At a recent event, a luminary from Microsoft with a global role but based in Ireland, put forward some interesting ideas about the role of the CIO.
Tim Hynes said that the reason so many CIOs now report to a CFO, as opposed to directly to the board, was that the CIO had lost relevance in the eyes of the CXOs, and particularly the CEO.
Hynes gave an example of a CIO round table where he asked each of them what was keeping them awake at night. Hynes said that the usual crop of responses was returned, all of which being the buzz words or terms of the day such as Big Data, mobility, compliance, regulation etc. He then asked what was keeping their respective CEOs awake at night and the answers that came back were pretty much uniform but not what was expected. They all pretty much said the economy was keeping their CEO awake at night.
Hynes said that the CIO had lost relevance because the priorities of the CIO were not the same as the priorities of the CEO. He argued that when this changed, the CIO would once again gain relevance.
What I took from this was that the CIOs in the example, who are probably fairly representative of CIOs and heads of IT around the world, were working in a head-down mode focusing on technical answers to largely technical issues. They were not looking forward and anticipating issues that the business would encounter that might harm growth or watching out for solutions that might enhance the business, increasing productivity and profitability.
Now these assertions may not be new necessarily, as IT people in general have been accused in the past of wanting to implement the next big thing in terms of technology without it being fully supported by a well thought out business case. Now, those days are well and truly gone and no IT person worth their salt would embark on a procurement or implementation process without being able to fully justify their spend, but even this is perhaps a little short sighted. The real issue here might be how assertive a CIO should be in making suggestions to the business.
In recent years the role of the CIO as facilitator for business owners has been emphasised where the CIO waits for a business unit or process owner to ask for a solution or a steer and then use their knowledge of the technologies available to work with them to achieve their goal. This way, there is no technology for technology’s sake and the business owner can make the business case.
This is, by its nature, a very passive role and perhaps does not justify a C level position. There have also been other suggestions that the CIO role is only really relevant to technology companies, as in those organisations and businesses that do technology as opposed to merely using it. Again, I think this is missing the point somewhat as these days information technology is akin to accounting in that businesses cannot avoid it and the most successful ones are usually those that wholeheartedly embrace it.
For any company that embraces technology for all it can do, a passive CIO doesn’t really sit right. If a company has an outlook of using technology to its utmost to gain competitive advantage then it makes far more sense for the CIO to be at the front line, which means the top table usually, making suggestions, acquainting the board with technological developments that could benefit the business and just generally being active and pre-emptive.
This would require a CIO to be both familiar with business in general and well acquainted with the business specifically. It does not preclude non-technologists, but it does require a supreme understanding and demands a great communicator.
Coming back to example above, the worries of the CIO are in the context of the business insofar as without the systems in place to assure compliance, maintain systems and deal with emerging issues such as Big Data, the core capabilities and competitiveness of the company will be compromised. This is a subset of the worries of the CEO, but will the top person know that if the CIO is less than forward about communicating it?
The active CIO who encounters new technologies should be able to interpret those for consumption by the board to help them understand how they may further the interests of the business. In fact, the role may go lower again to regular technical briefings of top unit managers to contextualise the hype of any given trend or development for their organisation.
Much in the same way that the dire warnings on security did not work to educate users, but the pizza and a chat approach did, a good CIO should be able to present compelling briefings that don’t bore but may inspire unit or process managers to see how the likes of cloud, big data, bring your own and any other buzz terms can work for the gathered audience.
The overall point is that perhaps the CIO, in looking at the technical, can get a bit blinkered and revert to the head down approach. It’s not really that they have lost relevance, but perhaps they have lost the ability to communicate their relevance. It’s not as if compliance obligations have any less value to the business, but the relevance is not obvious and needs a voice, a high level voice, to express how it, or any number of other IT implementations, directly support the business and its competiveness.
Ltd
