A Must Read: A Technology Manifesto for the Cloud, Mobile and Social Media

John Mancini President of AIIM (www.aiim.org) has just published a thought provoking book Occupy IT Book that is a must read for information professionals. Written in a highly engaging manner he lays out in simple yet compelling fashion a blue print for how businesses must fully espouse IT innovations inherent in the intersection of cloud, mobile and social media technologies.  The author starts with the following premise: “…in prior decades, new systems were introduced at the very high end of the economic spectrum…Now it is consumers, students and children who are leading the way, with early adopting adults and nimble small to medium size businesses following, and it is the larger institutions who are, frankly, the laggards…”. 

The author makes a compelling argument that the confluence of rapid IT innovation cycles and consumer led mass adoption means that “…what is transpiring is momentous, nothing less than the planet wiring itself a new nervous system. If your organization is not linked into this nervous system, you will be hard pressed to participate in the planet’s future…”. The shift is toward “systems of engagement” with employees, customers, partners and external constituencies interacting in a dynamic and instantaneous manner unencumbered by the constraints posed by legacy systems.   

The author posits the view that “…the inexorable drive toward Systems of Engagement requires that we think radically differently about IT in our organizations…”.  The author’s call for action is in the form of a manifesto for “…creating a framework and a set of imperatives for how we should collectively look at our IT priorities in the era of consumer technologies…”. He calls for five key initiatives; fully embrace cloud based IT architecture, go mobile, transform the business into a social enterprise, remove paper from business processes by digitizing content and prepare for capabilities that extract value from big data. These initiatives call for more agile organizational structures and collaboration between business and IT “…where smaller teams made up of multitaskers and multidimensionally skilled workers with subject matter expertise, business savvy, technology skills, and a range of appropriate interpersonal and “political” skills…”.

The book is not only written in a personalized and engaging manner but is also extremely well researched, with extensive references to empirical studies and research that supports the author’s arguments as well educates the reader. And there is more. There are several chapters that provide a technology primer related to cloud, mobile, social media and records management principles and technologies. 

 

The book may be downloaded here: Occupy IT Book