The IT brand is in trouble. Long gone are the good vibes associated with IT stepping up and enabling remote work and social connectivity during the COVID crisis. Gone is the general good feeling associated with putting compute power in the hands of ordinary workers during the PC boom. Out-of-sight and no longer remembered is the empowerment and general untethering enabled by the mobile phone.
Two major categories of technology investment and user experience — social media and artificial intelligence — have flipped from being perceived as “good things” to being positioned as ticking bombs of future menace.
We have not quite reached the point where PCs, tablets, mobile devices, and software applications are required to carry warning labels similar to those attached to tobacco products but we are tilting in that direction.
The sadly and perennially underappreciated demand side of IT — hardworking internal-to-the-enterprise developers, architects, data wranglers, and infosec workers — is being tainted by the growing animus surrounding the behaviors and unaccountability mindsets of hyperaffluent vendor senior executives.
CIOs are uniquely positioned to get our profession back to the status quo ante,where IT was perceived as at least attempting to make the world a better place. This brand resuscitation effort is more than just repositioning IT positively in the minds of stakeholders. This essential rebranding moment of truth is not just about telling better stories. It involves positioning IT in the lives of stakeholders. CIO branding is not about “making people want things” but rather “making things people want” — producing supremely relevant outcomes for stakeholders.
Why the IT brand matters
At the turn of the 20th century, around 1909 when Good Housekeeping startedevaluating product quality, brand evolved from a legal mark to a trust mark — a mechanism that reduced uncertainty for consumers. CIOs are the trusted explainers of a rapidly changing and massively complex technology ecosystem.
Many in society today feel they are wandering in the technology weeds without a scythe. Ideally, IT should be thought of as a hot water bottle of calmness in a sea of digital uncertainty.
IT brand rehabilitation begins with CIOs demonstrating that they understand the shared technology waters in which we are all swimming. Psychology tells us that life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. CIOs are the foundational rock that constitutes that secure base.
CIOs need to convince stakeholders that they are not on the outside of the technology change process. The grand cycle of human history can be represented as a series of reactions to circumstance. CIOs need to explain the current technology “circumstance” and shape reactions. In a fissiparous world, CIOs needs to become the magnet that brings us together.
Flipping the script on IT
A not insignificant subset of the population, addicted to algo-driven feeds now live in their own little hells, trapped like Sisyphus on a going-nowhere hamster-wheel of misinformation and AI slop — machine-generated junk that pollutes our social media feeds. Technology optimism has given way to a throbbing migraine of just-under-the-surface digital dread.
The executive teams at the technology companies once known as the “Magnificent 7” (NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Tesla), rightly or wrongly, are now more often than not portrayed in the public square as villains. Maureen Dowd, a highly influential opinion columnist at the New York Times insists that the “tech heroes turned zeroes are leading us to our doom.”
CIOs have to create a new narrative repositioning IT as a force for good — good for the company, good for the employee, and good for society in general. CIOs will always be subjected to cavils of stakeholders whose patience is frayed by not-generated-by-IT bureaucratic absurdities. As a CIO are you aware how the employee base of the enterprise actually feels about IT? Do they believe your team is helping, hurting, or neutral vis a vis them being successful?
In the early days of the Internet the food website Chowhound featured a section called “Downhill Alert!” that alerted patrons when favorite restaurants were slipping. As a CIO you need a similar early warning attitudinal sensor system.
Despite the protestations of Silicon Valley’s “Utopia Is Just Around the Corner” multimedia message machine, the general population is increasingly skeptical of AI. Borrowing a phrase from humorist Dave Barry, positive feelings for artificial intelligence are dropping “like a pig out of a helicopter.”
CIOs need to make sure that when that AI pig lands, the good works of the IT organization remain in the spotlight.
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