What IT can learn from Steve Jobs

Much has been written about Steve Jobs’s impact on the tech industry, as well as his visionary role as a business leader. But if you’re looking to move your IT organization forward, what you need to learn from Steve Jobs boils down to one thing: Focus on upside potential, not downside risk.

One minute comparing the iPad to the Motorola Xoom is all you need to accept this wisdom. Here’s the difference: The iPad was a new type of gadget with no proven market and no clear selling proposition beyond its overall coolness and undefinable potential. Along with it came the Apple-curated App Store and the hope that independent developers would show up to stock its shelves. Risky.

[ Also on InfoWorld.com: Get Bob Lewis’s continuing IT management wisdom in his Advice Line blog and newsletter. | Bob Lewis outlines the IT survival guide for uncertain times. ]

The Xoom was (and is) a copycat device, a late arrival that wasn’t quite as good, but just as expensive and with no unique feature. Motorola (and, to be fair, every other purveyor of Android tablets) played it safe, which is, in the long run, the least safe way to run a business, because really, what do their tablets offer that anyone might want, other than being not an iPad?

When you’re leading an IT organization, safe is just as risky.

IT’s unique selling proposition

The most basic challenge of any business strategy is to define a unique selling proposition. This is not a complicated concept; in fact, the phrase is self-explanatory: Businesses must explain what only their products and services provide … what you can’t get anywhere else.

Even though running IT as a business is a bad idea, IT organizations must consider their unique selling proposition in relation to the enterprise as a whole. After all, we are in a battle with the IT outsourcing industry for executive hearts and minds. And our opponents have entire sales and marketing departments devoted to creating unique selling propositions, which, if successful, will put us all back on the IT job market — with the possible exception of the CIO, whose job will subsequently change to contract administrator.

What does internal IT have to offer against this threat? Financially, it doesn’t have to turn a profit, giving it an automatic cost advantage, which outsourcers are masters at countering through the use of lease/buy-back arrangements and other financial games. Don’t try to win on the financials.

Internal IT’s competitive edge over an outsourcer is its ability to form deep relationships with every other part of the business. IT organizations that focus on these relationships — not just in the executive suite, but at all levels of interaction — position themselves uniquely to be an asset to the business, while at the same time satisfying the “requirements of enlightened self-interest” by making their services harder to hand over to an outsourcer, which would, after all, limit delivery to its contractual obligations.

Which is why IT should say yes to iPhones and other forms of consumer tech.

Why playing it safe can wreck relationships

Executives, middle managers, front-line supervisors, and staff-level employees are embracing technology in every facet of their lives. And when they express interest in bringing their preferred devices to work, playing it safe is a poor way to run IT.

Why? Because playing it safe makes IT’s job easier at everyone else’s expense, and this is a poor approach to building relationships.

Not that relationship building justifies recklessness as an alternative. But as it turns out, embracing “Bring Your Own Tech” (BYOT) isn’t at all reckless.

In Bill Snyder’s recent post, “Smartphones storm the enterprise — and no one gets hurt,” Nike’s Art King, Global Infrastructure Architecture Lead, nailed why fighting BYOT is so bad for the IT/business relationship: “Users say to me, ‘Why is everything I do in my personal [computing] life like snapping my fingers, but everything at work takes years?'”

King, I suspect, understands that answering, “Here’s why,” is exactly the wrong way to go about things. The right response is to ask everyone in IT, “What can we do to change this equation?”

No question: IT’s challenges are a lot more complicated than setting up a Wi-Fi router at home, even if the home expert faces challenges as a consumer, like how to open another port and enable another service so that the family Slingbox will work. But that’s a problem to solve, not a reason to say no.

The hidden payoff of BYOT

Snyder’s post on BYOT initiatives at Nike and Cisco shows that saying yes to user tech isn’t reckless, and it doesn’t have to come with a prohibitive price tag. But the real upside might be the ability to enhance IT’s unique selling proposition for larger initiatives down the line.

Think of it this way: A BYOT policy, if handled well, will significantly improve relations between IT and the business. This enhanced relationship will facilitate smoother, more successful business change initiatives. While there are a few dots to connect, this business benefit is decidedly real.

Not real enough to be convincing by itself, though. Just because BYOT does no harm, that doesn’t make proving the benefits at all easy.

That’s why it’s so important to couple your employee-owned tablet and smartphone initiative to policies geared toward fueling user-driven innovation. That’s what can send cash to the bottom line in a hurry. Doing so will get IT a lot more positive attention than trying to keep iPhones from coming in the door.

This story, “What IT can learn from Steve Jobs,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.