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Every organization has core competencies. National Fuel delivers gas to the home. Medaille College certifies people as having met state and regional educational requirements. Kostas up on Hertel makes souvlaki for lunch.

Every organization has support competencies. National Fuel, Medaille College, and Kostas all need to have competence in accounting and computer technology and personnel management. In smaller organizations, one person may wear several hats. In larger organizations, these hats are the traditional "silos": R&D gives the thing to Production gives it to Marketing gives it to Distribution (and the consumers end up with a VCR they can't program).

Even with a silo-type organization, you'll find support competencies: writing, math, computers. It's easier when all the accounting is done in one department and no one else in the organization has to do any accounting.

But what happens with computers? There's an Information Technology department, perhaps by some other name. Those good folks have computer skills that no one else in the organization needs to have. Joe in marketing may know how to debug a COBOL program, but that's not marketing's job and it's not Joe's job and Joe's boss in marketing doesn't want Joe debugging COBOL on company time.

On the other hand, Joe is expected to operate his desktop PC and some of the software and hardware. He can't go calling IT every time he ....

How Joe would finish that sentence is different in every organization and changes in that organization over time. It's what I call The Geek Line. It's like the line in the sand, the line that cannot be crossed or should not be crossed.

Since World War II, that's been a distinct line. The computers stayed put in their own room or wing or building. The first to cross the line were secretaries, who replaced their IBM Selectric typewriters with IBM word processors in the early 1980s. Next across were the graphic artists, usually in marketing or PR, who used Macs for image creation and editing and for layout, what came to be called desktop publishing. The Internet and especially the Web have finally pushed management over the line. Not only are computers on every desk and in every lap, but they're all networked to each other and to the world beyond the organization's walls.

Some IT departments have adapted well. They help others, listen to them, build interfaces for them, and inform them. They understand the organization's core competencies. They lead change with a clear vision of the future. As a result, they are often let into the highest echelons of the organization: the CIO or chief information officer can sit right next to the CEO and CFO. You should be lucky to work for such an organization because they are few.

Many IT departments have not adapted well.

The Wizard Behind the Throne

Please don't get the idea that this change to new media comes down to the computer folks versus everyone else. Indeed, many computer folks feel threatened by new media, too. They grew up running mainframes that controlled dumb terminals. The interface was a monochromatic mess that happened to be what was on their screens when they finally got the code debugged enough to run. When they wanted to tinker with something, they just shut the system down -- good news to the data-entry folks making minimum wage.

In the past several years, these wizards, like the rest of us, were confronted with distributed interactive networks. Some of them "got it" and continue to lead change in their organizations. Others, starting far behind, are having to run twice as fast to catch up. Still others either didn't get it or got it all too well and rejected it. It threatened to take away their centrality, their control, their power, and their fairy dust of geekspeak.

The January 1998 Info Systems Executive magazine claims in "Who Are You?" that "the infosystems professional is without liability or accountability." The author, Grant Buckler, categorizes them as

data cowboys 21%
slow-tech minimalists 28%
info priests 39%
proprietary mandarins 12%

"The info priests are control-oriented administrators who value hierarchy, seeing themselves as sole IS providers and believing in the consensus committee process."

"Proprieary mandarins are bureaucratic administrators who espouse planning and closed information systems, are insecure about their financial position, and feel the IS department should decide which information tools end users must have."

What divides us is willingness to change our work flows, our power relationships, our accountabilities, our deliverables. If an organization can't proceed any faster than its chief technology officer, it may be in great shape. It is far more likely to be in big trouble as the wizards crawl out from behind their thrones and realize that they aren't in charge anymore.

The Roman Catholic priests must have felt the same way when confronted by parishioners reading the Bible -- not in Latin but in German and then the other European languages. The many parallels between today and Europe in the hundred years after Gutenberg are fascinating.

The Geek Line

Grey area between programming and coding

out: scripting (JavaScript and PERL)

in: dynamic HTML (JavaScript and cascading style sheets)

example: http://toLearn.net/clsstage/clsmove.htm

Learn more

iorg.com helps organizations manage the change process driven by the distributed power of intranets. Their site features a lot of articles about intranets. Here's the first words you used to see on their home page:

What to do?

You already discovered that an intranet is really about how you make decisions in an organization and how you view control.

In one of their white papers, The Intranet Paradigm, Steven Telleen writes:

In very general terms, the two views in conflict are the organization as an engineered machine versus the organization as an organic, self-adapting system - the assembly line versus the learning organization.