Whither the CIO

I started this post back in early August and it got lost in the draft folder.  So, while the referenced post is now a bit dated, the topic certainly isn't any less timely.

In a post on Brian Gillooly's CIO Nation Blog, Gregor Bailor, recently CIO at Capital One, said: As to where the CIO role goes... The use of IT is moving up the value chain and needs to be a part of "Business Design and Fulfillment" rather than "IT". This means that Operations and Technology groups are going to merge more. In addition, the e-commerce and customer interactions are so technology enabled now that they too need to be closely linked with IT strategy and process design. To this end, the new CIO role here will incorporate Enterprise Customer Management (all customer touch points and data), management of all Internet activities, Enterprise Process Engineering as well as all typical CIO functions."

A couple of thoughts came to mind while mulling this over and, since this is my blog, I figured I'd share them.

1. I generally agree with Gregor's perspective.  Having run both Content Operations and IT for Getty Images, I have some recent experience with just this kind of blended role. I was fortunate to have really superb leaders working for me which gave me the freedom to look down the road a bit to develop strategy and encourage taking more risks to gain more innovative solutions.  The Content Ops groups were heavily dependent on tools created by IT to really move the needle and I think it helped that both functions were aligned in one organization.  The teams were able to make process and quality improvements that were in some cases measured in an order of magnitude kind of way.
2. There are clearly going to be cases where the CIO's role is best filled by a focus on partnering with other functional leaders who are specialists in their fields rather than ownership.  I do think that the days where the CIO could "get away with" only taking responsibility for delivering a system to spec are very much in the past.  Partnering means not just sharing budget and sponsorship but should include being on the hook to deliver results as well. 
3. The days where successful companies could push IT underneath CFO or Chief Administrative Officer or somewhere else on the SG&A side of the business are gone.  Those companies still operating that way are unlikely to be leaders in their sectors as more and more customers expect that effective, customer-focused technology is part of the delivery of goods and services. 

It used to be that we argued about whether the CIO role was going to go away, subsumed into every functional organization because it was so important.  We seem to be headed the other way, to where the CIO role continues to be elevated in importance to the success of businesses. Perhaps it's the seperate COO role that's going away.....

Or is that just CIO daydreams??

IT Mission

For some organizations, formal Mission Statements are standard fare. Some organizations even go so far as to believe them, make them actionable and something that sheds light on where they need to go.

For IT in for-profit organizations, I think the Mission Statement can be neatly and succinctly captured - We make Money. Either directly or indirectly, the mission of every IT organization is to increase profits.

Sure you can add words to dress it up. You can include something that makes HR feel warm and fuzzy like valuing employees (or associates if you are in that kind of company). You can be sure it includes fashionable words like Innovation, Collaboration, other-ation. At the end though, it all boils down to making money whether you are publicly traded or privately held. Your raision d'etre is to participate in generating enough profit to meet the company's other goals. Being good corporate citizens, helping employees to earn a fair wage, and so on revolve around profit.....but this isn't an Economics blog, it's an IT Leadership blog.

Too many CIO's and IT executives wonder why they "don't have a seat at the table" or are in some other way marginalized by the rest of the business. Every executive I know of has a set of financial goals. Ask yourself a couple of questions:

• Do you know what your partners on the business side are tasked with achieving? If not, you are behind already.
  
• Can you clearly and in business terms express how IT is (or isn't) helping meet those goals? Can your business partner??
  
• What are your ideas for helping to grow the business? What does IT need to do? How much risk is there? Will something else have to give?
  
• Are you meeting your current obligations? What do the business leaders think about IT's performance? Honestly? If you aren't running the existing portfolio of IT products and services with excellence it's highly unlikely you'll get to talk about anything else. Don't waste your time and that of your partners. Fix things. If the trains don't run on time, you don't get to talk about new and exciting strategic projects. At the risk of mixing metaphors, your political capital account is at risk of being overdrawn.

The further up the org chart you are talking, the less important are the bits-and-bytes, speeds-and-feeds of technology. What matters are things like revenue, customer retention and satisfaction, quality, etc. Your technology strategy, tactics and performance should be wrapped with those business metrics. Your business partners don't really care about the how's of technology, they care about the impacts on their profitability. In Board presentations, I never use technology jargon, instead I use the same language and jargon that you'd hear from the heads of Sales, Marketing and Finance.

When you can clearly define the impact on the bottom-line of that next project, you'll find your opinions are being sought out by those who need that project.