James Franklin: That’s an interesting point to make and I think that’s spot on in terms of what we are seeing. If I translate that back to the IT organization, when you get to that mode where things are more peer-to-peer, things that are bottom-up, if you think about historical IT, it was much the other way around. We will get your requirements and we will deliver you a solution. Now it's much more collaborative in nature, so that brings up a question of how does IT, if you think about IT as an organization service provider, how do we become relevant, how do we differentiate ourselves in terms of what we do for organizations, or do we have to think about that differently that now you are not relevant in the normal way, you are relevant in this ecosystem of collaboration. What are your thoughts on that and how IT still brings value, or how do we charter them and have that mission?

Gary Hamel: I think in every organization IT adds the most value when it really deeply, clearly understands the fundamental business issues and where it’s not isolated. I think, as you know, IT folks are starting to understand that, and this is my view and I think I can back it up. Then over the next few years, the success of any organization is going to depend largely on how fast they can migrate their business model, but also their management model. As I said, if you think about the way we make strategy in organizations, it's still way too much top-down. The way we do employee reviews: too much top-down. The way compensation gets set: too much top-down. I mean, in most organizations today an individual share of voice is still largely dependent of where they sit, rather than just the quality of ideas. My first recommendation in any CIO today would be look at the social revolution that is going on, on the web right now, because this is a fundamental reconfiguration of how human beings work together, and its the first reconfiguration since the pyramids were built. So you know already, you see online, you see how good the web is at making markets right, bringing buyers and sellers of anything together, so you say maybe in a large company what we need instead of having a top-down resource allocation process, you need everybody who has a budget in a company, maybe everyone should have five percent of that budget to invest in any idea across the whole company.

So no one manager can kill an idea because it doesn’t fit this year’s priorities or their prejudices. I think you have to be looking at how the web is helping us to allocate resources, helping natural leaders emerge at the top of these hierarchies, how it's helping us identify big trends out of masses of complex data. When you track or dig into any of these other things like the folksonomies and the tagging, how does that help us make sense of a hugely chaotic world in a quick way? That’s where I think a CIO has to be learning today, and then they have to focus that on "how do I build companies that are far more adaptable or changes much more of a bottom-up and an autonomic process than once every ten years in crisis? I think in a way we kind of have to go back to school, number one, and then I think number two probably the role of the IT in the CIO organizations is going to become much more enabling rather than really feeling like we run the IT plant, like somebody else runs the physical plant. I think you will know much better than me Jim, but this is going to create a lot of challenges. Because in most organizations IT has been reasonably centralized, often for good reasons, it was very expensive investment, you want standardized processes, you don’t want to take any shortcuts around security, and five nines or whatever it is, reliability, and yet now somehow I have to give teams down there the chance to use these new social tools to bring them in to experiment with them, so that’s going to be a really, really interesting tension. How do we continue to take responsibility for the old things that we were held accountable for, security and so on? But at the same time how do we leverage the new technologies in ways that make our organizations fundamentally more transparent. I mean here is kind of my bottom line.

If you look at the values that underlay the web, that made it so adaptable and so innovative and so on, their values of transparency, openess, collaboration, meritocracy, freedom. I think the meta-level challenge for the IT organization is how do we make sure that those those IT-enabled values are also enabled on our organizations.

James Franklin: I think again that’s a perfect description of what we are seeing. The way the business and IT work today is a collaborative effort and it is no longer this more draconian "we build it and they will come" type mentality.