Moving Targets.

This article presents an interview with Geoffrey A. Moore, a managing director of TCG Advisors LLC in San Mateo, California. Information technology is an enabler of innovation. With disruptive and application innovation, the technologies that matter most are about communication and collaboration. People have been talking about concurrent engineering and collaboration problems for 20 years, but the clients of the company say communication and collaboration are still not what they want them to be. Information technology has a long way to go to be better at those. With product and process innovation, where companies are ramping up and seeing hypergrowth, laying down the transactional systems really matters, and designing for scalability is a huge issue. Information technology gets very focused and even a bit siloed because at this point the functions in the company that it serves tend to be siloed. During this hypergrowth phase a company is growing so fast you may want to talk across functions, but there is no time to talk to anyone. Companies and information technology tend to build those silos that they spend the rest of their lives trying to deconstruct, but there is no easy way around it. Whenever you outsource, you need great visibility and control systems. Information technology has fallen behind here. Information technology systems tend to be about productivity for in-house workers. When we do the work, we are not so worried about visibility and control because management takes care of that. Structural innovation is all about merging companies and merging information technology.