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CIO = Chief Infrastructure Officer or Chief Innovation Officer?
The poor CIO, the role is perhaps around ten years old, at one time was discussed as a role that ought to lead to being seen as a board level executive and now? The discussion on what the role the CIO has to play, and even sometimes does the CIO have a role at all, is everywhere. Seems the CIOs themselves are not too convinced of their future either as late last year a survey by The Economist magazine had around a third questioning if there would be a central IT function in five years time. Well just to remove this alternative debate from the table my view is yes there will be a central IT department, but it is one of two major ways that IT will be deployed within the enterprise to support business.
Let’s recap for a moment to the late 80s when the role of computers in the enterprise was exactly that, to compute, centrally, under the command of the Data Processing Manager, or DPM as we knew him/her. The PC was a nasty little computer lacking all the attributes that the DPM knew were needed for reliable transaction processing, managed data backups, etc. The users, mostly young MBAs, didn’t care as they didn’t want to compute, they wanted personal information, when and where it was needed to help them do their job better. The original ‘killer app’, the spreadsheet, drove such high value in departments, and was so cheap to do, that departments just went right ahead and bought more and more PCs, with networks for cross communication, till the overall impact on the business was bigger than that of the ‘computers’.
What was that impact and value? Information! But by now there was so much of it, and so often conflicting, that an information centric approach was required, and not a processing centric approach. Hello CIO and goodbye DPM, except it wasn’t quite true, those big mainframes were still needed, but in a different way, what today we think of as the ‘Back office’, whilst the focus had moved to the ‘Front Office’. Funny how history repeats itself, because that’s pretty close to the challenge that CIOs and business are facing today in questioning where is the value, and what is the role, to manage getting the value.
Smart young users adding a new generation of software to their PCs that they think will help them do their job better, mostly based around using the Web and Open Source with communication tools to make them better informed and able to react quicker. Generally being encouraged by their departmental managers to JDI, ‘Just Do It’, it’s cheap and the results are great, so why wait for MIS to tell us we can’t have it. The so-called ‘Shadow IT’ phenomena that is alive and well in almost every enterprise today! In defence of the CIO, with their current role, and responsibilities, for safe, secure, managed transaction based computing, they would try to stop this dangerous set of new technologies, but just as the DPM couldn’t stop change due to the obvious accessible business value nether will they succeed.
So the question is how to learn from history and manage change, and that means making a choice of which role the CIO should play in different organisations; the force for innovation and change; or the force for conservatism and security of enterprise operations. Both are going to be required but the skill sets are different, and different industry sectors will place different values on the two parts. The role of existing IT as the infrastructure on which an Enterprise trades together with the pressures to manage compliance, security, and support a new generation of trading protocols for the ‘book to bill’ process sequence of inter company trading may be the most important aspect of their business, leading to the Chief Infrastructure Officer role. In others words, the ability to focus on innovation in business capabilities through rapid adoption of new technologies will be the leading role calling for a very different skills profile in the Chief Innovation officer.
I believe it’s time for CIOs to drive the debate in their own enterprises by defining the type of business and where the value is to be found, then the profile of the roles required to make this happen. Both are needed and maybe some existing CIOs will wish to choose which role they will play, complimenting their own skills with that of a colleague. However there may be a third role, and this is at board level; the ability to bring transformation to the business to use both aspects to drive success; the Chief Improvement Officer! What is the profile of this role? I would say it seems to be a return to the roots of the first generation of CIOs when this was the key role that the newly appointed CIO played, but under all those other activities that have come along over the years this aspect seems to have become squeezed out. Time to re-invent ourselves!!
Posted by Andy Mulholland on February 26, 2007 | 
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Comments
# on February 26, 2007 4:32 PM, R3M1 said:
I believe that CIO main focus of attention lies in the alignment between business and IT. The particular role (innovator / consolidator) depends on the business strategy i.e. product excellence, operational excellence, etc.
# on February 27, 2007 12:30 AM, andy mulholland said:
the interesting question is who in the business wants what. the CFO wants stability and cost management, whilst other CxOs seem to want innovation, and most CIOs are begining to feel caught between the two very different forms of business demands
# on March 1, 2007 1:43 AM, Doug Houseman said:
I like it, but it fails to take into account a role that is important for many CIO’s since they do not have a CSO. That is: "How to keep the company from violation of security and privacy rules?" Yes the PDA’s and other tools are nice, until they run smack dab into lost computing devices and stolen data from these new toys, then the department manager and the user are both fired, the fines are millions of euros (pounds, dollars) and the adverse publicity impacts both shareholder value and revenue (not to say that the fines and increased costs of the auditors impacts the net). Yes this problem happens with laptops and other portable devices, but since PDA's are smaller and easier to steal (cooler to steal too!), we are seeing an faster increase in the loss of small portable computing and messaging devices than the large ones. If they do not have storage - then it is not much of an issue, but the mobile messaging devices are rapidly gaining gigabytes of storage.
There is a definite ying and yang to new computing, one we saw in the 1980’s when desktops first came into business, except the connections did not exist then, so you had to have physical access to the building to get at the data. Then laptops and the chaos that brought. Now mobile messaging devices.
In the 1980's no one has thought thru the privacy issues, or the penalties. In 2007, most countries have, and the corporation is at risk, not just the mobile messaging device user.
Like it or not, this is an issue of corporate risk the CIO needs to deal with, since the department managers mostly do not have the knowledge to do so.
# on March 1, 2007 3:49 PM, andy mulholland said:
An most interesting build - so though it is possible to understand how to break up the business processes into seperate responsibilities currently this would still not address the need for enterprise wide security. Now that is thought provoking and kind of links up with the challenge of deperimeterised security but moves it into a new direction.
# on March 3, 2007 2:38 PM, andy mulholland said:
time to introduce www.technorati.com!
Technorati Profile
# on March 3, 2007 7:14 PM, andy mulholland said:
Just been reading an article in the UK based www.computerweekly.com on their views on this topic. interesting point is that they suggest there are four main types of CIO curently and even suggest the likely period of service for each type!
1) the professional -traditional technology based come up through the department ranks and services 7 years on average
2) the executive - appointed from within the business to caretake the troubled IT department for an average of 2 years
3) the consultant - a supply side or marekt knowledgable outsider brought in by the CIO to 'update' the department for an average of 4 years
4) the paratrooper - seasoned professional brought in for a big business transformation and will lave when it is over say 3 to 5 years.
Seemed to be pretty recognisable in terms of the types to me!!
# on May 7, 2007 4:00 PM, Brian Murray said:
A more recently article (http://www.silicon.com/ciojury/0,3800003161,39166989,00.htm), almost duplication of the above, reminded me of my intention to add some commentary here …
As a basic principle, I think resting the responsibility for such a broad characteristic as ‘innovation’ on one person’s shoulders may be inappropriate. Now, more than ever, innovation should be integral to corporate behaviour and led from board level. Perhaps the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of an organisation should be responsible for ensuring all of his team are driving and rewarding innovation within the organisation.
All in all though, as with most things, a review of the fundamentals may shed some light on the subject.
Surely, the primary role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) was to ensure the company had access to appropriate information at the relevant time and, as a more recent concern, in the relevant place. Most companies have since relegated this role to be more akin to technical resource manager, which is the root of many of the issues we see today.
In this context, the time has come to evolve the CIO role. Knowledge, more than information, adds true value (Intellectual Capital) and this is still much more within the domain of the human resources than the technical ones. The importance of the Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO), so often overlooked, should be recognised. Perhaps we will even grow to realise that this should be the true function for what was long ago de-valued and restricted to an administrative remit as ‘HR Director’.
That is not to say that the importance of relevant information, reporting and processes are not critical. This applies equally across IT, finance, procurement, marketing, sales or personnel for example. Appropriate measurement, analysis, compliance and modelling (i.e. Governance) should be ensured. In this context we may come to recognise the role of a Chief Governance Officer (CGO) in managing all core process-orientated functions.
I think an equally important message in lies around the need to recognise and exploit the ability of technology/trends to drive innovation and growth in your business. The scope of the technology in question has become highly IT dominated, but that is not to say we should restrict our focus to IT alone. As part of this realisation we may see a resurgence of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) role. It is under this remit that implementation should fall, but with diligent handover to the CGO.
So – who manages the IT? … With IT being simply a fundamental day-to-day tool in corporate functionality now, isn’t it sensible to manage it as such and re-focus on the objectives and deliverables?
Under this new business model, we would have innovation driven by the CEO, core intelligence/expertise structured under the CKO, technical awareness & implementation led by the CTO with the CGO managing the means by which we measure the overall effectiveness & efficiency. This model delivers both innovation and growth from the perspectives of expertise and technology, as well as ensuring good practice and manageability.
It may have dawned on us that the traditional roles of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) or Chief Operating Officer (COO) now become delegated to more administrative functions (probably under the CGO) … Perhaps the question we should really be asking ourselves is – What value does a CFO or COO actually bring beyond this, is it actually these roles whose time have come?