Enterprise Canvas as service-viability checklist

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One of the more valuable uses of the Enterprise Canvas is as a checklist to verify completeness and viability of services, in any context within the enterprise. By ‘completeness’ I mean that we check that the service has all the connections and support and flows that it needs to play its full part in the […]

Will Voice Leapfrog Handwriting Recognition?

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Last year, I posed the question if Apple’s barrier to business adoption of the iPad was handwriting recognition. In fact at the time I thought that without a better data input method, the iPad would only be really useful as an information consumption device. Since then, I have experimented extensively with the iPad as a note taking device using my handwriting.  I’m to the point now where I neither carry any newspapers and magazines nor […]

If you liked this, you might also like:

  1. Handwriting Recognition is iPad’s Next Hurdle
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  3. 7 Great iPad Apps for CIOs

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. 

A week in Tweets: 28 August – 03 September 2011

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Almost catching up for once: only one week late. Another collection of Tweets and links, anyway, all in the usual format and so on. Enterprise-architecture and the usual ‘big-picture for business’ stuff: gkathan: RT @pbmobi: The 7 Rules of Tubemapping http://wp.me/Piayu-oC #entarch #storytelling gkathan: Perspectives of Enterprising, Architecture & Systems: Enterprising http://bit.ly/petnf1 #entarch >summary of […]

More on simplified Enterprise Canvas

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Following on from the previous post on ‘Simplifying the Enterprise Canvas‘, a few more notes on how to use the notation, and some practical matters on modelling. Perhaps not quite as technical as some of the other recent posts, but I’ll admit that if enterprise-architectures and the like are not of much interest to you, […]

Link Collection – September 11, 2011

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  • Zachman Framework 3.0 Announced Tues, Aug. 23 … Quick Notes — Ron Ross on Business Rules

    “Here’s a zipped pdf of the new 3.0 version of the Zachman Framework (with permission): ZF3.0.zip [approx 1.5M]…

    …Our Editor for BRCommunity.com, Keri Anderson Healy, attended the announcement event – she reports an excellent turnout. The following are some quick first-look notes from Keri (my own comments appear in brackets)…”

    tags: zachman

  • Change This – The Art of Hassle Map Thinking

    “Yet we’ve found that organizations that excel at demand creation do exactly that. They examine the lives of customers through the lens of what we call a Hassle Map-a detailed study of the problems, large and small, that people experience whenever they use their products.”

    tags: hassle map thinking innovation

  • Change This – The Six Rules Women Must Break in Order to Succeed

    I like: “Proceed until apprehended”
    —
    “We all have thoughts that limit our potential. Some of these beliefs come from our individual experiences; they take hold over the years. “I’m not good at taking credit. I’m much better working behind the scenes. I’m lucky to have this job.” Other beliefs are a result of the gender stereotypes that are all around us. They creep into our heads over time. “It’s my job to nurture everyone else before I take care of my own needs. I am selfish and self-centered if I choose to indulge my ambition.” Still others are simply erroneous conventional wisdom. “I can have it all without compromise. I’m a failure if I can’t make it look easy.”

    We get in our own way when we buy-into these limiting beliefs. But it does not have to be that way. We can nurture the beliefs that will sustain us and help us grow. To rise to the highest ranks in business, women need to unwind some of the traditional thinking that holds us back. We need to rethink the conversations we are having in our heads and tell ourselves a new story. We need to break our own rules.”

    tags: women business

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

  1. Link Collection – August 13, 2011
  2. Link Collection – July 31, 2011
  3. Link Collection – July 3, 2011

Simplifying the Enterprise Canvas

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The Enterprise Canvas is a model-type for use in enterprise-architecture, that can be used to describe any aspect of the enterprise, providing a consistent, unified view all the way from strategy to execution. But can we simplify it so as to build support for it in existing EA toolsets? The full specification for Enterprise Canvas […]