Learning the fundamentals: beyond the IT slot machine

Photo credit: Joakim Honkasalo via Unsplash

Business executives often experience their IT department as a slot machine: something that consumes money, occasionally gives a payout, and whose inner workings are opaque and inscrutable.

Sure, sometimes the slot machine gets new lights and buzzers which claim to give an idea of what it is going to do (project plans, progress reports and dashboards), and sometimes it gets new buttons which make players feel as if they are in control (steering committees, governance processes and change boards). But the machine still seems to keep on doing the same old random things, as if the lights, buzzers and buttons weren’t actually connected to anything.

It’s unsurprising that people will occasionally arrive who offer to help, claiming to know how to make the slot machine pay out, or even better, how to bypass it altogether. In the corporate world, this means product companies pitching directly to executives, telling them that their products are so powerful, so intuitive, and so configurable, that they don’t need the IT department at all, except to do some mundane, trivial things, such as install the software, or integrate the products, or check the security. Unfortunately, these mundane, trivial things typically turn out to be complicated and expensive, and the executives find themselves right back on the casino floor, pulling the handle and hoping for the best.

For enterprise leaders who want to become enterprise AI leaders, it is likely that, without a grasp of the fundamentals, AI will become part of the IT slot machine ecosystem: something that promises to break the cycle of random spins, but whose value is obscured behind layers of confusion and mysticism.

I believe that, to make sense of AI, enterprise leaders must first acknowledge and accept that understanding their IT function is no longer optional. Most enterprise leaders would agree that they could not survive unless they knew how to manage people, risk, finances, supply chains and customer relationships. They would probably agree that their ability to manage all of those things depended on technology. But many would resist the idea that, therefore, they need to understand technology. The arrival of AI might seem to offer the prospect of avoiding or deferring this understanding yet again (‘I built the systems for my entire company with just one prompt!’), but it actually makes it more essential, not less essential.

To put AI to work in their companies, enterprise leaders must understand that it does not replace the wobbly stack of technology, people and processes that run their company for them - it is one more layer on top. AI might sometimes seem like magic, but it is built on the same combination of maths, logic and physics that has powered the information revolution for the last eighty years. If AI did not involve using people building software, manipulating data, pushing electrons through silicon, housed in machines sitting in big concrete buildings, dependent on cooling and power, then the software, data, chips, cloud, data centre, water and power industries would not be responding to AI as they are.

I do not believe that business executives need to become expert coders, system admins or data scientists, or even become expert in the more traditionally ‘business’-facing roles, such as product management, project management or business analysis. However, I do believe that they need a mental model of the IT ecosystem that their businesses depend on, and on AI’s role in it. I also believe that such a mental model should not be hard to acquire, and that doing so can be fun.

Consider other mental models that we possess. If you are a reasonably well educated leader who is reasonably curious about the world then you probably have a broad grasp of human history, the Earth’s position in the solar system and the universe, the atoms that make us up, the ways that societies function and so on. You don’t have to be a professional historian, astronomer, physicist or sociologist to have these mental models - you just have to have curiosity about the world you live in, the humility to accept that other people know more about certain topics than you, and the integrity to recognise that even expertise is rarely uncontested.

I believe that it is possible for enterprise leaders who embrace curiosity, humility and integrity and engage in open dialogue with experts to build a useful mental model in a few short hours - and to use this mental model to approach the world differently, including making sense of AI.

We aim to create this opportunity in the course we are developing - but leaders can also create it for themselves by shedding their conception of the IT slot machine, going to their IT leaders, and asking to be educated.

It is also the first step towards enterprise AI leadership.