CEOs increasingly value creative leadership. What does that mean for the new era of IT?
On the face of it, artists and data scientists couldn’t be more different. But they’re both using data to gain a perspective upon the world.
Take Brian Dettmer, for example. One of the world’s most renowned contemporary artists, Dettmer began his career exploring the relationship between text, images, languages and codes, including paintings based on braille, Morse Code, and American Sign Language – the very streams of structured and unstructured data that digital analytics tools aggregate and correlate into forms from which we can derive meaning.
Since 2000, he’s achieved acclaim for his ‘Altered Books’ series. From historical datasets such as old dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, art books and medical guides, Dettmer carves out from each page the information that’s no longer relevant. What remains is a richly layered, three-dimensional “revised text” that discovers new forms and interrelationships that were always “present,” but hidden deep within the book.
You might say this is Big Data Analytics, the artist’s way.
So as IT departments advance into the new era of social, analytics, cloud and mobile, it’s becoming apparent that technology alone doesn’t magically transform an enterprise. As with any tool, it’s in the way that you use it. It’s the application of human intelligence and imagination upon these tools to unlock innovation (what artists would call “originality”) and to create new possibilities (what enterprises would call “a transformative business model” or “novel revenue streams”).
Today we live in a global mash-up, remix culture, in which anyone can express themselves creatively by re-appropriating the media and the information around them.
So what can artists – both Old and New Masters – teach businesses about getting the most out of IT? Here are five tips from some of the greats.
1. Brian Dettmer: The value of data is its associations and relationships.
In a 2012 interview with Bookriot.com, Dettmer related some exciting parts of his process. “Language can function like an image and an image can incite a phrase or association that can be indelibly tied to language…. I think it’s most exciting when I see a pattern or echo in elements or structures that I had never thought to see in the same context, like when a scientific drawing of a cell becomes juxtaposed with the map of a city park.”
Businesses can gain similar epiphanies from using analytics to correlate radically different data sets: hidden relationships and insights can emerge, leading to new ways to perceive the business.
2. Cezanne: Don’t stop at realism. Get to the real.
19th-century realism tried to capture the photographic qualities of the world, when just-invented cameras weren’t good enough yet. The Impressionists went beyond that – and worked to express the emotional qualities of light and color in the composition of a scene.
Data analytics has provided businesses with a very good picture of numerical realities. But with social listening tools and social-analytics solutions, enterprises can acquire insights on customer sentiment –– the impression your brand makes; the satisfaction that your products and services deliver; and methods of improvement. Sales are only one measure of reality. Companies can discover a deeper, more profound reality by understanding how they truly relate to their customers.
3. Leonardo da Vinci: There are some who considered themselves ‘Renaissance Men.’ He was a Renaissance enterprise.
He painted the Mona Lisa; he studied anatomy. He frescoed The Last Supper; he designed flying machines. Granted, it’s tough these days for a single person to be so hyphenated: sculptor-architect-musician-mathematician-engineer-botanist…. But it’s likely your workers have a wealth of hidden talents and specialized knowledge that can enhance the value your company provides. Social collaboration solutions can help unlock all the expertise, and latent value, that exists within your enterprise, to collaboratively build masterpieces.
4. Leo had a long tail. Later Leonardo admirers have proved that terrific, polymathic ideas don’t have to die when there’s no immediate buy-in. Take, for example, this ingenious “viola organista,” a fusion of viola and harpsichord , built and played for the first time, 500 years after the artist dreamed it up. Examples like this are why your company needs a comprehensive plan for storing and retrieving company data, whether it’s a cloud-based or on-premises storage plan, or an enterprise content management system. The data your company generates is always a potential source of value. Often, organizations that win the innovation game are those with the longest memory and the quickest recall.
5. David Hockney: Mobility gives old dogs new tricks.
Educated at London’s venerable Royal College of Art, Hockney began his career as a painter with traditional tools of the trade. But excited by the possibilities of technology, he was constantly an early adopter: in the early days of the photocopier, Canon would send him the latest print cartridges just to see what he could do with them. He took to photo and fax collages; now he’s achieved international celebrity anew with his work composed on iPhones and iPads. “You can pick up a color from another color,” he said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “And you can work very fast.” Mobility meant that he could travel anywhere, and make a sketch quickly without dragging around boxes of pencils and paints. Then he blows up those images, scaling them large without any pixilation, to create monumental museum works.
By embracing a mobile strategy, businesses can deliver the tools their employees need – whenever and wherever they need them – to put thought into action with ease.
Tell us how you think the advances of IT into the new era of social, analytics, cloud and mobile can help transform midsize businesses @MidmarketIBM
