Does it matter how we brand IT, or are bigger questions afoot?

Recently, there’s been a flurry of LinkedIn activity in response to an article by IT Brew reporter Brianna Monsanto about the value of an IT department name change. The general conclusion from the article, and ensuing discussion, is that while changing IT’s name can be a good move, it’s merely a branding element in what needs to be a wholesale reengineering of the team. If you feel the need to change the name of your IT organization, you probably have bigger problems. Or, as I put it in the article, putting lipstick on a pig isn’t going to help. You have to actually change that animal.

The current interest in this topic calls to mind a section on rebranding IT in my 2012 book The CIO Paradox, proving once again that everything old is new again and that the CIO Paradox persists. In it, a CIO I interviewed said: “When I was at GE, we did rename IT. While I had no objections to this rebranding effort, I don’t think it’s central to the success of any IT organization.” 

Back in 2012, rebranding IT was the right conversation. IT’s goals of enablement, support, and alignment would be well served by some gentle reorganization around business relationship managers and a shiny new name. (Digital Technologies! Business Solutions! Ministry of Funny Walks!) But today, we need to have a different conversation. The ground has shifted dramatically since then that renaming IT is almost a moot point.

Let’s think back a couple hundred years when we were all farmers in this country. Then, around 1786, a new technology, the steam engine, was invented, and farm girls moved to mill cities, robber barons got rich, and we ushered in 200 years of the Industrial Age, with the 19th century seeing more innovation than any other era to date. Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Astor, and the rest built empires on expansive plots of real estate, owned assets and big teams, and constructed moats around their businesses to stay competitive.

Then sometime in the 1960s, we had another invention: software, which has been driving the evolution of business ever since. And because of software, companies tend to want consolidated real estate, a smaller owned asset footprint, small nimble teams, and API-enabled connections right into their partners’ tech platforms.

This is a new economy, a data economy, where industrial management practices and ideologies no longer apply. In the data economy, where our future growth is only as good as our data strategy, culture, and infrastructure, we need to run our businesses very differently. This means ultimately remodeling the entire organization, including IT.  

Bigger questions

So before we ask what to call IT, we need to ask what value a technology team brings to a business in the data economy. But before that, we need to ask what the AI tsunami headed our way means for big companies still stuck in industrial mode — that is, almost all of them. Will our human difficulty with change derail our AI adoption odyssey and create a massive disparity in data version legacy business? Are we on the verge of a slew of Blockbuster death stories? Based on recent news about China’s DeepSeek giving Nvidia a run for its money, what kind of wild global AI market ride are we all on?

These are the questions that technology leaders, who ironically have the most power to shape our rapidly changing human society, need to figure out before worrying about a name change.

But in the meantime, here are some name ideas: value creation, AI adoption, enterprise transformation. But there’s one I believe most accurately describes the impact that technology will have in the data economy. I call it IT.