How the IT department can best engage and influence Line of Business managers
Quite a few years back, in fact I have trouble remembering exactly when given the pace of technology change and the rate of uptake by the general population, I used to ask audiences a few questions. I asked them for a show of hands from all those who had a better PC and Internet access at home than work. I could be guaranteed to see an overwhelming majority. I’d ask if they had ever actively chosen to go home because their home PC enabled them to do a particular task more effectively than their work PC. Another overwhelming majority would put their hands up.
This shows that even ten years ago that many Line of Business (LoB) managers were already finding the constraints of “enterprise IT” a challenge to be bypassed.
Come forward to around two years ago and I was asking a similar question about ownership and use of Apple iPads (and for the business community this is overwhelmingly the tablet of choice). LoB managers couldn’t get their hand up fast enough. Unless they were in the finance or IT departments, where all their work was going to be internally focused on the enterprise IT systems.
Add a question to see if they were using their tablet for business use, and the simple answer was that the iPad enabled them to access information and services that IT didn’t, or couldn’t, provide.
At this time the iPad almost certainly was not in any way intended to be “connected” to enterprise IT. It posed relatively little risk (or even, from the perspective of IT, maybe no risk) and therefore a LoB manager felt that it had nothing to do with the IT department.
At this point two things should have become clear.
First is that this is unlike the introduction of mobile phones where the focus was on email, as email required an interactive connection into enterprise IT.
Second is that these users are deploying a new generation of technology and devices for a new generation of business requirements. These solutions provide a completely different set of capabilities, capabilities that the existing generation of client-server based enterprise IT applications does not provide.
Now throw in the key question to our audience: do you have online banking and are you able to manage your own budgets and financial matters more simply and easily than before? The answer is of course “yes”. But now try asking: are you using this to bypass your enterprise’s financial systems? The unanimous reaction is “definitely not”. The fiscal management of an enterprise is recognized to be a professionally managed and legally defined responsibility.
Now move the discussion towards how far the LoB managers should be allowed to take their use of technology. The discussion will initially position the IT department in the role of technology support, and the LoB managers’ ability to be able to use these new consumer technologies without needing this support.
The reality we need to bring the discussion towards is the role IT plays in providing an auditable and compliant enterprise operating environment that underpins operations across the business, just as critically as the financial systems, systems which after all depend on IT anyway!
Yup, thought provoking isn’t it?
LoBs instinctively recognize the financial no-no, but equally instinctively have a first reaction that it’s okay to do what they are doing. That is until they really start to think about the implications of all LoBs across the group adopting this behavior, or how reliant they are on common, shared trusted information rather than the challenge of “trash and treasure” in “Big Data” usage. And that’s before we get to the point of auditable traceability!
The CIO role in the new business model of the early 1990s
CIOs of a certain age and with long memories should at this point cast their minds back to the adoption pattern of PCs around 1990, back when the enterprise computing service was based on mainframes and minis running terminal-based applications.
In those days, when PCs represented the new and disruptive technology, business managers also bought their own PCs, even their own departmental networks, all for exactly the same reason as now. Namely, to use a new generation of technology to deploy a new generation of business capabilities that lay outside the capabilities of the existing enterprise data center with its mainframe/mini computer terminal-based systems. At first these were also standalone applications, as a younger generation of LoB manager introduced spreadsheets and other simple applications, and shared data via discs and then local area networks, LANS, etc.
Not surprisingly, given the benefits obtained within a matter of a few years, the enterprise was soon full of PCs, small separate departmental networks, and many, many applications, all bought from LoB manager budgets. These solutions were mainly incompatible and resulted in spiraling operating costs and, most important of all, obscured the overall understanding of the enterprise operation, to the chagrin of auditors.
There was a tipping point in most enterprises when so called “safe standalone working” had become a confused mass of activities. Even more concerning were the multiple copies of key data spread around these desktop PCs, leaving little trust in the integrity of any enterprise level results.
The huge business benefits that the early adopting LoB managers had gained in their individual work or departmental activities were becoming insignificant as, at an enterprise level, the stability of the entire business was being called into doubt. The good news was that the early adopters had accelerated the understanding and the ability to create value using these new technologies by being able to move quickly with relatively minimal constraints. The bad news was that as momentum and scale of use had built up, making the new technologies and business functions mainstream within the enterprise, professional management was sorely needed.
So how was it all resolved? How was the CIO role created? And how was the way forward to the adoption of ERP created?
The answer didn’t lie in the technology. It lay in the business’s adoption of a different organizational model; one designed around the use of PC client-server systems. Organizations were redesigned around business processes that run across the business, rather than as a string of separate departments: Business Process Re-engineering (BPR).
BPR was as big disruption to the operational models of the time. This is similar to today’s teaching on business model innovation that introduces the idea of constant reaction to external opportunities and circumstances. But BPR also introduced the necessary definitions of roles, responsibilities, and operational methodologies that made ERP the competitive necessity to create the enterprise as we know it today.
The role of the CIO, and of the enterprise IT department as we know it, is based on the business model of BPR. It’s a role designed to administer and automate internal business operations through best practice. At the heart of this is transactional data integrity built around the structured data created and managed internally by recognizable, auditable business processes protected inside the firewall. Not surprising neither the role, methodologies nor even the responsibility/authority works for or fits with the new disruption in technologies and their business use!
Our LoB managers are not using PC based client-server technology on internal enterprise applications. They are using tablet-based browser-cloud technology externally to be part of an environment that has been created by consumers via the mass adoption of cloud-based solutions.
At the stage this mostly means that the solutions they are using are not transactional but interactional. As long these solutions are completely separated from enterprise client-server systems they are reasonably safe. The challenges are when some degree of integration is requested, or made demanded. Importing traditional structured data into these solutions, or integrating internal and external data as part of Big Data analytics, challenge the integrity of the internally managed structured data.
This is the point where CIOs are right to express serious concern.
Right now in most enterprises early adopters are blazing the trail to find the winning and losing propositions, and expectations are rising for the opportunities that these new solutions will bring. Most importantly, these activities are taking place at a scale where they are still contained enough to be “standalone” and safer outside of IT.
That is not to say that you should ignore them. It is to say that you should accommodate them via a policy that apportions an appropriate level of responsibility to the LoBs, a policy that has been agreed with the CEO.
The CEO and the new Digital Business Model
The CEO is becoming the key to managing the shift to a new (IT) operating model. Business school teachings are recommending that CEO take direct responsibility for their enterprise’s digital strategy, and with it the redesign of their business model.
This is the much talked about, and little understood, topic of business model innovation; a topic that, together with business strategy, has been exercising the minds of business school professors for some years.
Today business model innovation is well-developed set of principles (defined by Mark W. Johnson) taught to business managers that explain nineteen prospective business models that can be used to position a product or service with customers, as shown in the table below. Think of it as the new BPR to suit the capabilities of new technologies deployed outside the firewall, and outside the internal processes of IT. Business model innovation brings with it a new set of business values focused on taking new products to market, wining new customers, increasing market share etc. None of which are justified around internal cost reductions. All of which could be expected to be funded from budgets other than ITs.
Source: Mark W. Johnson (2010), Seizing the White Space, Harvard Business Press
So where is the CIO in this brave new world?
The choice of the phrase “outside the role of IT” was deliberate. It doesn’t, however, mean “remote from IT and the internal business processes”.
There will at least need to be alignment across lines of business and, as the new business model develops, there will need to be integration to allow interactions and connections to take place on an end-to-end basis across the enterprise. A customer engagement should result in a customer order, and that requires integration to be managed successfully.
When will this occur? There are two distinct answers.
The first is as business-as-usual, with no new business model applied, hits a natural barrier and the law of increasing chaotic cost of operation starts to consume the new technology’s benefits. This point was identified for the PC client-server era in the book “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore, when the rising curve of expectations hit the trough of disillusionment as enterprise wide operational issues revealed the serious challenges to be faced. To cross the chasm meant to adopt new levels of maturity in what products and methods were used to deploy the new environment. In short, it’s the moment when the second answer below becomes unavoidable!
The second answer is for the CEO to understand the need for an enterprise to consciously understand the opportunity that digital business will bring, and to set out to redesign the business model before hitting the tipping point. To address this properly will mean clarifying how technology will operate across the business and outside the business, and how the IT department be involved in the business activities.
It’s a huge shift and a big responsibility as by now the auditors will have woken up to the need to be able to follow and understand how the digital enterprise actually functions, who has what responsibilities etc.
It’s a return to the time for professional management of technology, its use, its purpose, risk management etc. This is a big organizational role requiring a mix of business and technology understanding as well as knowledge of the enterprises current systems and compliance obligations. It’s also a role the CIO should be the right choice to fill, based on their experience and profile.
Current Realities for the CIO to address at this stage?
Sadly there is no magic bullet to immediately gain “control” of the LOB managers, their technology and business deployments. As they currently stand the CIO and the IT department are neither equipped nor empowered to solve this problem in this new environment. But that doesn’t mean blocking or stopping deployments; that’s simply not commercially feasible in the face of the increased competition and customer demand for digital based business.
Instead the answer is to work on ensuring that the separation and isolation of the new deployments from the IT environment is understood and fully observed.
LoB managers who want to be early adopters should be encouraged and supported to grasp that the real risks that they are accepting. Risks stemming from the manner in which their people use the technology and their ability to commit the company to unintended consequences. Organizing “awareness” training and guidelines for “online” behavior and hazards are both practical assistance and will create relationships that allow monitoring of what is happening to build experience.
This approach also allows for clarity in who is responsible for the impact and behavior, and that means not only for the CIO but also for LoB managers. It even means the CEO and CFO.
More importantly, it formalizes an enterprise wide management involvement that will be required as the organization develops an understanding of the good and bad impacts that the new digital environment is creating. In time this will be the group that reacts to the possible tipping moment and creates the business model and management changes necessary for the mature adoption and integration.
Are the lines of business in your organization experimenting with browser-cloud solutions? Has your organization already hit that natural barrier when the increasing chaotic cost of operation consumes the new technology’s benefits? Or has your business already set out to redesign its operating model before hitting the tipping point?
As more jobs are automated, how many of us will still have productive work?
By Ross DawsonThere has been a lot of press the last few days about a paper The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?, published by the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology.
Almost all the coverage has been on the headline figure that 47% of US employment is at risk. However the paper provides many more interesting insights when you examine the detail.
Read more →
Reality check: intelligence agencies have been using social network analysis since the 1990s
By Ross DawsonThere is a big hubbub today over a New York Times article N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens.
I fail to understand why this is big news, since US intelligence agencies have been using social network analysis (SNA) for domestic purposes since the 1990s, and likely even before that. The only issue here is that the NSA is tasked with non-domestic surveillance, so is not supposed to gather data on US citizens. However other US agencies that cover domestic intelligence have long been using SNA.
Certainly recent revelations suggest the NSA appears to have data surveillance capabilities that exceed those of US domestic intelligence agencies, but there is no good reason to imagine the CIA, among others, doesn’t have access to equally good data to seed its social network and other analysis.
I have been focused on networks since long before I wrote Living Networks in 2002. In the July 22, 1997 issue of The Bulletin (at the time Australia’s equivalent of Newsweek) included an article I wrote titled Beware! Netmap may be watching, which described how an Australian software package called Netmap was being used by police and intelligence around the world, taking examples of the identification of insider trading and a serial murderer. I wrote:
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Must the Business Always Bypass IT When It Wants to Innovate?
By Andy MulhollandHow the IT department can best engage and influence Line of Business managers
Quite a few years back, in fact I have trouble remembering exactly when given the pace of technology change and the rate of uptake by the general population, I used to ask audiences a few questions. I asked them for a show of hands from all those who had a better PC and Internet access at home than work. I could be guaranteed to see an overwhelming majority. I’d ask if they had ever actively chosen to go home because their home PC enabled them to do a particular task more effectively than their work PC. Another overwhelming majority would put their hands up.
This shows that even ten years ago that many Line of Business (LoB) managers were already finding the constraints of “enterprise IT” a challenge to be bypassed.
Come forward to around two years ago and I was asking a similar question about ownership and use of Apple iPads (and for the business community this is overwhelmingly the tablet of choice). LoB managers couldn’t get their hand up fast enough. Unless they were in the finance or IT departments, where all their work was going to be internally focused on the enterprise IT systems.
Add a question to see if they were using their tablet for business use, and the simple answer was that the iPad enabled them to access information and services that IT didn’t, or couldn’t, provide.
At this time the iPad almost certainly was not in any way intended to be “connected” to enterprise IT. It posed relatively little risk (or even, from the perspective of IT, maybe no risk) and therefore a LoB manager felt that it had nothing to do with the IT department.
At this point two things should have become clear.
First is that this is unlike the introduction of mobile phones where the focus was on email, as email required an interactive connection into enterprise IT.
Second is that these users are deploying a new generation of technology and devices for a new generation of business requirements. These solutions provide a completely different set of capabilities, capabilities that the existing generation of client-server based enterprise IT applications does not provide.
Now throw in the key question to our audience: do you have online banking and are you able to manage your own budgets and financial matters more simply and easily than before? The answer is of course “yes”. But now try asking: are you using this to bypass your enterprise’s financial systems? The unanimous reaction is “definitely not”. The fiscal management of an enterprise is recognized to be a professionally managed and legally defined responsibility.
Now move the discussion towards how far the LoB managers should be allowed to take their use of technology. The discussion will initially position the IT department in the role of technology support, and the LoB managers’ ability to be able to use these new consumer technologies without needing this support.
The reality we need to bring the discussion towards is the role IT plays in providing an auditable and compliant enterprise operating environment that underpins operations across the business, just as critically as the financial systems, systems which after all depend on IT anyway!
Yup, thought provoking isn’t it?
LoBs instinctively recognize the financial no-no, but equally instinctively have a first reaction that it’s okay to do what they are doing. That is until they really start to think about the implications of all LoBs across the group adopting this behavior, or how reliant they are on common, shared trusted information rather than the challenge of “trash and treasure” in “Big Data” usage. And that’s before we get to the point of auditable traceability!
The CIO role in the new business model of the early 1990s
CIOs of a certain age and with long memories should at this point cast their minds back to the adoption pattern of PCs around 1990, back when the enterprise computing service was based on mainframes and minis running terminal-based applications.
In those days, when PCs represented the new and disruptive technology, business managers also bought their own PCs, even their own departmental networks, all for exactly the same reason as now. Namely, to use a new generation of technology to deploy a new generation of business capabilities that lay outside the capabilities of the existing enterprise data center with its mainframe/mini computer terminal-based systems. At first these were also standalone applications, as a younger generation of LoB manager introduced spreadsheets and other simple applications, and shared data via discs and then local area networks, LANS, etc.
Not surprisingly, given the benefits obtained within a matter of a few years, the enterprise was soon full of PCs, small separate departmental networks, and many, many applications, all bought from LoB manager budgets. These solutions were mainly incompatible and resulted in spiraling operating costs and, most important of all, obscured the overall understanding of the enterprise operation, to the chagrin of auditors.
There was a tipping point in most enterprises when so called “safe standalone working” had become a confused mass of activities. Even more concerning were the multiple copies of key data spread around these desktop PCs, leaving little trust in the integrity of any enterprise level results.
The huge business benefits that the early adopting LoB managers had gained in their individual work or departmental activities were becoming insignificant as, at an enterprise level, the stability of the entire business was being called into doubt. The good news was that the early adopters had accelerated the understanding and the ability to create value using these new technologies by being able to move quickly with relatively minimal constraints. The bad news was that as momentum and scale of use had built up, making the new technologies and business functions mainstream within the enterprise, professional management was sorely needed.
So how was it all resolved? How was the CIO role created? And how was the way forward to the adoption of ERP created?
The answer didn’t lie in the technology. It lay in the business’s adoption of a different organizational model; one designed around the use of PC client-server systems. Organizations were redesigned around business processes that run across the business, rather than as a string of separate departments: Business Process Re-engineering (BPR).
BPR was as big disruption to the operational models of the time. This is similar to today’s teaching on business model innovation that introduces the idea of constant reaction to external opportunities and circumstances. But BPR also introduced the necessary definitions of roles, responsibilities, and operational methodologies that made ERP the competitive necessity to create the enterprise as we know it today.
The role of the CIO, and of the enterprise IT department as we know it, is based on the business model of BPR. It’s a role designed to administer and automate internal business operations through best practice. At the heart of this is transactional data integrity built around the structured data created and managed internally by recognizable, auditable business processes protected inside the firewall. Not surprising neither the role, methodologies nor even the responsibility/authority works for or fits with the new disruption in technologies and their business use!
Our LoB managers are not using PC based client-server technology on internal enterprise applications. They are using tablet-based browser-cloud technology externally to be part of an environment that has been created by consumers via the mass adoption of cloud-based solutions.
At the stage this mostly means that the solutions they are using are not transactional but interactional. As long these solutions are completely separated from enterprise client-server systems they are reasonably safe. The challenges are when some degree of integration is requested, or made demanded. Importing traditional structured data into these solutions, or integrating internal and external data as part of Big Data analytics, challenge the integrity of the internally managed structured data.
This is the point where CIOs are right to express serious concern.
Right now in most enterprises early adopters are blazing the trail to find the winning and losing propositions, and expectations are rising for the opportunities that these new solutions will bring. Most importantly, these activities are taking place at a scale where they are still contained enough to be “standalone” and safer outside of IT.
That is not to say that you should ignore them. It is to say that you should accommodate them via a policy that apportions an appropriate level of responsibility to the LoBs, a policy that has been agreed with the CEO.
The CEO and the new Digital Business Model
The CEO is becoming the key to managing the shift to a new (IT) operating model. Business school teachings are recommending that CEO take direct responsibility for their enterprise’s digital strategy, and with it the redesign of their business model.
This is the much talked about, and little understood, topic of business model innovation; a topic that, together with business strategy, has been exercising the minds of business school professors for some years.
Today business model innovation is well-developed set of principles (defined by Mark W. Johnson) taught to business managers that explain nineteen prospective business models that can be used to position a product or service with customers, as shown in the table below. Think of it as the new BPR to suit the capabilities of new technologies deployed outside the firewall, and outside the internal processes of IT. Business model innovation brings with it a new set of business values focused on taking new products to market, wining new customers, increasing market share etc. None of which are justified around internal cost reductions. All of which could be expected to be funded from budgets other than ITs.
Source: Mark W. Johnson (2010), Seizing the White Space, Harvard Business Press
So where is the CIO in this brave new world?
The choice of the phrase “outside the role of IT” was deliberate. It doesn’t, however, mean “remote from IT and the internal business processes”.
There will at least need to be alignment across lines of business and, as the new business model develops, there will need to be integration to allow interactions and connections to take place on an end-to-end basis across the enterprise. A customer engagement should result in a customer order, and that requires integration to be managed successfully.
When will this occur? There are two distinct answers.
The first is as business-as-usual, with no new business model applied, hits a natural barrier and the law of increasing chaotic cost of operation starts to consume the new technology’s benefits. This point was identified for the PC client-server era in the book “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore, when the rising curve of expectations hit the trough of disillusionment as enterprise wide operational issues revealed the serious challenges to be faced. To cross the chasm meant to adopt new levels of maturity in what products and methods were used to deploy the new environment. In short, it’s the moment when the second answer below becomes unavoidable!
The second answer is for the CEO to understand the need for an enterprise to consciously understand the opportunity that digital business will bring, and to set out to redesign the business model before hitting the tipping point. To address this properly will mean clarifying how technology will operate across the business and outside the business, and how the IT department be involved in the business activities.
It’s a huge shift and a big responsibility as by now the auditors will have woken up to the need to be able to follow and understand how the digital enterprise actually functions, who has what responsibilities etc.
It’s a return to the time for professional management of technology, its use, its purpose, risk management etc. This is a big organizational role requiring a mix of business and technology understanding as well as knowledge of the enterprises current systems and compliance obligations. It’s also a role the CIO should be the right choice to fill, based on their experience and profile.
Current Realities for the CIO to address at this stage?
Sadly there is no magic bullet to immediately gain “control” of the LOB managers, their technology and business deployments. As they currently stand the CIO and the IT department are neither equipped nor empowered to solve this problem in this new environment. But that doesn’t mean blocking or stopping deployments; that’s simply not commercially feasible in the face of the increased competition and customer demand for digital based business.
Instead the answer is to work on ensuring that the separation and isolation of the new deployments from the IT environment is understood and fully observed.
LoB managers who want to be early adopters should be encouraged and supported to grasp that the real risks that they are accepting. Risks stemming from the manner in which their people use the technology and their ability to commit the company to unintended consequences. Organizing “awareness” training and guidelines for “online” behavior and hazards are both practical assistance and will create relationships that allow monitoring of what is happening to build experience.
This approach also allows for clarity in who is responsible for the impact and behavior, and that means not only for the CIO but also for LoB managers. It even means the CEO and CFO.
More importantly, it formalizes an enterprise wide management involvement that will be required as the organization develops an understanding of the good and bad impacts that the new digital environment is creating. In time this will be the group that reacts to the possible tipping moment and creates the business model and management changes necessary for the mature adoption and integration.
Are the lines of business in your organization experimenting with browser-cloud solutions? Has your organization already hit that natural barrier when the increasing chaotic cost of operation consumes the new technology’s benefits? Or has your business already set out to redesign its operating model before hitting the tipping point?
Creative, Intelligent, Funny, Passionate – Could This Be Your IT Team?
By Alistair LloydYour IT group has some surprising traits, and it’s not what you (or many others) expect
Blessed are the geeks, for they shall inherit the earth. In August 2013 Inferno, a U.K.-based advertising agency, released the results of a survey which suggest that twice as many people associate the word “geek” with being “cool and chic” rather than “boring and unattractive”. This finding is important as it affects how you lead your team.
Behind the stereotype of the nerdy, bookish engineer are often individuals with the ability to engage and influence people across the organization. Your role is to nurture the potential of your team, supporting, protecting and promoting what they can do.
Issuing creative license
Creativity. Is this something that comes to mind when you think of your IT team?
Consider what they can achieve. Engineers are designers and crafters. Watch them at work as they turn a (frequently vague) set of requirements into a functional, enduring and often-beautiful solution. Furthermore, during the process they will have refined and tuned the resultant product.
Nurture creativity by laying down appropriate boundaries when setting goals. Explain to your team the “what” (the objective) and the “why” (the strategic goal or operational imperative) while leaving the “how” (the method of achievement) up to them. Respect them for the creativity and talent they bring, not just their output.
The solution will be superior and the team will feel valued for what they produce.
Applying brain power
Intelligence. It may be taken for granted that the members of your IT team are smart. However, their collective brain power may be assumed to be good only for tasks such as churning out working code or load-balancing web servers.
Challenge this assumption with a simple exercise. Take members of your team to a problem solving session being run by another department. Ask them to come up with their own way of addressing the problem.
You’ll find that they adapt quickly as they are used to being challenged with matters outside of their functional domain. An IT professional will look for patterns and cause-and-effect. They will break a problem down to its component parts. They will experiment, ideate and collaborate with others in the organization.
It is not just what they can do, it is the different angle they take which makes them effective.
Comic relief
Humor. How funny is your IT team?
Watch a few episodes of The Big Bang theory and you’ll get the drift. Humor is endearing; it makes your team more approachable. As Jacquelyn Smith noted in her March 2013 article in Forbes, a good sense of humor promotes teamwork, reduces stress, increases productivity and boosts morale.
As their leader you will need to maintain an environment that balances their humor with the quiet, focused solitude that they need to work their craft.
Feeling the zeal
Passion. Few kids grow up wanting to be an accountant, compliance auditor or project manager. Technology is another story. Initiatives such as Robogals and Code.org are a response to the fascination that technology holds for many people from an early age.
Your team can be evangelists for positive, break-through change in your organization. Encourage this by coaching them on how to inspire and communicate with their peers in plain language. Show them how to focus their energy outwards to their professional community, and watch as it becomes infectious.
If you love them, set them free
As your team continues to mature and interest in their achievements grows, keep in mind three things:
As the credibility of your team and their ways of working grows, so does your own reputation. It is a significant stage on the journey of the future CIO – growing as leader of a clever and humanistic team that your company recognizes as vital to its success.
What are some of the behaviors that your team shows that could really make a difference in your company?
[VIDEO] Conversation with Gerd Leonhard: The future of Switzerland
By Ross DawsonWhen I was recently visiting Switzerland to deliver a keynote on the future of work my colleague Gerd Leonhard and I recorded a series of video conversations that are featured in his Meeting of the Minds series.
Following our conversations on the implications of Big Data and the future of privacy, here is our dialogue on the future of Switzerland.
While I haven’t spent a lot of time in Switzerland recently, I lived there for 13 years in my childhood, so do have experiences and perspectives to bring to bear on the topic.
Here are some of the issues we discuss in the video:
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Launch of CIO of the Future
By Ross DawsonAdvanced Human Technologies is, among other things, a publisher. To complement our existing ventures and publications, we have been building the platform and capabilities to generate more web publications and soon, more books and reports.
The general theme of our publications is the future, or in some cases what we need to do today to be successful in the future.
The first of our new phase of publications is CIOoftheFuture.com, looking at where the Chief Information Officer role is going.
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Exploring the future of investment management
By Ross DawsonLast week I was in Amsterdam for the International User Community Meeting of SimCorp, a leading provider of software for the investment management industry. I gave the keynote on the Future of Investment Management and ran a half-day Executive Master Class on Creating the Successful Organisation of the Future.
Prior to founding Advanced Human Technologies most of my working career had been in financial markets with Merrill Lynch and capital markets with Thomson Financial, with my final role as Global Director – Capital Markets.
My initial client base when I established my company was largely in financial services, and I began to focus on the investment management industry, for a number of reasons.
In the later 1990s my work and research was split between the fields of knowledge management and intellectual capital on the one hand, and futures methodologies such as scenario planning on the other.
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Cloud has Moved from “Should We Do It?” to “How Do We Do It?”
By Peter Evans GreenwoodIT investment has shifted from virtualization to private cloud as CIOs prepare to go public
A recent survey of IT budgets shows that the focus for many IT departments has moved beyond virtualization and consolidation. They’re working to hard to realize the flexibility and agility that cloud promises to bring to their organizations.
The report found that:
Image source: Forbes.com
It’s not surprising that a shift to private cloud is at the top of the list. CIOs are, by nature, risk adverse as the role still carries operational responsibilities. The current boom in private clouds probably represents a try before you buy mentality. CIOs are using private clouds as a tool to understand the operational impact of moving to the cloud.
The fact that cloud provider assessments slot in at the second position, closely followed by Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), shows that the private cloud boom might be a short one. CIOs are already using what they have learnt from private clouds to evaluate cloud providers and then invest in their services.
The report also found that the biggest roadblocks are organizational or – that old bug bear – security challenges, and not the technology itself.
Image source: Forbes.com
Cloud radically changes the dynamics of our IT departments. The shift to cloud means that we’ll spend less time managing IT assets, and more time managing external service providers and knitting together end-to-end processes. This change takes time as teams and individuals must adapt to new roles and responsibilities, and new ways of working.
Where are you on the cloud-adoption journey? Have you experimented with private cloud? Or have you leapt into a public cloud? And what challenges did you need to overcome on the journey?
Avengers, Assemble! Why Senior Superheros Should Fight Together
By Alistair LloydBringing together diverse capabilities, experience and opinions results in a powerful alliance
As CIO you hold great power, though this power also brings a Kryptonite-like weakness with it. You are responsible for sustaining the information flows of an organization. You also carry the curse of not being taken seriously. It’s like being Captain America and the Invisible Man at the same time.
It’s seems lonely and frustrating, but if you step outside of your Arctic stronghold/ underwater lair/ server room and take a look around you’ll notice you are not the only executive in the same predicament.
Your challenge is to assemble a team and lead them into a powerful and effective alliance.
The need to work across the C-suite
As a leader you see the benefits when your team collaborates with others from across the organization. The synthesis that results from different professional skills, diverse opinions and complementary thinking styles is well documented. But how often do you do this at the C-level?
Collaboration across the C-level is rare outside of monthly executive meetings. Often what stops you is an over-full schedule, your own conviction, or the vulnerability you feel in reaching out to your peers with the opportunity to join forces.
There are three situations that you risk by not taking the initiative:
The good news is that you are not alone. There is a opportunity for you to gather a group of your peers and creatively join forces. A League of Corporate Superheros, if you will.
Learn from your peers
Begin by approaching individuals on their terms. Do your research, watch their body language in meetings to see what is frustrating them, observe what topics they are continuously trying to get onto the agenda, and learn to appreciate their strengths.
As an example, consider the following positions in your organization and how their peers may view them:
Explore the skills and insight that each of these leaders brings to the table. These are not necessarily their functional strengths. Rather, they are the intrinsic values and viewpoints that, by themselves, are often lost against the backdrop of everyday matters such as sales, operations and finance.
Consider the following mix:
When combined these skills create a powerful analytical and problem solving capability that is far more effective than if they were to be employed individually.
Take the initiative
Be on the front foot. Work with your peers. Find time to explore the capabilities that you each bring by discussing and agreeing on the common dilemmas and obstacles you face.
Pick a pressing problem facing your organization, one that provides you with an effective and visible vehicle to engage with your C-level peers.
Workshop the problem as a team and agree on the target outcome. Map the journey ahead, including the risks and opportunities you might encounter. It is at this stage where you will benefit from the diverse perspectives and experience of your League of Corporate Superheros.
The result will be a sound plan with a number of your senior peers united and invested in both the approach and the outcome.
Be clear and consistent as a team
The way in which you engage your remaining C-level colleagues will depend on the culture of your organization. It is safe to assume that nobody (especially the CEO) enjoys being ambushed. Your best stratagem is to divide and conquer.
Have your League engage with each of the C-level and the CEO individually. Ensure the messaging is consistent and focused on the target outcome. Share the challenges and additional insights that come back from those engagements – they will be vital in showing that the individuals have been listened to and their opinions valued.
Start conservatively and adapt your style and approach, once more using your League peers to shape and refine this based on their own viewpoints. The success of the process will be a consequence of two vital actions: your partnering behaviors, and the effort put in to give all parties the opportunity to voice their opinion and become invested in the process.
Leadership is something you earn
By taking the initiative to bring together an otherwise marginalized group of senior leaders you will have gathered a formidable influencing force around you. Furthermore, you will have set the scene for your own team as to what a CIO – their leader – is capable of achieving.
As the sun sinks and the smoke clears over the company battlefield, you might feel more human that super-human, but that’s OK. By forming a powerful alliance you will have overcome the odds and live to fight another day. And who knows – maybe you can use a structured lease on your Batmobile flee.
CMOs and CIOs: Will It Ever Be Happily Ever After?
By Thora FitzpatrickTo make the right technology purchasing decisions marketing and IT must collaborate
Not so long ago the term marketing meant; promotion, branding, and communication. Nowadays the Chief Marketing Officer’s (CMO’s) role is one of strategy. The rise of internet based solutions has seen them become responsible for overseeing the company’s key driver for growth: digital marketing. As a result senior marketing executives have suddenly found themselves at the very heart of important IT issues.
CMOs are taking control of IT budgets
Last year Laura McLellan at Gartner predicted that soon CMOs will be spending more on IT than CIOs, a conjecture that was taken with a large pinch of salt by many. But when you consider that marketing already purchases a fair proportion (30%) of its own technology and services perhaps it isn’t such a far-fetched proposition. In fact, CMOs have been buying technology from outside providers for some time – tools for lead generation, tracking, content management and more.
CMOs are under pressure to make fast IT purchasing decisions
Organizations that have managed to get up to speed with CRM, database marketing, and social media are now rapidly turning their attention to customer analytics and big data issues. Finding ways to tame and utilize the steady stream of information coming in from all directions is top of the agenda for CMOs keen to gain a competitive advantage. In response, a host of new technology enablers, including cloud service providers, have appeared on the scene, giving senior marketing executives ever-more perplexing IT purchasing decisions to make.
The value proposition that is being increasingly thrown at CMOs by such providers is that they can ‘tech enable’ their marketing projects without having to involve IT. As such the opportunity to circumvent IT is no doubt an enticing prospect for some CMOs, given the pressure on them to act fast in a market which is changing at lightning speed.
Does marketing need its CIO when buying technology?
Marketing executives are tempted to leave IT out of the equation because they fear their CIO will slow down or even halt their plans. Marketing is all about innovation, speed, and agility with market impact and customer experience top of the agenda while IT is more concerned with stability, security and functionality. It’s not that IT doesn’t understand marketing’s objectives, but rather IT executives value their own priorities more.
While marketers have the vision and the drive, they often lack the technical depth. IT on the other hand has the technical depth, but different incentives and priorities. At first glance it is clear that both parties have something valuable to bring to the table. IT is likely to be able to provide valuable insights about how to best achieve marketing goals faster and less expensively. In particular they may have had experience with prospective vendors that will help in making the right buying decision.
Marketing need to ‘own’ their technology
While CMOs may lack the required skillset to make big decisions about IT purchases they feel passionate about being able to ‘own’ their new technology. Since it’s their heads on the block when the CEO looks at the results they need to be the market drivers of marketing technology, the creators of their own destiny, rather than just interested passengers.
But buying in new marketing technologies is not just about making decisions about individual components. It’s about the effects and interactions the new technologies will have on other components, both internal and external. This makes leaving CIOs out of the picture a risky venture. The buck will stop with CMOs alone if they are later found to have implemented rogue projects which could potentially harm critical IT infrastructure.
The rise of cross-functional marketing/IT teams
Forward thinking companies have already brought these two essential functions closer together. In an IBM Survey in 2012 a reported 51% of high performing companies reported a close working relationship between their CIOs and their CMOs (10% higher than other companies).
They achieved this by initiating job swaps, appointing technical people to senior marketing positions and vice versa. The result: A shared customer view, more efficient workflows and clear benefits to workers, the brand, and consumers.