Leadership Lessons from Losing the BlackBerry
Roughly 12–14 years ago, a war raged in every corporate IT department. The people wanted iPhones at work. Corporate IT clung to their BlackBerry’s. This is most certainly old news. Why bring it up now?
I think time gives us perspective. There are lessons to be gleaned now that were hard to see then. We love to talk about the hot new tech trends. Do we ever look back and evaluate our previous positions? What did we get right? What did we get wrong? What difference does that make for us today?
I recognize that some of my readers are young enough to have never wielded the mighty BlackBerry, so for everyone’s sake, let me retell a bit of history:
Approximately 20 years ago, BlackBerry was the best smartphone on the market. It was a premium product, and it was built with business in mind. The end users loved it. Corporate IT loved it. We ran the central management software, called BlackBerry Enterprise Server or BES, (pronounced BEZ). I administered that system at two different large companies. Are there any other BES admins out there? Give me a fist bump in the comments section.
Life was grand for a while, and then it wasn’t.
A New Hope
Back in 2007, the original iPhone was released. This was NOT a threat. There were plenty of niche smartphones out there. People liked them for personal use, but they weren’t serious business tools. The iPhone was basically an iPod that made calls. That was it.
A few years later, the iPhone started breaking out of the niche and into the mainstream. People may differ on when that happened, but I’ll offer my opinion. It was at the release of the iPhone 4, in 2010. A year later, this was the first iPhone to support multiple carriers, which opened up its appeal broadly. The iPhone 4 was the inflection point.
Even at that point, BlackBerry was superior to iPhone for business in so many ways. The enterprise integration, manageability, and security were just better. iPhone had a better touch screen and Angry Birds. It also had the “cool” factor, which IT people everywhere underestimated.
It wasn’t long before people brought these to work and asked IT to connect them to corporate email. This was easy to say no to, for a while. Then the C-suite started asking. That was a little harder to deny.
At first, we opened up a few exceptions for pilots but before long the dam had burst. BlackBerry was still better in a lot of ways, but it didn’t matter. All of a sudden, no one wanted them anymore.
The Empire Strikes Back
Let’s face it. IT got their butts kicked. The empire struck back. IT was very comfortable being in the driver’s seat of technology decision-making. We figured out the tech, and the users just took it. Now, for the first time, the users had thrust a technology change upon IT, and we just had to take it.
About this time, a new buzzword emerged: “The Consumerization of IT.” A whole lot got lumped into it. I remember a lot of attitudes of defeat and surrender. BYOD meant “Bring your own device” but it extended to pretty much everything. Users had their own networks, their preferred productivity apps, and their SaaS apps. IT was simply not needed. IT just got in the way. Some were predicting the end of IT as we knew it.
The Return of the Jedi
I had a sneaking suspicion that this reaction was overblown. Little known fact: I actually got my first ever public speaking opportunity at a national tech conference back then. My thesis was simple: I was among the few who didn’t really think iPads were going to replace every laptop out there. Today, that may seem obvious, but in 2013, I was the devil’s advocate.
Fortunately, my predictions came true. IT as an industry had learned our lesson. We need to be a whole lot more user-centric while maintaining security, compliance, and enterprise manageability. We realized that we could do both, and if we did both, we could remain in harmony.
Business is tech-savvy and demanding. Modern IT is user-centric and adaptable. Together, we really can create meaningful business outcomes.
The moral of the story
IT is often in the position of change-maker. But sometimes, we’re the change-takers. In the end, we’re better leaders because we are more empathetic. We know how it feels to be on the receiving end of disruptive technology. We use that empathy to create better products and deliver them with higher levels of acceptance and effectiveness.
Long from now, when no one is old enough to remember BlackBerry besides me and my aging contemporaries, we’ll look back and tell the tales. We’ll tell new IT professionals that they should always be wary, and never be over-confident. We provide immense value to the businesses we serve, but at the same time, it seems we could be one obscure cell phone away from irrelevance at any given time.
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