Whether it is the all-too-familiar “fail whale”, or the depressing “API Limit Exceeded” message in TweetDeck, users are finding it difficult to deal with deteriorating service levels that are rendering the service unusable for any serious social networking.

Of course, Twitter is “free”. As such, we are told that it is offered to us “as-is” and, since you get what you pay for, expectations that it will be there when you need/want it; fully-functional and void of yo-yoing, syncopating starts and stops; is simply asking too much.

In today’s post by Thomas Wailgum, “Twitter Rage: Can you Really Complain About Outages?”, he makes the point:

Think about it: The fact that I’m not paying a cent for the Twitter service means that I don’t have much ground to place “buyer-seller” type expectations upon the immature service. (This isn’t Salesforce.com downtime or disruptions with internal enterprise systems.) My outrage is tempered by my acceptance of the “free deal” I have with Twitter: You get what you pay for.

While a conventional “buyer-seller” arrangement is not evident, a binding contract is a bargain where the parties each get something for good and valuable consideration. Indeed, as the Twitter Terms state “… You may use the Services only if you can form a binding contract with Twitter…”.

Twitter’s Terms go on:

In consideration for Twitter granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Twitter and its third party providers and partners may place such advertising on the Services or in connection with the display of Content or information from the Services whether submitted by you or others.

So, the bargain is that you get access to and use of the Services and Twitter gets all of the ad revenue, content, demographic information, and the ultimate financial value of their property that appreciates on the backs of the millions of users that expect to be able to have access to and use of the Service. Seems to me to be reasonable “payment” for “services” rendered.

And, of course, there is that “AS-IS” escape hatch. Thus, there is no warranty and I (or anybody else) cannot make a claim for damages. Fine.

But, as far as expectations go, I am not as willing, anymore, to give Twitter an easy “Pass” because they are growing so fast and are not yet mature. The Twitter value proposition is diminishing as my time is being squandered on a service that is not getting better because too many interfaces are sucking the life out of it and too many users are being added to the pile.

I hope it gets better.

Luckily, we, as users, have no obligation to stay with the “service”. If it gets bad enough, we’ll be gone and “AS-IS” will become “AS-WAS”.

Tell me what you think.

©2010 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved

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.

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

Apparently, there is no shortage of ways to generate revenue for cash-strapped government programs. Now we hear of New York Senator Charles Schumer’s idea for a 25 cent tax on calls to offshore call centers.

From CIO.com:

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation that calls for taxing companies that transfer domestic customer service calls to foreign call centers. In a prepared statement, Schumer said the $0.25 excise tax is designed to provide incentive for companies to keep call center jobs on American soil.

Of course, this “incentive”  is highly unlikely to have its desired effects for the following reasons (and probably many more):

1. This will cost everybody 25 cents more for each customer service, help desk or other such call. Either the government will get the 25 cents, or a US-based service provider will be able to charge its US business customer higher rates (up to 25 cents per call) than the offshore provider.
2. The cost of doing business will increase as companies will have quarterly disclosure filing requirements, related audits and other bureaucracy-related fees.
3. The cost and size of government will increase to administer the program.
4. The switching costs to move already-implemented business process solutions from offshore centers to onshore centers would likely exceed the “benefits” of bringing the solution back to the States.

Other than this government’s insatiable appetite for taxing its citizens, what other reason could there be for imposing such a tariff?

With midterm elections less than 5 months away, populist programs that tout job creation/protection will be the rage.

In a blog post at OutsourcingPortfolio.com, it was noted that:

the National Association of Call Centers (NACC)  reported that US call center employment has generally grown – even through the current great recession…

So, are we trying to fix something that is not broken? No. We are breaking things further by creating an even uglier climate for businesses trying to succeed in America.

Further, from CIO.com:

According to Schumer’s plan, companies would have to certify annually with the Federal Trade Commission that they are in compliance with the offshore call center rules, or be subject to civil penalties. But the logistics involved in actively policing offshore call center traffic could prove much more costly to the federal government than to companies that outsource overseas.

Bottom line: another government money grab that increases the cost of doing business (thus killing job growth) and adds to the cost and size of government.

©2010 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved

Night Blue Sky and Tree of Light

We may be skiing, on vacation, digging into another batch of cookies, reading, making resolutions or putting the stacks of papers into some kind of order. But, In general, we aren’t working; or, in wall-to-wall meetings; or planning a weekend cut-over to a new system.

The brief respite that we have been given will end with a vengeance on Monday, January 4, 2010. So we better be ready.

Clear memory, reboot, recharge – whatever you do, take this gift of time and backflush all of the crud and waxy buildup that has accumulated on your brain in what was a brutal 2009.

Quite a number of challenges await your return. 2010 will be a pivotal year. The rate of disruptive technology changes, and the new social contract that will emerge from economic recovery, will drastically test the “elasticity” of the organization to deal with things.

Whatever happens in 2010, it is going to take more guile and determination, intensity, creativity, resourcefulness and tenacity from leaders.

So, enjoy the time off. IT Leaders will be called upon to actually lead in 2010. Figuring things out will take a clear head and the ability to find some think time and plan the moves. We used to call it “blue sky” or thinking outside the box but, first and foremost it requires thinking.

Simple, maybe. But such a simple thing is often sabotaged by knee-jerks and bad reactions.

Bottom-line: Come out of this holiday season thinking right.

Image: Francesco Marino / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved

Cloud computing boosters use the selling point that establishing large amounts of storage or computing requires no “up-front capital investment”. Pleading before the gods of capital within corporations has been a bane for IT and business operations functions forever. All those appropriation request forms and cash flow analyses – not much fun when you want the servers installed and the software loaded.

What has always been interesting to me is that more thought, analysis, decision-making and accountability goes in to managing the capital investment portfolio than you often see in managing operating expenses. The irony here is that “op-ex” is very often many multiples larger than the “cap-ex” spend in any given fiscal period. If a $400 million company (in terms of revenue) has an operating profit of 20%, then the company managers spent $320 million with likely much less oversight than the $15 million that they might have spent on projects.

At the end of the day, there is no free lunch. Just like leasing became the way to ensure “technology refresh” every 3 years, let’s make sure that cloud computing and all something-as-a-service offerings don’t wind up costing your company more or that the standards of decision-making are usurped by being able to fly more stuff under the financial controls radar.

The saying “you can pay me now or you can pay me later” became a “tag” line in old oil filter commercials where the idea was that you might pay more now for a premium filter but you would be avoiding the cost of replacing the entire engine later. Of course, the assumption is that you would own the car long enough for this to pay off. This was in the era when the majority of people traded-in and bought new cars in 3 or 4 year cycles. Not long after, 3 year leases perpetuated the cycle.

The reality, then, was that most people wound up paying now and they got to do it over and over because later never came!

Another myth that is related is the 3,000 mile oil change. Again, another marketing bonanza because it got people to pay to replace their oil and filters twice as often as the auto manufacturers recommend in the owner manuals.

So back to op-ex and cap-ex and buying infrastructure/software/platforms as-a-service. If I take the op-ex view, it is almost always an incremental view as in year-over-year budgets and the dearth of zero-base reviews. If I take the cap-ex view, everything is an investment and is evaluated as cash-flows over a defined “economic life”. This takes rigor and commitment and the potential for more eyes to see and more ears to hear.

It is not a bad thing to have the option of paying for something as a service. However, it is a bad thing if the selling point is that you get to relieve yourself of the burden of evaluating and justifying the all-in costs of doing it one way or another.

Remember, you can pay now or pay later. Some times, it is nice to get to pay later.

What do you think. Please leave a comment.

©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved

The past few weeks have been terrible, from my standpoint. I have never received so much bad, depressing news about IT jobs. Whether it is the jobs report released by the U.S. Department of Labor, weekly reports on the number of new claims for unemployment benefits, or the veritable flood of requests from associates for recommendations, networking meet-ups, referrals, etc. — things are not good out ‘there’.

Many companies are holding back, shutting down (or downsizing) projects and deferring investments. This is a time of hunkering down into something we all know as “maintenance mode”. For some organizations, it may even be a situation close to flirting with disaster by encroaching on what I call “the line of viability”. Basically, that “line” is the edge of the proverbial cliff.

This brings me to the well-known phrase that I have used to title this article: “a friend in need is a friend indeed”. Basically, this is a statement that suggests that “true” friendship is tested by what one does when a friend is in trouble or otherwise needs help. More on that in a minute….

The current state of the economy has had a miserable effect on jobs and has led people to develop and nurture their professional networks and/or head out on their own as independent consultants or professional service providers. Between June 2008 and June 2009, 3.5 million jobs were lost in the top 100 job markets and 1 million of them came from the top 6:

“Ninety-eight of the nation’s 100 largest cities lost jobs between June of 2008 and June 2009, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.The top three were Los Angeles (259,100 jobs lost), New York City (226,900), and Chicago (207,600). Three more cities lost more than 100,000 jobs; Detroit, Phoenix and Atlanta.The only two exceptions in the top 100 were Baton Rouge, Louisiana and McAllen-Edinburg, Texas, which each added a few hundred jobs over the 12-month period.The 100 major labor markets lost 3.5 million jobs overall.”

As if this isn’t bad enough, whether we have hit “bottom” or not is under constant debate. So, in all likelihood, things are not going to get better any time soon. In fact, because of the duration and depth of the recession, (some would say depression), I believe that there will be fundamental change in the social “contract” between employer and employee.

Employment used to be a relationship for life. Global competition and, what international financial scholars would call “comparative advantage” between countries and regions, have changed the rules of the “game”. The market for talent is no longer bounded by the city limits.

There will not be mass hirings to match the mass layoffs. Companies that have weathered the storm by maintaining skeleton crews and using contractors and free-lancers to fill resource needs may prefer to move more and more labor into the variable cost column. “Careers” as we knew them will morph from a measurement system that relied on the corporate “ladder” to one that is much more self-based and achievement-oriented. Of course, this is not necessarily “bad”. However, for those who have lived, worked and planned retirement under the old “system”, this is a big shock.

All of this is fine with me and many others. I say “bring it on”, embrace it. Running scared usurps the power of individuals and, collectively, of the entire team, workplace, workforce, etc.

We could pine all day “….oh, if only I was one of the fortunate to have had tremendous mentors and leaders who challenged them and prepared them for this very day.” Those are thoughts that must be erased or otherwise released.

So, now, it takes more — much, much more — than just “showing up” or “putting your time in”. You now have to be proactive, energetic, curious, adaptive, giving, communicative, interested, committed and plugged-in. You have to reach-out because no one is reaching in. For many, this will be like being a fish out of water. Years and years of inattention have dulled the senses and now, what? — all of a sudden transformed into a networking machine? Almost like thinking that recruiters are actually working for you. (See my post “Recruiters and Your Job Search“)

With that “slap” in the face, let me get back to the friend analogy. Flipping someone a LinkedIn connection request or posting your need to find a position in a forum post is not going to make up for time wasted waiting for a “package”. Friending people on FaceBook or following all the Twitter users you can find is not necessarily going to get it done.

The bottom line is that it is going to come down to who your “true” friends are and the situation that they are in. If you haven’t cultivated business friendships when times were better, you are in trouble. It will be easy to make friends with others that share your plight. But, all the “markers” are being called in. All of the “haves” are extremely busy working on helping the “have nots” that previously helped them. These “true” friends will take care of the people they know, trust and have faith in. They will regard these people as extensions of themselves. They will go to “bat” on behalf of their respected colleagues.

Better to get to work, jump into the fray, eat some crow and, perhaps, start over. Maybe a long distance commute is in your future. More likely free lance or contracting. Flexibility, for sure, will be required.

And, most of all, make sure that there is substance to your business relationships. You never know when you again will be that friend in need.

What do you think? Please offer your comments.

©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved

Readers of my recent post “Does Business Intelligence require Intelligent Business?” can find a great post to continue the thought at CIOZone: “Ask the CIO–Do you want more BI & a smarter company?”.

In her post, Lauren E. Bielski writes:

“Nobody wants a less capable organization if there’s a way around the usual trade-offs posed by budgets, time constraints, and the competition.  Hence, more talk than ever these days about fact-based decision making— which is pretty revered in management—and more efforts around data mining in an effort to learn more about operations, customers, and winning tactics.”

Good observations. But, are companies getting anywhere with their efforts? Quoting from a recent Aberdeen research report:

“the creation, management, and continual review of key performance indicators can prove to be a difficult process, particularly when large, complex data volumes are combined with rapidly changing business dynamics.”

Yes, it is not easy to do. I would also suggest that asking the CIO to make the company ’smarter’ may not be the best approach.

Net-net, companies have to do a number of things with their culture, vision, approach and, above all, not leave the job to the IT department.

Business leaders will not be able to get away with the abdication of attention and support that has doomed many an ERP implementation. No, they “own” this one. IT will lend its helping hand, but CIOs should push back and push back hard.

The CIO will have enough challenges executing the enabling initiatives.

What do you think? Please offer your comments.

©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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”.

Like the human brain, which, in a lifetime, is barely tapped for 10% of its ultimate potential, the organization “brain” is woefully underutilized. A number of studies and surveys have consistently shown that enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) software, such as SAP, Oracle, etc. are underutilized.

As Albert Einstein was once quoted, “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together, they are powerful beyond imagination.” Such a proclamation will only be true if there is a significant change in the approach that knowledge workers take to their jobs.

Mr. Davis suggests that organizational change may be the answer:

“As business intelligence divisions spring up in organizations across the globe, the same question is being asked: “How can we unlock the value of our data?” At Heidrick & Struggles, we believe that the answer lies in implementing an appropriate organization structure and in identifying and appointing the right executive — someone with superb business acumen combined with a sound technical understanding — and tasking them with delivering real business intelligence.”

In a very weird way, I actually agree and disagree, simultaneously, with this statement. For a company like H&S, an organizational solution is going to feel like the absolutely right thing to do. After all, that is one of the main things that they do. For organizations that commit to this approach and throw the full weight of their senior management commitment (and funding) at sustainable levels, it may work out very well.

But, there are quite a few brilliant people who are many times smarter on the subject of business analytics and business intelligence that will tell you that knowledge is a process that begins with data (“D”) and moves along a progressive transformation process into information (“I”) then knowledge (“K”) and ultimately, wisdom (“W”).

If the CIO owns the “D” and the “I”, and the CKO owns the “K”, who “owns” the “W”? Is there a collective ownership of the wisdom of the organization? Will we be seeing “CWO”s in our future?

It was back in 2000 that, with great assistance from Bill Odom, I drew the following picture. At the time, I was a first year CIO trying to stand up a new joint venture. With as close to a clean sheet of paper as one could get, we were architecting the mission of IT from end-to-end. And we got the chance to build it.

Since then, a lot has changed in this world. But, some things stay the same. No matter what the advances are that enable us to do things better, faster, cheaper, it still comes down to people and how people do things. Remember Einstein’s quote above.

Another brilliant thinker that captures the essence so well is Peter J. Thomas who writes in his recent blog post:

Business Intelligence is not just about technology and cannot be effective in isolation. To live and breath it needs to be part of a broader framework covering the questions that its users need to answer, the actions that they take based on these answers and the iterative learning that occurs in the process.”

At the end of the day, there is nothing I would like to see more than knowledge-based business processes executed by knowledge-savvy workers (and anyone else in the value chain) benefitting knowledge-enabled customers.

But, to see that idea realized, we have to understand and deal with the three main challenges that we previously identified.

1) Collecting information about customers is relatively easy. CIOs have been pretty effective at collecting data through transactional and automated data collection. So good, in fact, that most organizations are “drowning“ in data. In most cases, it is in multiple formats, fragments, repositories etc. Master data must also be dealt with, but, given the unbelievable chore of maintaining it, master data is often an “attic” filled with junk mixed in with the useful stuff.

2) Analyzing is hard. The issues cited in item 1 give the first clue why this is so. First, as previously noted, we are drowning in data. Second, the data that describes the data, i.e. “Master Data” and gives it purpose and context, is often an overburdened mess. Efforts at standardization of form and meaning collapse under their own “weight”. It certainly does not help that many companies are actually companies of companies. There are so many pieces that are pulled together via acquisitions, “carve-outs”, reorganizations, etc. that base lining and normalizing company data so that historical analysis can be done is like boiling the ocean. At a minimum, this becomes an activity that I call “data mashing”.

3) Disseminating it is very hard. While products are evolving to provide robust tools that will essentially offer “composite” applications that sit on layer(s) above the legacy applications and data stores, few organizations and their business processes are set-up to meaningfully “plug-in”. What will happen to all of the spreadsheets!?

Having said that, I am not sure that the answer lies with a new executive in the organization, driving the organization to come up with its business intelligence. Indeed, it is the remnants of the middle manager and senior analyst layers that are closest to the actual in-place and functioning business processes and work-flows. They know the business rules. They know how things “really” work. They know how to handle situations that come up that require judgment and understanding of the facts of each case.

Too many businesses play with fire by running in the margins with their knowledge workers. Thus, a problem exists where these folks are highly marginalized and “one-deep” on the resource chart. They are essential members of the business teams for everything that the business wants to do. What happens if they get hit by the proverbial bus, retire or quit?

Looking through this lens, creating a new silo, or a new organization matrix that adds a new “boss” for these individuals does not, in my opinion, get the organization the knowledge and wisdom that it needs to sustain and grow.

Ironically, this is one of the major business problems that service-oriented architecture (“SOA”) and business process management (“BPM”) is/was supposed to cure. The problem with SOA and BPM is that they are BIG ideas. BIG ideas usually require BIG money, time and resources. Of course, the expectation is also for “BIG” results, which would make it all worthwhile.

Going beyond this point would far eclipse the scope and intent of this particular “Rant”. Getting back to the question that was posed in the title of this post: “Does Business Intelligence require Intelligent Business?”.

Organizations are structured, for the most part, in verticals a.k.a. “silos”. Having efficient, well-designed, ubiquitous cross-functional processes that work is still a rare find. In that regard, a new executive and organization that creates the silo-to-silo (i.e. “horizontal”) channels and portals may have promise. But, hierarchy still rules the day and there is personal “safety” in these turbulent and vulnerable times for incremental approaches.

This sort of “incrementalism” does not create a noticeable increase on overall organizational business intelligence. To the extent that transformational change brings the IQ of the organization to new heights, then there is hope for creating an intelligent business.

Is there a chicken or the egg story here? What comes first – the chicken or the egg?

In organizations, what comes first – business intelligence or intelligent business?

There is, of course, no absolute answer. It could be said that if not an intelligent business then what worth business intelligence?

What do you think? Please offer your comments.

©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved

I decided to let the PC run for a while to see if it could work out its problems on its own. My iPod was close by and I selected some music to help me kill the time.

I wound up selecting one of the greatest music albums ever released: Hotel California, by the Eagles, in 1977. Its greatness is backed-up by all conceivable measures: total album sales, #1 singles, critical and popular acclaim, and, most of all, the test of time. New bands “cover” the songs in their live shows and recordings. Radio airplay of the original recording is still significant and the members of the Eagles reprise these and other songs for enthusiastic audiences in live shows throughout each year.

Listening to the title track, “Hotel California”, one of the great lines is

We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.

It struck a chord (no pun intended) and I started thinking that this is an appropriate sentiment for the (current) year 2009.

A lot was happening back in 1969. We put a man on the moon. We were in the most violent period of the Vietnam War. We were closing out a decade that brought about dramatic social change.

While all of this was going on, information technology was also undergoing tremendous change. Intel was formed in 1968. The internet was being born as ARPANET. And, 2 developers from Bell Labs took their dream of a new operating system to reality as UNIX. So, essentially, we had the birth of Moore’s Law, the creation of the Internet and the beginning of the era of open source. Quite a burst of creations that underpin almost everything we use today.

So, here I was, listening to Hotel California for maybe the 10 thousandth time in my life. It hit me that, what the band members were lamenting, in their context, was what I was starting to lament in my context.

Have we taken the “gifts” of 1969 — processing power, boundless storage, ubiquitous communications and collaboration — and managed them well? Are we doing all that we can to hand an even greater set of treasures to generations that will follow?

I think that the answer is “No”. The space is dominated by large multinational enterprises. Who would have thought that Oracle would ever own Java? Desktops and web browsing are still dominated by Microsoft.

The Internet is something short of a “bad neighborhood”. We still use keyboards rather than our voices.

In short, we are squandering our capabilities on marginal and incremental things. We call certain technologies “disruptive”, because they require the installed base to change. We have releases and patches and hot packs. We talk about things like clouds as if we invented the sky.

Wikipedia says that the song tells the tale of a weary traveler who becomes trapped in a nightmarish luxury hotel that at first appeared inviting and tempting. Hmmm.

The Eagles finish the song. My iPod dutifully selects the next track from the playlist. I am now, appropriately, tapping my pencil to Devil’s Haircut by Beck.

Something’s wrong ’cause my mind is fading

And everywhere I look

There’s a dead end waiting

Suddenly, for a moment, there is an incredible thought that maybe the best approach is to START OVER!

But, as another lyric from Hotel California goes:

you can check out anytime you like,

but you can never leave

Pondering this thought for a moment, I simply rebooted.

12 minutes later, after all the programs, drivers, virus definitions, firewall rules, boot record scans, diagnostics, and network log-ins were complete, I was back to writing.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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.