a way to break the “assembly line mindset”:

"In fact if you look at what I’m doing with Facebook, what I’m really achieving, what any of us who wants to use it in an enterprise environment achieves, is to say that you’ve taken what happened at the water cooler or at the coffee shop and made it persistent, made it shareable, made it teachable, made it learnable. That’s a huge win because we’ve spent years talking about the value of the water cooler conversations, of the coffee shops, of the more amorphous softer discussions.

Now we have the ability to actually understand what these relationships are, how information and decision making migrates horizontally, laterally through an organization, rather than through the published hierarchies, how people really work, and what people do as part of that work".

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Tags: JP Rangaswami, Dave Snowden, CIO, social computing, wirearchy

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