A new era of Coaching

Had great discussion with our CTO today who attended the recent Gartner IT and Architecture Conference in Sydney this week. One of the key points was the changing role of 'IT Departments' in a world where staff bring their own IT (in for the form of tablets and phones etc to work) to work. The view was that IT Departments in organisations are moving from a 'Command and Control' position dictating policies and tightly locking down IT infrastructure to one of becoming 'coaches' on how customer facing people use technology to achieve their commercial objectives.

We are already seeing this where wealth managers inside larger organisations are just totally frustrated with the slow pace of change of in house vendor selection and implementation (which was quick compared to in house builds...) and are using or seeking to use more sophisticated capabilities (such as Financial Simplicity) on the web. They are not doing this for fun, they are doing this so they can compete better for investor customers, deal with them in a better way and at lower risk to the firm, and remain relevant and profitable.

At Financial Simplicity, we are taking this to a whole new level where internally we regard our team as a team of coaches who all add value to areas of our clients' businesses, essentially coaching them, and that includes coaching IT Departments to help coach their stakeholders also.

Some questions for contemplation:

- who are you coaching ?
- who should you be coaching ?
- who is coaching the people you should be coaching ?
- what infrastructure do you need in place to leverage your coaching skills ?