3tera just took an important step in it’s young life, we hired our first full-time sales VP. He showed up, we
configured his WiFi, setup his laptop to join the domain, added his cell number to the company directory, created a couple email
aliases, and had a fifteen minute conversation about his preferences between Salesforce.com
and SurgarCRM.

None of this phased me until I noticed a cover story in CIO titled
“Users that know too much (and the CIOs that fear them)” last night. Scanning the article made me realize that just as with our new sales VP, users expect to select many of their own tools and IT needs to see this as a valuable transition. I wrote a while back that, IMHO, the most important aspect of SaaS is that it eliminates IT as the middleman between users and developers. The CIO article is encouraging because it confirms that IT is beginning to see this value.

So, what’s the implication? This is just one guys opinion, but I believe there’s value in IT learning to view their users’ experimentation as a focus group. Dedicating IT staff to mining the user experience can help you learn where potential innovations, or simply connectors between apps, can add the most value.