Director James Cameron might not be the most obvious choice of speaker at an IT industry conference, but attendees at this year’s CA World ’10 quickly learned that the choices Cameron made in his career can be related to challenges IT managers face daily when tasked with providing more services to the business with fewer resources.
Putting aside the star power Cameron brought to the event, the renowned director of films such as “Avatar”, “Titanic” and “Terminator” shared what he believed he had in common with audience members: his geek pride. While Cameron delved into technologies used in his films and the CA World ’10 crowd focuses on IT technologies, the filmmaker made it clear that fear was not a factor when innovating in his industry.
“Too much caution can be crippling. … Any complex enterprise striving for innovation is a leap of faith,” Cameron told the audience.
It may not seem so on the surface, but the foray into 3-D filmmaking for Cameron could be likened to IT organizations exploring technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing. If IT executives fear change and remain stagnant, they could miss the opportunity to innovate and help the business accelerate beyond competition. Accepting that there will be failures and learning from them, Cameron said, helps the innovation process.
“Failure always has to be an option, but fear is not,” Cameron concluded.
For IT organizations, the principle is the same. Take, for instance, an IT group that fears the potential of cloud computing for security or personnel reasons and resists evaluating it as an option for the business. It is likely that a business unit could gain access to cloud resources, prove to executives it is a more logical choice than internal IT and then the IT group is left looking uninformed. Or internal IT departments that resist allowing end-user groups to access social networking or peer-to-peer resources, perhaps also due to security concerns, could also find the community working around the IT mandates, improving productivity.
“The biggest problem for IT departments today is culture and political issues,” says Glenn O’Donnell, senior analyst at Forrester Research. “The complexity of environments, economic conditions and the threat of the external cloud should drive IT to change their culture.”
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