Posts Tagged deliver value
Reports of CIO ‘Death’ Premature
CIOs Must Have the Ear of the CEO
The Chief Information Officer is not a second-rate executive position as some would claim. Also, CIO, does not, as the saying goes, stand for “Career Is Over”. And the CIO position is certainly not “dead”, contrary to rumors to the contrary. As Mark Twain once said, “rumors of my death are premature”.
There is this notion that CIOs deserve a “seat at the table”. The “table” in this sense is the CEO staff, as a peer exectuive with the CFO, COO, and assorted VPs of Operations, Sales, etc. Much is written in blogs (included my own), magazine articles and discussed in forums about the justification for this belief. The main idea is that CIOs have to be more ’strategic’. Supposedly, the mechanism for becoming more strategic is most often termed “alignment”.
Let me so bold as to suggest that things like ‘contribution’ and ‘value’ go right along with ’strategic’. There are plenty of tactical issues with managing a business. Things are dynamic, a flow, requiring a dexterity of seamlessly migrating through issues of business performance: sales, product quality, customer satisfaction, supply chain, etc. Information Technology is clearly threaded through these and other areas of the business. However, the trick is to demystify and ‘dis-abstract’ this stuff so that you are not spending half of the monthly strategy meeting talking about who should be allowed to get a Blackberry or an iPhone.
So, the big picture has something to do with not being the “moron in the room”. True executive ”peers” suffer fools badly. The thought that there is somehow a special microscope for CIOs is nonsense — unless it takes one to see the value that the CIO is delivering. It is more about culture and being in the “club”. The one thing about clubs full of highly-ambitous people is that they are territorial and very picky about letting others inside.
Prior to being hired for a CIO position a few years ago, the HR executive told me that the company was thinking about slimming down the number of direct reports to the CEO. Thus, they were considering having me report to the CFO. My response: a non-starter. If they were trying to reduce the number of CEO reports, I had just the solution: have the CFO report to me.
After an awkward chuckle or two, the HR executive was back to his senses. I wasn’t asking for a seat at the table. I expected one. It is all about grabbing a chair and acting like you belong there.
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Bottom line
quit whining. If you do not have the business-savvy to earn the respect of fellow business executives, then you deserve to be seated in the gallery.
For more on this topic: Business Solutions: Death of the CIO?, by Nadia Cameron; The Death of the CIO–Again, by Brian Watson; Is the CIO a “pinnacle” position?, by George Tomko; and
What Do CEOs Want from CIOs?, by Maryfran Johnson.
Image: Arvind Balaraman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
©2010 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved
Does Business Intelligence Require Intelligent Business?
As I started to develop this blog post, it occurred to me that my working title, “Does Business Intelligence require Intelligent Business?” might have been previously used in some other publication. So, I Googled it.
I did find some very close variations, but not exactly in the form of the question that the title poses.
I was led to a white paper, “business intelligence is intelligent business”, by Gerry Davis, Regional Managing Partner, Asia-Pacific for Heidrick & Struggles. In the opening paragraph, the problem is summarized thusly:
“Collecting information about customers is relatively easy. Analyzing customer information for potential cross-sells, increased revenue streams, and improved service is more challenging. But getting the information to the front line in a timely manner and thus providing further competitive edge is proving increasingly difficult for many corporations.”
As we look at this statement, there are three main points: 1) collecting is “easy”; 2) analyzing is hard; and 3) disseminating it is very hard. Perhaps a bit oversimplified. But, in reality, most users will need this to be oversimplified to be able to overcome all their biases about IT, systems in general, any extra “work” that will automatically be assumed and fears about job security. This is said this way, not to be unkind, or even to be negative, but to make sure that the focus is on the right “problem”.
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CIOs as Brokers, not Controllers
As a long-time CIO and, now, consultant for CIOs, I am seeing that there is a role shift that is happening, ever so subtly, but it is going to be transformational for the role of CIO in most organizations. Perhaps it will not be manifested in a “big bang”, but all CIOs will be affected.
Some have referred to this as “CIO 2.0” as if to suggest that it is a planned and that there is some sort of documented manifesto that has popped out of some lab, university or think-tank. No, this is entirely circumstantial. It is also inevitable, unstoppable, irreversible, unavoidable, and, well, a good thing. A 2007 article by Deloitte and Touche, aimed mostly at government IT leaders, identified the changing roles and imperatives for public sector CIOs and was highly suggestive of the changes brewing for private sector CIOs.
The bottom line is this: a CIO is a broker of business solutions that involve cross functional process stewardship and a provider of a technology and infrastructure framework. Beyond this, there is an opportunity for the business-savvy CIO to contribute to joint enterprise strategy development with senior leadership. As described in an April 2008 blog post CIO 2.0: The Chief Impact Officer:
In other words, the ideal of CIOs becoming key players in the business arena is taking shape. Call it CIO 2.0 — the evolution of the IT czar into the role of “chief impact officer.” Call it the SCIO — the strategic CIO. But whatever you call it, the transformation is inevitable.
Those that are able to transcend the perception that they are zookeepers of the geeks and propeller-heads (as very talented technologists are unflatteringly labeled) will find themselves as thought leaders and key players in making things happen at the speed of business. Any attempt to be controlling, withholding, short-sighted or locked-in will simply generate powerful incentives for the organization to go it alone, underground, in any number of ways.
CIOs that fail to migrate from IT czar style CIO to chief impact officer style CIO will find themselves moved out, passed over or working for a more powerful executive (read CFO), rather than the CEO.
Do Consultants Deliver Value? (Part 2 of a continuing series)
I started this journey by considering all of the talent that is now out ‘there’ due to the economy downturn and a workforce that is facing an unprecedented number of retirements. That is a lot of experience that could be for sale and, when looking at traditional consulting engagements from “brand name” firms, are customers buying potential, when they could be engaging highly-experienced and been-there, done that practitioners?
I put out a set of exploratory questions to see how people see this.
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