Stephen OGrady - The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World

In 2002, a group of securities-industry CIOs and IT managers were interviewed about their challenges and strategies with regulatory compliance. Specifically, they were asked about their compliance strategies regarding the usage of instant messaging (IM) technologies, a communication channel that predates the Internet, but exploded in popularity as the Web grew. Because IM allows users to communicate quickly and efficiently with each other in real time for free, it found no shortage of users, or use caseseven in the heavily regulated securities industry.

When the executives were interviewed, however, every single one denied that their organization had any compliance obligations with respect to IM. They were certain of this because they were equally certain that IM was not being used. How were they so sure? We havent issued those technologies, so theyre not being used by our employees, was the typical response. The reality, however, was an unpleasant surprise to these execs. IM technologies might not have been issued by these companies, but with the technologies freely available and highly useful, their use by company employees was rampant and accelerating.

This revelation was to become more and more common over the following decade, however, because the nature of technology adoption was changing. Access to technology has been steadily democratized over the past decade, to the point that, as then CEO of technology provider rPath Billy Marshall put it in 2008, The CIO is the last to know. The following Venn diagram depicts the current reality in simple fashion.

This recalibration of the practical authority wielded by IT decision makers has profound ramifications for everyone in or around the technology industry, as well as those businesses that consume technologywhich today is virtually every business.

For years, medium-to-large-sized businessescolloquially referred to as enterprise buyerswere the primary consumers of technology, the economic engine that drove technical innovation. Unsurprisingly, the output of the technology industry reflected these buyers needs and desires, at the expense of other considerations. Usability was a secondary concern; features like manageability and security were far more important to CIO buyers. Sales and marketing efforts, meanwhile, were crafted around promises of return on investment or labor reduction, rather than personal appeal. Theres a reason the iPhone is an order of magnitude easier to use than the average business software application. Apple needed to convince each customer on the virtues of a given device. Enterprise technology vendors needed to sell only to the one buying the software. If the employees found the products difficult to use, so be it.

In an industry where usage is a function of purchase rather than a real desire for the item, technology providers will obviously optimize for the purchasing process. But in reality, that is no longer true today, and hasnt been true for years. As with IM or the iPhone, technology is increasingly being driven by bottom-up, rather than top-down, adoption. The world has changed, but only a select few in the technology industry have realized it. As William Gibson might put it, the future is already here, its just unevenly distributed.

What does the market think of this new, non-enterprise focused future-present? Currently, Apple is the most valuable technology company in the world, and depending on the price of oil when you read this, the most valuable company in the world, period. As this book goes to press, in fact, Apple is worth more than Adobe, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, Oracle, SAP, Red Hat, Sony, and VMwarecombined.

In the wake of Apples unprecedented success, one obvious question remains: if IT decision makers arent making the decisions any longer, who is calling the shots?

The answer is developers. Developers are the most-important constituency in technology. They have the power to make or break businesses, whether by their preferences, their passions, or their own products.

Consider the rogue or shadow IT departments that are busily metastasizing within organizations large and small all over the planet, simply because they can. These informal, non-sanctioned IT departments handpick, build, and maintain their own technology stackstechnology stacks into which centralized IT has no visibility, and over which it has no control. The result is a world in which Coca Cola or Ford or JP Morgan arent the customers any more: their employees are. Vendors are becoming aware that their future relevance and viability will depend not on their salespeoples willingness to let the CIO beat them at a round of golf, but their ability to get the rank and file to genuinely value their technologies. As well see, those that manage this transition most successfully turn sales from a costly and complex negotiation to a fait accompli.