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In state fair circles, deep fried butter on a stick is considered a delicacy. In reasons-to-distrust-scientists circles, some of the more recent findings that cast doubt on the fat-to-bad-health linkage are also considered delicious.

Me, I’m skeptical of the skepticism. If you aren’t, go ahead and eat as much deep fried butter on a stick as you like. I’m sure it’s the road to robust good health. And if it turns out not to be the road to robust good health, I’m just as sure the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus are skilled at anesthesiology and open heart surgery, respectively, so you’ll still be okay.

Something I’m less skeptical about is the so-called “digital revolution” in business — as described last week, the confluence of social media, cloud computing, big data, the next-generation workforce, smart products, the “internet of things,” mobile computing, and probably one or two other Next Big Things.

The KJR short version of the digital revolution: In the world, technology is pervasive. In many businesses it’s still a case-by-case decision.

Yes, there is a certain overhyped trendiness to the “digital revolution.”

But there is a revolution in the works. What it is: If a computer can do something, someone is making a computer do it somewhere. They’re probably giving away an adware-supported dumbed down version for next to nothing, too, to generate a bit of revenue and more than a bit of interest.

We’ve entered, that is, an era in which computerization is assumed, and is no longer considered the least bit remarkable or threatening.

And, we’ve entered another era of experimentation — one that rivals the experimentation triggered by the original personal computer in the late 1970s and early 1980s, by the World Wide Web in the 1990s, and, for that matter, the literary and artistic experimentation that accompanied the 1960s.

I’ll leave it to you as to whether Andy Warhol was more or less important to society than Reddit.

The hyping question is whether the digital revolution technologies — social media, mobile, big-data and the rest — will provide as much “value add” for business as, say the database management system did when it first appeared.

You have to be careful about “value-add.” It should include avoidance of “value subtract.” Just because something added its value a long time ago and has faded into the infrastructure, that doesn’t mean it’s any less present and important.

Like the DBMS. When these puppies were new and shiny, IT had to carefully and thoroughly demonstrate their value-add. Being new, and expensive, and — from the perspective of those who have thumbs-up/thumbs-down authority over capital proposals — IT’s latest and greatest shiny ball, the need for this latest latest-and-greatest technology was highly controversial.

35 years later, the notion of building a useful business application without a DBMS is somewhere between quaint and stupid. The only question is which one to use.

The DBMS is as much an assumed part of the IT infrastructure as Twitter is an assumed part of the political and celebrity infrastructure: Even if you don’t know exactly how it works, you know it’s out there and a lot of people seem to rely on it.

Developers building a new application assume they have a DBMS — it’s just there, just as for political consultants building a new campaign, Twitter is just there.

In the world, the digital-revolution technologies are just there. Many businesses, though, aren’t baked that way. They need a path out of their business archaism. Here’s a three-step program to get them there:

Step 1 is KJR’s increasingly tiresome stump speech about there being no such thing as an IT project. Or shouldn’t be. It’s always about business change — designed business change — or it’s a project with no point. And while this statement ought to be clear, in my experience it isn’t, so … no, this isn’t the same thing as saying IT projects should always have business benefit. Once more, with feeling: Projects. Are. Always. About. Business. Change. Earth. Person.

Step 2 is for business executives, and for that matter for managers at all levels, to consider knowledge of information technology to be part of their job description.

Not how it works. Not how to implement it. This being the 21st century and all, those who run businesses ought to understand the fundamentals of what they run on.

Step 3? Stop making case-by-case decisions about technology.

No, that isn’t quite right. Executives will still have case-by-case decisions to make about the use of technology.

Only now, the case-by-case decisions will be when to not use it.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Politicians tweet. Revolutionaries tweet. Even Tweety Bird tweets. Information technology did that.

Back when, newspapers and television competed only indirectly, and not that much. Now, CNN.com and WashingtonPost.com compete for the exact same advertising dollars and news consumers. Information technology did that, too.

The Arab spring has turned, sadly, into a chaos of constantly aligning and re-aligning factions. But it started with courageous people, linked through the use of cell phones and social media. Technology might not be what made the Arab spring happen, but the Arab spring probably couldn’t have happened without it.

In the world, information technology has become embedded. It’s integrated. Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, World of Warcraft, Flickr, Skype, not to mention Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and of course Google. These aren’t Things People Learn. They’re part of the landscape.

This wasn’t the case twenty years ago, but it is the case now.

Except, that is, in your average corporation. There, information technology is a separate bucket of stuff. Many business leaders still seem to think that if they want to cut the corporate budget, cutting the IT budget is a good place to start.

As I’ve pointed out here from time to time, this is like trying to cool a room by blowing cold air at the thermostat. It works, too, in very much the same way. Usually, the only thermometer in the room is on the thermostat, so the metrics report success even though everyone in the room is sweltering.

Cut the IT budget and it does sure look like corporate spending is lower than it used to be. The income-and-expense statement says so.

That’s one of the problems with metrics. They report the state of things, but they don’t tell you anything about cause-and-effect relationships because they can’t.

A corporation is a complex system. And that’s on a good day. On a bad one Complexity Theory has to give way to Chaos Theory if you’re going to make any sense of what’s going on.

But as someone once said, I digress. The question in front of us is, how did the world get so far ahead of the business world? How is it that in the world, information technology is embedded and integrated, while most business executives continue to think there’s such a thing as an “IT project”?

Yes, yes, I know I’m in danger of becoming tiresome on this subject. But what’s a poor Recognized Industry Pundit (RIP) to do? I figure, maybe if I act like a frustrated American tourist in Paris and Just Talk Louder, they’ll finally understand what I’m getting at.

Probably not, because I’m guessing the CEOs who still don’t get it … the CEOs who think CIOs should be able to calculate the ROI for all the money the company spends on information technology … aren’t the CEOs who read Keep the Joint Running.

If you work for one of them, or if you work for a CIO who works for one of them, give it the old college try one more time. (But not my old college — I went to Macalester, whose football team, while I attended, was in the middle of a 69-game losing streak.)

Where was I?

The old college try, that’s right.

Right now, the trend-spotting community is hot on the trail of something variously called “the digital transformation,” the “third platform” and, among the cynical, “everything that’s trendy blended into a casserole.” It’s the combination of (in no particular order) social media, cloud computing, big data, the next-generation workforce, smart products, the “internet of things,” and mobile computing.

No, that’s wrong. That’s the old there-is-such-a-thing-as-an-IT-project perspective of the change.

The transformation is more fundamental than that. It’s all of the above, viewed from a 90-degree angle. It’s the world of business when information technology isn’t a case-by-case decision anymore — information technology is and is expected to be pervasive.

Understand, this transformation, no matter what name you give it, is an aspirational vision, not a practical reality. Right now, implementing each component in a way that’s integrated into the business requires a lot of heavy lifting — in digital transformation-land there’s no equivalent to buying an ERP system that delivers it all in a coherent, integrated package. And if there was, we’d probably revisit the tired old plain-vanilla vs customization arguments that tie so many ERP implementations in knots.

So no. I’m not advocating a full-steam-ahead, if-there’s-a-computer-involved-somewhere-approve-the-project approach to business investment governance. That would be both unaffordable and stupid.

It’s both simpler and more complicated than that.

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