In many organizations the annual planning cycle is well underway. Some CIOs and CTOs enjoy a privileged position and are at the heart of shaping the future of their organization through this process. Others are at the receiving end of this process and work under constraints that make it hard to deliver technology-enabled value creation for the enterprise. The difference sometimes comes down to personal characteristics: charismatic leaders, strong communicators and proven relationship builders often achieve greater impact. But there is also an institutional aspect. A good understanding of the role and value of technology among all executives in the organization makes it much easier to deliver impact.  How can this be improved?

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There’s a lot of buzz around the idea that service oriented architecture (SOA) is dead. It’s true that there haven’t been many fans of this somewhat difficult concept, and there haven’t been a lot of large scale success stories for IT departments to brag about. And let’s face, it, it’s hard for businesses to build a strong case for something that promises “improved agility”.

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I’ve been thinking about the concepts in the book Nudge recently. For those who haven’t read the book, here’s a short summary of the main idea from the New York Times.

The main insight from which Thaler and Sunstein proceed is that no decision setting is “neutral.” Whether it’s a restaurant laying out food or a business offering its employees a list of mutual funds in its 401(k) plan or the government presenting different Medicare options, whoever presents choices must frame them in some way. And the framing will affect the decisions.

As a result, Thaler and Sunstein argue, many of the familiar arguments for why people should simply be left to make choices on their own, and especially for why government should stay strictly out of the way, have little practical force. In many important areas of choice…the operative question is not whether to bias people’s decisions, but in which direction.

Leaders in IT departments can use some of these same ideas to help improve performance and drive better behavior.

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I’ve long been a Twitter nay-sayer. I thought of Twitter as a feature that should be incorporated into a social networking site like Facebook – and not a stand alone service. I saw some value if one was semi-famous or wanted to follow the every move of the semi-famous – but I’m not and I don’t. Then, as part of publishing the article Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 work for the McKinsey Quarterly, we leveraged Twitter to promote the article. Within three days we had been re-tweeted to hundreds of thousands of Twitter users and got hundreds of responses from the community. The value suddenly became clear.

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Mention sustainability and IT in the same sentence, and most people think of Green IT and carbon abatement. These are important topics, of course, but only part of what sustainability really means.

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