Recently I was asked by a coworker if there was a way for him to do an online presentation involving a number of people spread around the country and maybe even a few in Europe. After a bit of thought, WebEx came to mind as a possible application to use since I had been in some seminars with it previously and had had good experiences. After sitting in on a couple demos and doing a trial run ourselves, we decided to give it a shot for the meeting. It worked so easily and so well, we decided to use it again for a follow-up meeting. By that point, the marketing person and I were convinced that this would be a good service for us to have that could be used for meetings like these, monthly marketing events, staff meetings, or even tech support. I contacted a sales rep, and we started discussing pricing. I've now recommended to the directors of the two departments I work with that we go ahead and get a contract.

That might seem like it took a bit of time, but that whole process actually spans the course of less than 3 weeks. The innovator in me really enjoys this type of idea that comes along, is easy to test out, and is easy to implement. The part of me that tries to be more thoughtful and spend more time doing analysis cringes a bit at moving this quickly.

Having these sorts of inspirations, innovations, and ideas come along that can quickly have a positive impact on your organization is really invigorating. It gives a fast sense of accomplishment, and it helps build your credibility for future projects that require the investment of resources. Building that trust from management is a key to getting budgetary and staffing support that goes beyond the basics of IT services like user machines and network infrastructure.

There are risks though to rapidly adopting technology change. For one, you risk going too fast for your users to adopt. Some users will adopt new technology quickly while others will only use it if they absolutely have to use it. There is also the risk that what seems like the obvious choice initially may not be the correct choice in the long run. Part of reducing risk is being able to do research rapidly while also being able to adapt to make a technology more usable.

Rapid technology adoption should follow a shorter cycle that is sometimes associated with agile software development. In agile software development models, development completely cycles in shorter time spans to incrementally build an application. Instead of designing, programming, testing, and implementing an application over the course of a year, the same cycle is done on portions of the application in increments that might be weeks long. Over time, the application is built and improved while getting continuous feedback from users on what should go into the next cycle's development. In the same way, new technologies can be tested and implemented in an organization to go from a small-scale implementation into something enterprise-wide.

Rapid technology adoption can be very valuable and effective, but it is never a decision that you should make and walk away. Rapid technology adoption requires review after initial implementation to make sure that the technology is being used effectively and appropriately before it is expanded further into the organization. To get some ideas on how to do rapid technology adoption wisely, reading up on agile software development is a good place to start.

Christopher Koch writes a blog for CIO magazine that usually has some good ideas in it. One part of a recent entry struck me, and I added my own input.

Think of information as food and think of the business as starving and think of IT as controlling who gets the food. Now you can see why there's so much emotion in the relationship [between IT and business in an organization].
- Koch's IT Strategy, Go Ape

I've been in a handful of small organizations and worked within IT in a variety of ways, and it can be difficult to rebuild a good relationship between IT and business when things have been sour. If information is the food of the apes in an organization, I can see where IT can improve the relationship by giving business better and more useful information. In my organization, management and users are always more impressed with access to new information or information presented in better ways than they are impressed with new technology alone. When IT pulls back into its corner and business's only experience with IT is when IT is snippy about a problem that business has caused or wants resolved, business sees IT has keeping things hidden and making it seem as though IT is somehow magical and not possible for business to understand. Being open with business while providing avenues to access information is what will win the hearts and minds of the people in the business side of an organization.

It's a rather basic view of how to do IT well, but I think it holds some wisdom for how to approach IT management.