IT executives and vendors are always vulnerable to business changes. However, it's increasingly apparent that IT leaders are entering an era of change that puts them profoundly at risk. This new phase will require enterprise IT to provide capabilities to match the ease of use and reliability that employees and customers expect from the consumer technologies they use at home.

The past 60 corporate visits I've made as part of my ongoing "Odyssey" of meetings with hundreds of IT executives confirm my belief that IT platforms and leadership agendas are at a point of major discontinuity. Yet few of the executives interviewed spoke of preparing for major change. Most simply talked about either getting better at their current efforts, tweaking their current IT strategy, or containing the "nuisances" disrupting their business. However, looking at the information in aggregate, it's clear that ready or not, massive change is under way.

IT platform eras aren't solely about technology. They involve the symbiosis of organizational learning, enterprise change, economic value, and facilitating capabilities.

The impetus for change may come from the top down or the bottom up, depending on the rhythm of the particular era. During what I call the Departmental and Distributed era of the mid-1980s to mid-'90s, for example, individuals felt ignored and underserved. So in a bottom-up reformation, they bought PCs and departmental minicomputers. The response to the ensuing fragmentation and redundant processes was a return to top-down oversight in the Transextended Enterprise era that immediately followed.

The era I believe we're now entering is driven from a bottom-up and sideways influence. A CIO I met who has taken the time and effort to strategize the magnitude of the change calls it the "Je Voudrais" ("I'd Want") era. I love his reasoning behind the name.

This French phrase implies that the new era will be driven not by what the enterprise can provide, but by what customers, communities, and employees want, expect, and demand in exchange for their loyalty. The name is perfectly suited to this business-technology environment in which style trumps the measurable economics of deliverables. For example, improving the customer experience outweighs focusing on hard budget numbers.

From my conversations, the following seven concepts emerged.

1. Seventy major changes and counting. I started the 2006 Odyssey with a list of eight significant changes to expect from a shift away from the current Transextended Enterprise era. That list has since grown to 70 items (See the full list here.) In the chart above, I boil these down to five categories and describe how the shift from the Transextended Enterprise era to Je Voudrais affects each category.

Not all the changes impact all companies in the same order or intensity. However, IT executives who have seen the complete table say at least three-quarters of the changes are on their radar screens.

2. The transextended enterprise is essential, but not the end game. Many of the executives I visited view the old model's one-size-fits-all goal of common business processes, common systems, and lowest-cost IT as the end game. All efforts and capabilities are directed toward the universal utility of this IT style. But while the projected savings may be enticing to many, the strategy is seriously flawed.

True, business and IT costs must come down, but the new model is about how companies will use IT for future differentiation. Lowest business and IT costs are a given, not a differentiator. Je Voudrais is about options and the end-to-end user experience.

On the other hand, every new IT era rests on the foundation of the previous one. If you try to launch a Je Voudrais strategy without a healthy transextended-enterprise IT base, chaos, high support costs, and poor customer experience will inevitably result.

3. The next IT arms race? Each IT era has created its own deployment momentum and herd instinct. How many times in the last decade have we heard business and IT execs brooding about falling behind because they didn't have the CRM, E-business, ERP, or outsourcing capability of a competitor? Pundits, consultants, and vendors fuel these IT arms races.

It's in a strategic context that business and IT leadership must evaluate the era that's unfolding. A new approach won't solve this quarter's problems. Remember how long it took for online ordering, online inventory management, ERP, or E-business to transform how business was done? Throwing a strategic platform change at an immediate problem is naive. A strategy must evolve.

4. Your brand: They want—and you'd better provide—a positive experience. Almost every company I visited said a major goal of IT is to support enhanced collaboration between resources inside and outside the enterprise. If customers can't get what they want from what your IT offerings deliver, they'll go elsewhere.

But vendors, consultants, and venture capitalists are telling IT salespeople, "Don't waste your time talking to the IT folks. Sell directly to the folks who use technology, not to the people who keep others from benefiting from IT." The typical CIO or enterprise-architect response is, "All technology decisions must go through us, and you'll only get that stuff brought in over our dead bodies." Remember a similar dialogue when minicomputers, PCs, and BlackBerrys first arrived on the scene?

5. Reversal, not adjustment. One person notices a fascinating geometry to the 70-plus changes required under the new IT era. He observes that for each IT capability constructively mastered in the previous era, there's an analogous but opposing capability for the Je Voudrais era. Therefore, getting better at an existing requirement does nothing to satisfy a changed requirement.

For example, companies in the past few years have become skilled at downsizing, avoiding lawsuits, and promoting consistent behavior among the remaining employees. However, Je Voudrais demands that companies be passionately successful at retraining everyone in new technologies, diversifying the IT skills base, and recruiting new, creative talent.

One IT executive with whom I spoke—a CIO at a college—describes how his institution's human-resources department experienced failure in its recruitment efforts when it doggedly insisted on following a framework from the previous period of downsizing. "What did I expect?" he laments. "I sent out a group of morticians to plan a wedding."

6. Outside in. For four decades, we've built systems to optimize our companies' internal processes. As an accommodating afterthought, we extended functions to customers. This inside-out perspective and architecture will come under attack in the new era.

Our systems and architectures will need to be driven from the customer's perspectives and needs. Learning to provide customer experiences from these multiple perspectives is as alien to most companies today as building a global supply-chain process was to folks in 1988.

I've observed that the AJAX Web-development technique may be the facilitating function for just what's needed—or, as I like to call it, the Great Humiliator. When you design a set of asynchronous services in AJAX, it forces the business and systems folks to crawl into the minds, behaviors, and desires of the individual users. It forces the team to address what types of customers are out there, why various customers may approach the service, what they may want, how they'll want it, what other support they may want, what help they may need, how their behavior will change as they gain experience, and what will make the experience most positive for them.

One company using AJAX says it created an asynchronous, interactive, industrial ordering system that boosted actual items per order by 8% and shortened the order-to-cash cycle by more than 60%. Another company saw its business orders triple during service-support events after modifying its customer-service support.

7. Two big lies must end. While CIOs will continue to exert cost pressure, the idea that overall enterprise-IT expenses will continue to fall while IT deployment for Je Voudrais expands is sheer folly. True, it's possible that in some industries, the requirements for new IT will be less than the annual IT cost savings. But for most businesses, failing to properly fund this change will actually put competitiveness at risk. If companies plan on using IT to secure their future, they'd better bring money to the table.

Also, the consumerization craze in IT has created the false impression that it doesn't take much to develop easy-to-use IT services—that users should be able to buy whatever's available and expect it to plug and play with everything else. But don't be fooled. To create the types of IT services that are seamless, highly responsive, and secure will involve levels of complexity beyond anything most companies have mastered so far.

As was the case with previous IT changes, it's OK to approach the new era with a measure of caution. However, it can be extremely dangerous not to recognize the magnitude of what's afoot. Just remember the war stories from those that naively entered the eras of ERP, distributed IT, or major online systems. It's time to start getting the business ready for the changes required to deliver in the new age of customer demand.

Bruce Rogow is principal of Vivaldi Odyssey and Advisory.

When your product is an in-vehicle electronic assistant that gives drivers directions, tells them when the tire pressure is low, and offers emergency road assistance, you know you've created a very personal customer relationship. Just ask Nick Pudar, VP of planning and development at OnStar.

With 4.5 million customer systems expected to be installed by year's end, any consideration of new features, design, and services must be part of an ongoing dialogue with subscribers, Pudar says. OnStar offers "peace of mind," he notes, "so we have to aim for a better user experience" in navigational and remote diagnostic systems.

Pudar says upgrades and innovations are both customer-driven and internally developed. The 10-year-old General Motors subsidiary still relies on call centers—where drivers speak directly to service reps or emergency crews—as well as on old-fashioned focus groups and other market research to get customer feedback.

CIO Timothy Evavold, who's been on the job just a few months, says listening and reviewing calls made to the call center are valuable in new product design, given the personalized nature of the services offered and the amount of data that's constantly collected about the cars and drivers. OnStar staffers and designers use wikis to communicate internally, he says, but so far the company hasn't extended wikis or blogs to customers.

Evavold and IT work closely with marketing, R&D, the business groups, and the corporate-strategy team to come up with new ideas. Small teams develop and execute prototypes; IT builds the infrastructure and software platforms needed to support the products. "Innovation can come from any of the groups," Evavold says. — Paula Klein