The End of the IT Director: The Rise of the Digital Culture Architect

Brad Hintze, Executive Vice President, Global Marketing, Crestron Electronics

Is the role of ‘IT director’ over as we know it?

No, not likely. But it may have just gained a new business-critical responsibility: company culture building.

Why? It stems from a new buzzword — ‘hybrid permanence’.

It sounds a bit restrictive and final, but it just means hybrid work is here to stay. This shouldn't surprise any of us at this point. But what happens when the heartbeat of your company culture is built on open floor plans, water cooler chats, and company picnics? How do we promote a healthy work culture when the people we work with aren’t at the water cooler anymore? How is the hybrid model going to affect the greater company culture moving forward?

Here’s what we know:

• Remote/hybrid work policies are great for recruiting top candidates from the global talent pool — potentially a positive for company culture.

• The side effect is that most meetings will have at least one remote participant. That means nearly every meeting is now a hybrid meeting.

• Hybrid meetings lose certain aspects of engagement and collaboration, such as eye contact, visibility of facial gestures, and other physical in-room context. This is bad for collaboration. And bad collaboration is a slippery slide to bad company culture.

So, we know that hybrid is here to stay (hybrid permanence) and we know that hybrid collaboration can lead to less engaging meetings and ultimately hurt company culture. These fears have led many leaders and organizations to push for a return to office in hopes of salvaging their company culture. But we’ve all come to see that even if your workforce is in the office, not everyone else’s is. Hybrid meetings are unavoidable.

Who can help us?

Today, company culture is shaped as much by screens and software as by shared spaces. So, who better than the IT team to help address the pitfalls of hybrid collaboration?

Thanks to emerging technologies, it’s now possible to maintain eye contact with remote participants, see every person in the room — even when you’re not physically there — and make hybrid meetings feel more natural and inclusive.

As hybrid work becomes the norm, organizations will increasingly feel the strain it places on workplace culture. The good news? Technology isn’t just the medium — it can be part of the solution. And no team is better equipped to lead that charge than IT.

Introducing the Digital Culture Architect

As a marketer during the rise of social media, I saw firsthand how marketing managers turned into social media managers. Maybe their titles didn’t change, but they certainly had to take on additional responsibilities and start thinking with a social media-first mindset. Then, when it became clear that social media added business value, marketing teams had to add a new headcount to make room for a dedicated social media manager.

I see this same shift looming for IT teams because of hybrid permanence. IT directors will continue to be responsible for finding the right technology solutions to help their organizations stay operational and productive. But now they will also have to think about how those technology solutions can foster a deeper, richer company culture.

The point is, we’re conducting business differently now. Removing in-person communication as the standard will have implications for the health of a company’s culture. And if technology is the main way we meet and communicate, then technology must be able to foster a culture of collaboration.

So, how do we do that?

The ‘Three Cs’ Framework

A company’s culture is all about people. What people think, what they believe in, and how they collaborate and communicate.

For us in the technology industry, it’s all too easy to focus on the kit. We can all geek out over the latest black boxes. But for technology to influence a culture of collaboration, we need to reframe how we think about it.

That’s the task we’ve been working on for the past 12 months at Crestron. And we’ve come up with a pretty simple framework for how we think and talk about technology. We call it the Three Cs. It focuses on three core areas of technology: content, collaboration, and control.

Content

Content technology is about information. Getting information from your computer to a screen. Or getting information from many disparate sources to many different destinations. But why does information matter? Because people need information to communicate and work.

AV-over-IP systems and point-to-point distribution tools enable seamless, high-fidelity content sharing across rooms and devices.

Collaboration

Collaboration technology is about people. People coming together — remote or in-person — people sharing ideas. People brainstorming new strategies. People working together. People learning together.

Collaboration technology facilitates all of the needs of people as they engage in work together.  facilitate all of the needs of people as they engage in work together.

Unified video conferencing platforms with intelligent audio and video capabilities make this possible across all types of spaces.

Control

Control is essential. People need to be able to walk into a space and easily use that space to collaborate and share information. It must be natural. It must be adaptable. It must get out of the way and let people just be people and do the things they need to do.

Touch interfaces, automation systems, and cloud-based management platforms simplify complexity and make spaces intuitive to use.

A framework like this gives IT teams a simple checklist. A checklist that can help foster a stronger culture of collaboration. Can your teams walk into any space and very easily start collaborating with in-person team members and remote team members? Can they easily share information from phones, computers, tablets, etc. without having deep technical knowledge or searching for the right cable adaptor? Do your spaces have a strong foundation of content, collaboration, and control technologies?

If not, this hybrid permanence may start to chip away at your company culture.

So, whether it’s your IT directors or you get approved for a new head count for a dedicated digital culture architect, if you’re not looking for ways to foster a stronger culture of collaboration using technology, you won’t be able to fall back on company picnics to save the day anymore.