Not too long ago, there’s been a flurry of LinkedIn exercise in response to an article by IT Brew reporter Brianna Monsanto concerning the worth of an IT division title change. The overall conclusion from the article, and ensuing dialogue, is that whereas altering IT’s title generally is a good transfer, it’s merely a branding aspect in what must be a wholesale reengineering of the staff. Should you really feel the necessity to change the title of your IT group, you in all probability have greater issues. Or, as I put it within the article, placing lipstick on a pig isn’t going to assist. You must really change that animal.
The present curiosity on this matter calls to thoughts a piece on rebranding IT in my 2012 e-book The CIO Paradox, proving as soon as once more that all the pieces previous is new once more and that the CIO Paradox persists. In it, a CIO I interviewed mentioned: “Once I was at GE, we did rename IT. Whereas I had no objections to this rebranding effort, I don’t suppose it’s central to the success of any IT group.”
Again in 2012, rebranding IT was the appropriate dialog. IT’s targets of enablement, assist, and alignment could be effectively served by some mild reorganization round enterprise relationship managers and a shiny new title. (Digital Applied sciences! Enterprise Options! Ministry of Humorous Walks!) However at the moment, we have to have a distinct dialog. The bottom has shifted dramatically since then that renaming IT is nearly a moot level.
Let’s suppose again a pair hundred years after we had been all farmers on this nation. Then, round 1786, a brand new expertise, the steam engine, was invented, and farm women moved to mill cities, robber barons bought wealthy, and we ushered in 200 years of the Industrial Age, with the nineteenth century seeing extra innovation than some other period up to now. Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Astor, and the remainder constructed empires on expansive plots of actual property, owned belongings and large groups, and constructed moats round their companies to remain aggressive.
Then someday within the Nineteen Sixties, we had one other invention: software program, which has been driving the evolution of enterprise ever since. And due to software program, corporations are inclined to need consolidated actual property, a smaller owned asset footprint, small nimble groups, and API-enabled connections proper into their companions’ tech platforms.
This can be a new financial system, a knowledge financial system, the place industrial administration practices and ideologies now not apply. Within the information financial system, the place our future progress is simply nearly as good as our information technique, tradition, and infrastructure, we have to run our companies very otherwise. This implies in the end remodeling the entire organization, together with IT.
Larger questions
So earlier than we ask what to name IT, we have to ask what worth a expertise staff brings to a enterprise within the information financial system. However earlier than that, we have to ask what the AI tsunami headed our approach means for large corporations nonetheless caught in industrial mode — that’s, nearly all of them. Will our human problem with change derail our AI adoption odyssey and create a large disparity in information model legacy enterprise? Are we on the verge of a slew of Blockbuster loss of life tales? Based mostly on current information about China’s DeepSeek giving Nvidia a run for its cash, what sort of wild international AI market journey are all of us on?
These are the questions that expertise leaders, who paradoxically have probably the most energy to form our quickly altering human society, want to determine earlier than worrying a few title change.
However within the meantime, listed below are some title concepts: worth creation, AI adoption, enterprise transformation. However there’s one I imagine most precisely describes the affect that expertise could have within the information financial system. I name it IT.