I recently had an interesting conversation with a consulting client. The CIO has a strong sense that Web 2.0 is going to be important to the business, and therefore to the IT organization. He can’t put his finger on why, or what it all means, or exactly what to do about it, but his instincts tell him it’s too important to ignore, and he’s invested time, effort and some money pulling his top IT leaders together for an off-site to raise awareness and explore options and possibilities.

One IT leader raised the question, “What’s the business problem we’re trying to solve here?” (The CIO was not present for this interchange.) Several of the other IT leaders latched onto this with a general consensus that there was no particular business problem to be solved, and therefore the topic of Web 2.0, while interesting, was not especially relevant, and certainly not urgent. And given that everyone was busy, it was probably best to declare the off-site event a success and move on.

This is a huge pity and misses a crucial point. I’ve blogged often on this site about the Business-IT Maturity Model. One way of thinking about the progression of business demand maturity, and the corresponding progression of IT supply maturity, is that:

• Level 1 is about improving business efficiency - in other words, enabling the business.
• Level 2 is about improving business effectiveness - in other words, solving business problems.
• Level 3 is about innovating the business - in other words, finding business opportunities.

I realize that these homilies can sound trite and simplistic, but I strongly believe that underneath those simple-minded expressions are some important truths. If you look at Web 2.0 through the lens of waiting for business problems to appear, you will probably fall short in leveraging powerful opportunities. I’m convinced that these types of technologies, almost by definition, drive opportunity from the outside-in, and from the bottom-up. You have to facilitate their use, empower their users, and watch carefully to see what happens. This is a very different paradigm from the traditional IT world of business enablement or business problem solving.

This “waiting for the business problem to surface” is one of the many reasons that is causing the take-up of Web 2.0 technologies in mainstream businesses to be slow. As long as the IT organization is the gatekeeper, and as long as that organization is waiting for the business problem to be solved to become clear, we are at an impasse.