Are there still businesses and managers out there that need to have ICT ‘sold’ to them? Could there possibly be hidden dinosaurs in the undergrowth of the corporate jungle who believe all this tiresome modern computer stuff might go away if you ignore it long enough? We certainly know there are board directors who have never used a keyboard, but surely real life managers of any vintage appreciate what ICT can do for an organisation (and their careers) and need no convincing?
Talking to CIOs and ICT senior management in the last few years, it seems certain that the last of the Neanderthals have been driven, however reluctantly, into the current century. The sheer economic pressure to reduce costs, do more with less and consolidate the core processes of all enterprises has meant there have been few hold-outs. For the vast majority of hard-pressed directors and staff, any element of ICT that helps personal productivity has been especially welcome. In the process, it is now apparent that organisations of all types, sectors and sizes became considerably less conservative in regard to ICT. As so often in Ireland as elsewhere, smaller enterprises have led the way in many respects, especially those in smarter, knowledge-based sectors such as professional services and practices, design of all kinds, the financial sector with its regulatory burdens, retail and distribution and others.
Small and nimble
The general pattern is fairly obvious, really. Smaller organisations are more nimble because decision making involves fewer leaders and less of a legacy burden. Larger organisations have to move slowly and carefully, certainly by comparison, and the speed of implementing anything significant is inexorably governed by the number of units-people, divisions and departments, locations, applications, devices. Willingness to embrace change and new ICT is just not enough. Implementation and change management impose disciplines that smaller entities, even in regulated sectors, really do not have.
There is one other huge influencing factor that is almost an elephant in the room. Personal and consumer ICT has accelerated away from the traditional, indeed, current working environment, even more than work itself has become untethered from place for so many people. Even in bricks and mortar sectors such as retail and manufacturing, senior manager and proprietors now prefer to work without a fixed office-or only use it Mondays and Fridays. In this new untethered world, portable devices and internet connectivity are the new norm. Some people will have a set of essential devices-smart phone for constant use, tablet for a larger screen or a little more computing power, laptop for more sustained desk sessions. Big screen laptops are also invaluable for the occasional move when the hotel’s 57 channels are in languages you’ve never heard of much less understand.
In the consumer world, smart phone apps and entertainment resources have raced so far ahead of all forms of corporate ICT that the comparison poses a real challenge to organisations and not just the CIO or tech team. Where once those anti-technology survivors lurked in the corporate undergrowth, nowadays the challenge for ICT in winning hearts and minds may come more from a generation that is over the hills and streaking further away in technology terms.
Value add
In this year’s annual CIO survey by Deloitte, just 31% of CIOs believed that their organisations viewed IT as a value adding partner. Harry Goddard, Deloitte partner in the consulting business, acknowledges that the alignment between IT and the business has been a victim of the relentless cost-cutting economy drives, especially in larger organisations. "It now seems as if the CIO must adopt something like guerrilla tactics to squeeze value from limited resources. That will certainly involve potentially game-changing technologies such as cloud computing and enterprise mobility." It could also be suggested that as a set of individuals the line-of-business people see value-add and innovations in their consumer lives to an extent that makes all corporate ICT appear dull, oldfashioned and limited by comparison.
"The ICT leadership challenge is to step between the technology and the business options and in the full light of the huge advances in consumer technology from ever smarter phones to social networking," says Goddard. "For a very long time the corporate attitude to users was ‘You have to do it this way, our way.’ Now there is growing recognition that the organisation has to yield and say ‘We recognise that we have to do it your way’. The point, of course, is that management and ICT still have to provide the leadership. Giving users the ability to work in ways they prefer, and often are more used to, does not have to mean loss of control."
Employee apps
This trend is already there, Goddard points out, in that the Deloitte survey shows that 40% of CIOs have developed mobile applications, largely for the organisations’ employees. "More and more the job of ICT and the CIO is to provide the means for their colleagues to work in the ways and with the devices they prefer while preserving the integrity and security of the organisation’s data and core systems. They can do that by taking leadership and helping to identify the best choices for those individual colleagues, balancing freedom and choice with the essential security of the employer’s interests and legal and regulatory environments."
That is a challenge to ICT, just as successive generations of technology have been, says Goddard. "It is also the way in which the role of the CIO and in-house ICT is rapidly changing. We may be seeing the demise of the IT department, because boxes and wires and keeping the lights on can all be outsourced. In fact such third party services may well be more reliable and resilient than the organisations can supply for itself."
"But the leader and agent of change within the organisation is in a role that will itself change and develop but will always be close to-and valued by-the strategic business leadership. IT people especially should understand that change is constant and the responsibility is to facilitate the organisation in taking advantage where it can be gained."
So yes, Goddard says, there is an evangelist role for the CIO. "Not least because if the business perceives you as a boxes and wires person, that’s the pigeon hole in which you’ll stay. So have to take the lead and do it yourself, by which I mean innovating and changing and adapting, or you’ll have it done to you."
Smart technology
Friends First which has been actively cultivating a close relationship between the IT team and the business for the best part of a decade. One of Ireland’s leading financial services companies (and financially healthy itself), it employs over 400 people in its Dublin head office and branches in, Cork and Galway. Friends First is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Eureko BV, a pan-European insurance group headquartered in the Netherlands, but locally autonomous. "Our top management and our previous two heads of IT leaders strongly conscious that strength, competitiveness and efficiency in our sector would depend more and more on smart technology," says Lavinia Morris, head of IT operations and well known in the ICT industry as Chair of the Cloud Computing working group of the Irish Internet Association.
Bought from Friends Provident in 2002, the company underwent major transformation. A significant part of that depended on IT and the leadership team very deliberately set about aligning IT and the business, in large measure by fostering a culture of partnership between the people involved. "Friends First has a history in the last decade of business people joining the IT team, usually as analysts, and some IT specialists moving over to progress their careers in the general business," Morris says. "We are not unique, I would think, but we have been very successful at that career cross-fertilisation which other organisations have either found difficult or not encouraged.
"It has been helped by the fact that every IT proposal and project in this organisation in that period has been and is a joint effort between the relevant business division or team and IT as partner. On a day-to-day basis, IT people spend days and more in their client departments, learning in some depth how they work and what their needs and pressures are. In business case development and project teams our line of business colleagues sit with us and learn about technology, its potential and its constraints as applied to their work."
In that context and culture it is clear that ICT does not need promotion in the company as if it were some sort of optional extra. "We genuinely begin at the top. When business strategy is formulated it is our role to work with the business leaders to ensure that it can be achieved, successfully and at the best investment value. In fact our mission is business value, its sustained delivery and helping to add by innovation and effectiveness," says Morris.
ICT mandate
Morris is keen to stress that the excellent partnership spirit does not distract from the clear mandate of the ICT department to provide reliable and economical systems performance to support the company’s activity 24 x 365. "We have tight, agreed SLAs with each business unit and we publish our service catalogue with clear standards such as response times. The disciplines are kept tight by measurement, reporting and monthly review. We do to in general charge back ICT, everyone recognises it as a shared overhead, not do we have ‘penalties’ for lapses in service performance. The discipline is around communications, keeping everybody informed. When something goes wrong we work hard to establish exactly why and then communicate how we are ensuring that it will not occur again."
Martin Cullen, director of business and partners in Microsoft Ireland, believes many CIOs and ICT leaders may have felt side-lined to some degree in recent years as the universal corporate emphasis on minimising costs restricted investment for innovation. "But another aspect of the economic climate is that ICT can be demonstrated to be a margin-making contributor to viability and competitiveness. A CIO can show how technology can add capability and agility to the business. To be blunt, after several years of cutbacks and restraint, how else could an enterprise continue to optimise any part of its activity?"
There has been a huge shift in business culture, he says, from the economic constraints at one end to the accelerating pace of development in personal technology at the other. "In that context, ICT and the CIO should not be in ‘justification’ mode. The consumerisation of technology has changed it irrevocably and the CIO has to deal with that. But the core agenda has not changed at all-the job of ICT is to help add value and profit to the enterprise. The constituent elements are changing, rapidly, but the objectives have not."
New environment
In today’s world of smarter consumer tech, business and other organisations are investing, -perhaps more than any other category-in collaboration technology. "The top CIOs are re-grounded in this new environment. They have the responsibility to think through very carefully how the new collaboration tools and devices can be usefully and safely embraced by enterprise systems. In truth there really is no alternative. So there has to be a roadmap and a well-advised adoption strategy," Cullen said.
That is not really about internal marketing, which is for the optics. "It is about creating a coherent and rational ICT structure which clearly gives colleagues and clients the benefits and freedom of smart mobile tech. In parallel it will give enterprises the corporate flexibility that has long been an aspiration," said Cullen. "Here’s one example of a serious and unchallenged gain. Mobile working and smart collaboration has reduced the physical office space requirements in Microsoft by 35%, despite staff growth. In any enterprise that is one very convincing argument."
ICT leadership
All in all, this is a great time to be a CIO in the view of Aidan Gregan, head of Technology Consulting, Accenture Ireland. "There is so much going on in technology and all business and organisational leaders are aware of it. A dynamic environment is offering us cloud, daily advances in powerful analytics, universal communications any time anywhere, social media and other new forms of collaboration and an overall consumerisation of technology-or at least the front ends."
What does all that mean for this organisation? That is the question and it is being directed in the first instance at the internal ICT leadership. "The CIO has to see clearly what is relevant and what is not, what can be accommodated with relatively superficial change-portable device of choice is an obvious example-and what poses structural challenges or issues in security or governance," Gregan believes.
In this environment, Gregan maintains, there may be lots of technical challenges and change but that is after all what ICT has lived and breathed for decades. "But there is also a terrific, ongoing opportunity to show the enterprise and its divisions and activities how it can embrace and benefit from the new electronic culture that is now pervasive. It is also a time to demonstrate clearly that technology has the only possible answers to the issues of security, compliance and governance that concern every board of directors. Yet at the same time it is the engine for competitiveness, growth, profitability and the business objectives of every enterprise.
"I don’t think ICT needs to sell anything to its enterprise colleagues," Gregan adds. "If anything they are ready to line up for advice and services and as they experience the value they will come back for more."
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