Putting on the brakes

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks writing about bleeding-edge and aggressive IT cultures. Organizations with these types of cultures tend to be comfortable and confident with a virtual workplace.

But shift gears a bit to organizations who classify their IT staffs as moderate or conservative, and the acceptance of a virtual workplace changes.

First, let’s look at the numbers. In Nemertes’ upcoming Building a Successful Virtual Workplace benchmark, we asked participants to describe their IT culture by selecting one of four types: bleeding edge, aggressive, moderate, and conservative. Nearly equal percentages defined themselves as conservative and bleeding edge, and the majority selected the two middle selections – aggressive (41%) and moderate (33%).

Moderate organizations have an average of 742 branch locations, which indicates these are primarily large organizations in terms of employees and revenue. Manufacturing, healthcare, and nonprofits most frequently place themselves in this category.

But they drop considerably compared to bleeding edge and aggressive companies when it comes to growth in the number of branch locations with only about a 7% increase. (By comparison, bleeding-edge companies plan to increase the number of branch offices by 51%, and aggressive companies are increasing by 42%.) The percentage of virtual workers among companies with a moderate IT culture is at 23%. (By comparison, bleeding-edge companies employ 37% of their workers virtually, and aggressive companies employ 27% virtually.)

Typically, these types of organizations are older, more stable companies that don’t see huge swings negatively or positively. They keep status quo because status quo works. They will leverage IT, but they won’t deploy new technologies until other companies have worked out the kinks and determined the value.

So what does this all mean for companies with “moderate” IT cultures? The IT culture tends to mirror the overall business culture. In a highly competitive climate, this somewhat cautious approach could be as risky as it is rewarding. Timing truly is everything.

Moderate IT staffs need to focus on the right time to deploy new technologies to maintain competitiveness, reduce risk, and make sure that “status quo” continues to be fruitful to the bottom line. That isn’t as easy as it sounds. They tend to look at bleeding-edge and aggressive companies to analyze their successes and failures, but if they wait too long or try to analyze too many data points, they risk losing their competitive edge.

A 7% increase in the number of branch locations still can be a lot of new locations each year, depending on the size of the organization. Moderate IT staffs are apt to deploy the status-quo IT infrastructure at new locations because it’s worked so far.

But branch office products and technologies are changing so rapidly, it’s imperative to become a bit more aggressive when deciding on the overall branch infrastructure. For example, all-in-one appliances can save significant time and money over point products, yet vendors are still selling these products more heavily into organizations that define themselves as aggressive or bleeding edge.

Bottom line: Know when being moderate works and when it doesn’t.

Next week, we’ll wrap up this IT culture discussion with a review of those who identify their culture as conservative.