Parting Shot

Midmarket enterprises have to be smart. In a knowledge economy, only those organizations able to bring knowledge to bear on short-, medium- and long-term objectives will be successful. And yet the processes by which an organization gets and stays smart are not well understood.

For example, if a martian were to analyze mainstream media treatment, public event speaker demographics and subscription research coverage of the IT industry, he would probably conclude that big companies are smarter than small ones. Why else would they get all the ink and most of the mic time at industry conferences? The issue here is not whether midmarket IT shops and IT leaders are famous or spend enough time on the rubber chicken circuit, but that such exposure implies knowledge and intelligence. And both of those things are central to career and economic success.

So the martian might think that enterprises are out in front, but is it true? There is a widely held but rarely admitted-in-public belief among many in the IT community. It posits that midmarket companies tend not to be as far along the learning curve as large enterprises when it comes to many next-generation technologies. Whether it's knowledge management, business intelligence, enterprise software or strategic sourcing, the thinking goes, the large enterprises lead and the midsized businesses follow. This might lead one to conclude that indeed the larger enterprises are smarter.

But wait. With re-engineering, Six Sigma, ERP, outsourcing, ITIL, SOA, Web 2.0 -- you name it -- the big guys have gone through painful and lengthy learning curves. They emerge exhausted -- if filled with lessons learned. At this point the midsized execs swoop in, hear those stories and start thinking seriously about deploying these new technologies/frameworks. Rather than expend all that time, all that energy, all that money, they are quick and efficient. They let someone else do the dirty work and then learn from their experience. Who's smarter now?

The danger is that this model isn't sustainable. Is it prudent to assume that big companies will never figure out how to move down learning curves further, faster and much less painfully? Will an ever-accelerating economy allow midmarket enterprises to continue to pursue risk-adjusted "fast follower" strategies and yet still compete effectively with their larger brethren? Is it rational to believe that the learning emerging from big-company mistakes will continue to be a primary source of midmarket IT wisdom? And if it's not, then where will the knowledge come from?

In the future, how you stay smart will be how well you manage your ride down the new technology learning curve. There will be times when you will have to jump in as an early adopter and conduct what scholars call "deliberate practice" -- working at something you don't do well. You'll need to find the time and the money to try things out before they're fully baked and enterprise customers are on the conference circuit impressing audiences with their brave tales of technology they've wrestled with and conquered. In the future, to be smart, we will have to do some of the teaching ourselves. Get ready.

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