Okay, let’s talk about “Micro Technology Stewardship”.  I define Micro Tech Stewardship as follows:

“Micro Technology Stewardship is the use of people with enough experience of the workings of a business or department to understand its technology needs, and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs.”

Please note that this definition does not specify these people as IT staff.  Nor does it say they are the same person.  It simply employs the concept of leveraging two types of talents within any company:

1. Technology

2. Business

But, I do believe that it is an important best practice that IT leads the way in successfully defining and deploying good Micro Technology Stewardship and treats this process as they would under any good governance process.

Let me give you an example.  In this day of social networking, there are a lot of business people exposed to this technology, be it in their personal life (LinkedIn, Facebook etc) or in their professional career (MedPedia for medical knowledge, Yelp for food services, Focus for general business,  Yammer/Twitter, etc).

Add to their familiarity with some of these sites to the messages the media are constantly sending about how they should be using the technology to further their business and you have a perfect storm.

So let’s look at the Micro Tech Stewardship formula;

Business folks who understand there may be a need for technology; check!

People who have varying experiences to take a leadership role; check!

But, can we let them lose on the organization at this point? No. we need to add process to the mix.  In this case, I recommend that IT lead this process.

In a recent consulting engagement, that is exactly what we did.  That company was a  3,000+ person company, we formed a task force consisting of certain internal “social networking thought leaders”, business folks and IT staff where we met monthly and learned from each other to see what worked and what didn’t.  From Flicker, to Google Mashups, from Facebook to Twitter, to Medpedia we examined, tailed and tested them all the while practicing good Micro Technology Stewardship to the benefit of the organization.

Next time, I think I will talk about BAD Micro Technology Stewardship as that will be much easier to come up with multiple examples.