Leadership and Organisation

The New CIO Leader’s Top Priorities

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“The New CIO Leader: setting the agenda and delivering results”  (Harvard Business Press, 2005) by Marianne Broadbent (Associate Dean, Melbourne Business School & Gartner Fellow) and Ellen Kitzis (Group Vice President, Gartner Executive Programs) remains one of my favourite modern IT management books. This was one of the early books to challenge conventional IT management wisdom and proposes principles, maxim and rules of modern CIO engagement with business. 

Ever a ready reference in my library, I was browsing through this over the weekend and could not resist listing “Ten New Priorities for the new CIO Leader”, here in my blog. Hopefully serves the purpose of ready reference for people in my network and my blog readers. 

Lead, don’t just manage – Leadership and management are not the same; they are complementary. A modern CIO needs to both manage and lead with personal vision and a point of view about how information and IT can make your enterprise more effective.

Understand the fundamentals of your environment – The new CIO leader knows the industry and competitive environment. 

Create a vision for how IT will build your organisation’s success – Ability to envision how to better IT-enable the business. 

Shape and inform expectations for an IT-enabled enterprise – Heart of the modern CIO role; work closely with business colleagues to identify key business needs, strategies, and drivers then articulate the IT guidelines. 

Create clear and appropriate IT governance – Effective governance enables the modern CIO to weave together business and IT strategies.

Weave business and IT strategy together – IT strategy means developing and actively managing IT portfolio to deliver success as measured by business colleagues.

Build a new IS organisation, one that is leaner and more focussed than its more traditional predecessor.  

Develop and nurture a high-performing team in your IS organisation – Know the competencies required for the new IS organisation, one that relies much more on internal and external relationships and to recruit and train for effectiveness. 

Manage the new enterprise and IT risks – A modern CIO is expected to proactively address and lead efforts to tackle ever-evolving threats such as cyber-terrorism, data privacy, and information security
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Communicate IS performance in business-relevant language – The new CIO leader must know and communicate how IT is contributing to shareholder value and the IT value indicators that are directly linked to business value measures.

I will certainly recommend securing a copy and reading through chapters relevant to your area of priority, focus, responsibility or interest in strategic IT management. You won’t be disappointed unlike some other similar work. 

Yes, your Organisation will need a CIO by 2020… but with a different set of Capabilities and Competencies

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A few days back I posted an article on my blog with a title of “Will your organisation need a CIO by 2020?”. The title was meant to be provocative and the subject matter explored top 5 disruptive themes which today’s CIO practice are facing. As m…

Yes, your Organisation will need a CIO by 2020… but with a different set of Capabilities and Competencies

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A few days back I posted an article on my blog with a title of “Will your organisation need a CIO by 2020?”. The title was meant to be provocative and the subject matter explored top 5 disruptive themes which today’s CIO practice are facing. As many of the forums and individual reviewers have since then remarked, the real question which needs to be explored is how will the role of CIO evolve? This post summarises the approaches and options for such an evolution.

Over a period of next few years should the role of CIO evolve to become a “CPO” or even a “CPPO”? (ref. John Clarke). The purpose of technology and information is to enhance the People in the Organisation, and there respective Productivity. So CIO may be less ‘I’ and more ‘P’ Productivity and People. IT will continue to play a key role in organisations. What will change, is the way that IT is packaged, used and managed. While the roles (and titles) may change, organisations will continue to need highly trained, experienced and competent professionals to plan and execute their technology mandates. These changes will also drive firms to think more on how to use IT in their business and less about how to develop and maintain it. This will mean a rethinking of core competencies for some companies – both the service users and providers. (ref. Ryan Jones)

There seems to be a myth that, CIO role is about technology rather than information, confusing, as so many do, the respective roles of CIO and CTO. The CIO role is about information, not technology. Information is not going to go out of fashion, nor is valuable information going to be commoditised. In many cases the CIO role has devolved to technology management from its true purpose of Information, in part due to aspirational IT managers and CTOs who think that being a CIO is about managing IT, instead of performing their corporate duty of supporting strategy through information (ref. Steve Burrows).

The CIO role will remain crucial, and remain at board level if his/her brief is to maximise the amount of knowledge available to the business at the right place, distilled from the “income of information” the company is generating. This knowledge is in effect part of the company’s balance sheet. The CTO is less likely to be a board member and may be superfluous in situations where the IT provided by outsourced services. If so then the CIO is effectively the solution architect. (ref. Stephen Clothier)


However there still remains a strong school of thought which proposed that, the CIO role will not evolve; it will revert to simpler times and will eventually disappear. CIOs such as Jem Eskenazi argue that, SOA, web services, SaaS, the Cloud, are abstracting information management from the underlying technology. At the same time, a new generation of executive management has a much better understanding of how IT can help their companies. The convergence of these two means that soon non-IT management will be able to specify and procure IT services without the help of a C-level expert.

In conclusion then the role of CIO is intrinsically linked with the state of IT industry and even more so with the business environment which surrounds it. Technology trends may come or go but the importance of information is paramount for modern business. As Paul Coby summarised his thoughts from a recent industry event, “IT matters even more than before, because it is leveraging social and economic change much more than ever before.  The role of the CIO or IT Director is to make sense of all this change and of all these possibilities. IT providers are central to businesses in new ways.  Yes, of course, for Operations; yes, of course, for Selling and for Servicing; but now IT is central to the whole Customer Experience.  That is new and that is the landmark change.”
 
Responding to my own challenges then, yes those five trends which I listed in my original post; Rise of Business Services, Maturing Cloud Computing, Business Analytics coming of Age, Popularity of Application Services and Technology Consumerisation are very much real. Yes they are disruptive to the CIO practice. But the best CIO will interpret them into an advantage position for their respective business. They will understand that Information matters Technology which drives that is probably not. In effect what would matter more is IT benefits realisation.

Would a CIO manage that process or CIO evolves to some other role such as COO or CPO or CITO may not really matter. So the definitive answer then, Yes your organisation will need a CIO by 2020 but he / she will have different set of competencies and capabilities. They may be more oriented towards an Operations function or a Market function or even Sales function. This orientation will depend on business value of IT for respective organisation. But Information Management backed up by effective and cost-efficient technology will be crucial for most modern organisations. 

Evolution of the CIO Role: Is Your Organisation Ready?

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Even as the initial feedback loop on my previous post “Will your organisation need CIO by 2020” is getting completed, I came across this very topical post by Jessica Twentyman, titled “Do CIOs need to shout louder?”. She quotes a provocative piece of research from management consulting firm Oliver Wyman and the US-based National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) suggests that their voices simply aren’t being heard in the boardroom. While almost all of the 204 company directors surveyed acknowledge that IT will have a significant impact on their company over the next five years, it appears that many boards do not have the skills or information they need to manage IT risk effectively.

This topic is linked to the question of how will the role of CIO evolve in coming years? I had written another post a few months back on CIO evolving to become a Chief Innovation Officer for instance. To refer some relevant extracts….

“Comparing the typical role of CIO (information) with that of CIO (innovation) – I do see some natural extensions of abilities which a competent CIO should possess. A good CIO should understand the language of the organisation as he / she serves a cross-section of business unit customers. Prototyping should be one of the core abilities for a CIO. And cross-delivery functions of modern IT dependent organisations should help him / her to unlock the creativity. So on the face of it a good competent and credible CIO should be easily double up as CIO (innovation).”

The tricky question to be tacked though is will an organisation allow it’s CIO to branch out? For instance I had written…..“The question however is will organisations trust or want their technology functions to lead path to innovation. Or would they rather drive this from commercial, functional or marketing perspective? It can also be argued that, CIOs are already one or two steps ahead in the game of innovation given their leadership in automation, optimisation aspects. Either way the CIO (information) should play a major role in enabling and making the innovation plans successful.” 

And Oliver Wyman and NACD is not the only recent study to suggest that CIOs’ skills and input are not sufficiently valued at board level. When research company Gartner recently conducted a survey with the Financial Executives Research Foundation, it found that “the chief financial officer is increasingly becoming the top technology investment decision-maker in many organizations.” The survey reports,“In 41 percent of organizations, the senior financial executives (mostly CFOs) who responded to the survey viewed themselves as being the main decision maker for IT investments. This response occurred in most situations where IT reports to the CFO, but it also occurred in other reporting models”

So even if the CIOs are ready for evolution of their role will the organisation have enough trust for them to take charge of matter beyond IT?

Image credit – digital art

Will Your Organisation Need a CIO by 2020?

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The title of my new blog post is provocative. Why would I ask such a question, especially after covering number of CIO surveys, trends, leading CIO thought leaders and underlining the strategic importance of IT in this very blog? I am asking this question because the IT Landscape as you and I know it, is changing and very fast.  Even by IT industry standards the pace of recent developments is remarkable. The business technology is undergoing rapid evolution. And the central argument which I am presenting here is that the conventional role of CIO or CIO function as it stands today will either be ineffective, redundant or out-dated and hence not required by end of this decade. Let me explain…

There are a number of reasons and drivers for the rapid evolution of business technology. However according to me there are five major forces which are influencing this evolution. They are Business Services, Application Services, Business Analytics, Consumerisation of IT and Cloud Computing. I will try to explain them briefly  

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Rise of Business Services – Awareness of the fact that, “Organisations purchase technology to fulfil business needs” is growing like never before. Given economic challenges very few organisations can now justify technology investment for pure technology advantages. Your CEO, COO, CXO and CFO will be demanding “Return on Investment” (ROI) and “Value for Money” (VFM) from each technology $ invested and they will be demanding that most likely in year one. Days of five or even three year technology pay-back are certainly behind us. And this is where purchasing business services independent of large technology investment is becoming so attractive. There are a number of examples of this trend ranging from payment processing to HR processing. Google is taking business services to new dimensions.
 

A test question for you – If you are CEO of a mid-size organisation would you invest $5 Million in back office processing software, hardware, network, back-up, security etc.? Or would you sign up for business outcome based contract with niche business services supplier? I know your answer and mine is the same!
 
Maturing Cloud Computing Industry – Enough is written about benefits of Cloud Computing (including this blog) so I won’t repeat it. However it is safe to conclude that Cloud is more than hype. It is real and there is an entire industry being built around Cloud propositions by all major IT vendors as well as rising number of niche players. Cloud computing if adopted in right manner frees your organisation from capital intensive infrastructure and operations investments. The business justification will not be far different than arguments which I have listed above. Cloud computing however gives organisations added flexibility of building solutions to suit their requirements yet allows them to offload its capital and resource intensive aspects to infrastructure specialists. It can be easily argued that business services are a variant of cloud computing. 
Another test question for you – You are a CFO of retail chain and you have a legacy retail management application. Your peak business transactions are expected only in the months of March, September and December but for all other months you operate at half the transactions of peak. Would you like to scale up and down the capacity and hence the cost of your retail application operations? I know your answer and mine is the same!
 
Business Analytics Coming of Age – A large number of small niche companies and even large companies like IBM and Oracle are investing millions of $ in developing and enhancing business analytics products and services and they are doing this for a very good reason. People like you and me (and multiply that number by millions of Indians and Chinese) are adapting to self-service shopping lifestyle. When was the last time you went into your bank branch? Or when was the last time you bought a book in a book shop? When was the last time you called your airline or visited its city booking office to purchase your airline tickets? I know your answer….we are more and more relying on smart, intuitive ecommerce sites, price comparison sites, shopping portals, kiosks, ATMs, etc. to buy everyday and occasional things of need and desire. The merchants are looking for smarter ways to know you, your preferences, your wish lists and keep your loyalty. This is true for brick and mortar businesses too by the way. And smart merchants are turning to business analytics to make more sense of their business transactions, shopping patterns, supplier dependencies, seasonality and thousands of other trends which affect their business. 

Another test question for you – if you are a mid-size or small company COO running a brick and mortar plus an ecommerce portal for your business would you rely on your in-house MI experts to keep up with 1000s of changing patterns, equations, behaviours and trends? Or would you secure an external niche business analytics company to analyse tons of your business transactions, do the number crunching and present predictions for next quarter along with benchmarks? I know your answer and mine is not too different! 
 
Popularity of Application Services – This may be very specific development but worth making a note of. You may recollect my earlier blog on ASOS and how smartly they are leveraging open access to their applications of catalogues. Apple App Store is another example of this model. These smart technology and business models are making middleware software, hardware and tools almost redundant by giving core access to application tier of your business systems. You suppliers and partners deliver direct to your application and data tier, why bother with message brokering? See my proposed revised retail reference architecture and you will know what I mean. 

Let me not ask you a question but pass you my verdict on this one – No I don’t need an internal IT department to develop interface to launch my catalogue on Apple App Store. I will go to a niche small firm who will do it for me at fraction of cost to much better response times than internal development and test department. 
 
Spread of Technology Consumerisation – Again enough is said about Apple ipad, Amazon Kindle, and Android smart-phones. The fact is if you are reading this you have either all of minimum one of them. And I know that you will prefer to carry your own ipad to work and do your office email, documents as well look for best place for Thurs after-work drinks on Google map on one of those boring conference calls. And if you organisation is not funding your smart-phone then you do not mind getting on an attractive tariff to join swelling ranks of smart mobile workers of next generation. I am not even mentioning Google Docs, Microsoft Office 365 and other similar offerings which liberate corporate IT. 

You know where I am going next – If your data privacy and security concerns were addressed would you mind if your employees brought their own IT equipment to work? I would not if I am a CFO of a business which made loss of double digit last year and who do not understand why I pay three times for a desk top compared to retail cost of ipad!
 
To summarise my argument – given these very influential forces which are shaping the world of business technology and the fact that they are here and will be growing in their influence….and their strong commercial as well as functional advantages; how long before your conventional CIO function turns into out-dated, ineffective and irrelevant cost centre? If the trajectory of this evolution continues like this, will your organisation need a CIO by 2020? I know your answer and mine is very similar!