I have become an adherent to the new martial art of business. I can now see the entrepreneurial wood for the IT trees.

And in true zen stylie, what I see is all about what is unseen.

A statement of the bleeding obvious perhaps BUT in the realm of your tech and IT systems and solutions partner who enabled them, out of sight is truly out of mind.

We should not only embrace the invisible Matrix nature of IT and tech deployment. We should grow to love it. And for good reason.

The Now you see it Now you don’t approach to best in class tech and IT – apparent only by its absence denotes a win for the business.

Invisibility is success.

Because Visibility usually means you’ve a little way to go yet.

Like the word Digital. Or the word Social. IT and tech, while still top of the conversational pile and being touted as the next best C Suite thang, are patently still under-performing.

While we still say them out loud, put them on presentations, flag them, budget for them, mention them loudly in lifts it simply means they are not yet embedded properly. They are not optimally integrated. If they were we would not need to point at them.

In certain areas of business the idea of anything becoming invisible is a measure of its success. Sustainability is a very good example also of this phenomena. While there is still a CSO, and Sustainability has not migrated up into the Marketing or Operational functions, Sustainability cannot be said to be truly integrated into the nature and fabric of the business.

Much like Sustainability, Tech and IT should, in its explicit and visible form, seek to become invisible – working towards a strategy of divine obsolescence.    

Moving from an explicit visible tangible to becoming internalized, implicit, invisible: transforming into a discrete reflex or innate ability within the business: when something becomes second nature, it means that the fluid, synchronised nature of it is seamlessly connecting and connected with the ‘flow’.

IT & Tech, much like HR, is no longer a support activity as it was in the old model of Value Chains, an administrative prop to paperwork systems and communications in an analogue world. Through intra and extra nets, digital and social service improvements and propositions, operational innovations and the new world order of hyper speed intelligence and data as a primary driver of most businesses competitive advantage, IT & tech is now woven through every dimension of a business. 

So to set out to deliver Invisible Telecoms – to make the measure of success the degree of visibility of IT & tech dimensions of the business is compelling.

If you are a solutions provider in the area and your goal is to work with clients to embed IT and telecoms to such a degree that they become invisible – transforming into the company’s systemic operational reflex, the synaptic system controlling the optimal operational ‘flow’, then your goal has exceptional commercial value.

The ambition to take it to the nth degree until it becomes the company’s ‘second nature’ if you will presets a business for greater flexibility agility and focus.

Invisibility also becomes a very clear metric of customer centricity.

If you’re in the business of selling IT and tech, in the real world of value, you need to move from pushing buttons boxes and fibre to selling the space to think and act on building a more resilient business through tech.

You need to be in the business of selling Mind-width not bandwidth: free your mind and your ass will follow as Funkadelic sang. Unlocking the entrepreneurial reflex in the business by liberating the customers mind of Tech & IT distractions – leaving them free to concentrate on creating exceptional ‘flow’.

To a customer Invisibility is about the goal of making IT & Tech less and less present in my eye-line: less of a priority: less visible in my inbox everyday, dropping away to being something that just ‘is’. The concept of turning IT & tech into a truly ethereal concept for a business is brave and powerful.

Creating the Qi model for smart businesses, changing the whole way we thing about IT, moving it from rational and engineered to being truly systemic, flow orientated and about cultural and social vitality and wellbeing – wellbeing from the inside out.

Qualitative growth is hard to see or imagine let alone define and capture through a complex maze of surface connectivity, functionality and capability. The ability to mine qualitative growth opportunity needs to be a reflex in the business facilitated by invisible technology and hyper speed connectivity. The systemic fabric and infrastructure needs to be able to act at the speed of the human mind and work well in advance of it.

Time to remove the IT bandages and unsee what is beneath. The degree of how much is left unseen will be down to the mastery of the CTO and their digital partners in crime. 

This truly is the looking glass and the wormhole rolled into one. A world of infinite possibility only recognisable in each successful step towards a wholly more resilient and differentiated business – one focused on unleashing minds to do what they should be doing. Walking the talk is not an app that you buy; its a disposition that you live.

White rabbit anyone?