No one can argue against the fact that the depth and breadth of business technologies in use today has gotten, well, much deeper and wider in the last decade.
Ten years ago, IT teams primarily worried about desktops, servers and network connectivity. The corporate marketing department primarily managed websites as ‘brochureware,’ smart phones did not exist, only one out of 10 computers were portable laptops, and there was a ‘phone guy’ who managed the phone system.
Today, the situation is dramatically different. Not only do IT teams have to manage traditional IT services, but they also must corral all the new information technologies that have emerged in the past decade. The expanding list of new technologies is growing faster than the national debt — smart phones, tablet computers, remote desktops, VPNs, VoIP, the cloud, the list goes on and on.
“This has led to a condition among CIOs and IT managers that I refer to as competency deficit disorder (CDD),” says Mark Swanson, the CEO of cloud communications provider, Telovations Inc., headquartered in Tampa, Fla.
Smart Business spoke to Swanson about the competency deficit disorder phenomenon, and how the cloud can offer some cures for CDD.
What do you mean by competency deficit disorder (CDD)?
I define CDD as the inability to manage the various technologies that you choose to deploy in your business. It happens when IT’s focus moves from delivering strategic value to the business to pursuing an agenda of buying technologies as a response to management’s obsession with cost control. When you choose to purchase based only on cost, you make dumb decisions like buying cheap while at the same time paring down your IT staff and bringing previously outsourced services in house. The result is your remaining staff runs around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to fix things that break more often and that they have little or no training on. It’s like a never-ending tsunami of problems. These keep you from focusing on the projects that move the business forward.
