It’s Time to Get in the Game

It’s Time for CIOs to Get in the Game CIO.com.

Are you in the game or on the sidelines? In a recent article on CIO.com, it is suggested that its time for CIO’s to get in the game. while I couldn’t agree more, I would encourage you to take this article one step further.

If you find yourself wanting to get in the game now, I suggest that you are significantly behind the curve. For how many years has the concept of transformation via the CIO role been around? This is not a new concept, rather a concept that is rising in importance and possibility due to the level of disruption enabled by technology…think “commercialization of IT” as an example.

So, lets presume you are behind the curve. Where do you start? How do you start? I recently fielded questions like this at the PhillyETE conference. Some food for thought:

• Follow the pain – What are the top 3-5 problems in the business? Find a sponsor to partner with and go solve for one of them, then make it a poster child for the business value you can drive as a CIO. to help identify the pain points, think of the following areas of your enterprise: revenue, operations, client perspective, and competitive position. Surely, there are some low hanging fruit to address in these contexts.
• Attack the white space – To avoid turf battles and resistance to your delivery of business value, find areas of the company where there is no business model, or little risk. In Adam Hartung’s book Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition, he discusses this concept in detail. My simple interpretation is “white space = unexplored opportunities” in your enterprise. For example, find areas of the business where there is no risk to the existing revenue streams and drive value.
• Innovate, Transform, Lights-On – Chances are you have projects that are transforming your company, and you are undoubtedly running systems to keep the lights on. However, what are you doing to innovate? Framing your activities within these constructs can help you focus on the innovation part. What innovations could be valued by your company? How is your budget allocated across these three areas? Can you find ways to reduce your “lights-on” spend to fund some innovation?

CIO.com presents a great topic that is timely given the current state of the CIO. Take the discussion a step further, get off the sidelines, and get in the game!

Related articles

• Not What, but How – Connecting IT and the Business (ericbrown.com)
• CIO: Challenges of New Business Models (bjconquest.com)
• The shifting role of the CIO (ericbrown.com)

The New New CIO Role: Big Changes Ahead

The New New CIO Role: Big Changes Ahead – CIO.com.

In a recent discussion with a previous client of mine and now friend, I was challenged as to why I view the role of CIO as exciting. The attached article does a good job of answering my friend Jim’s question. Incidentally, you can read Jim’s musings on his blog at O’Reilly Radar.

What’s not to love about being on the border between the business and IT, or shall I say the border between France and Germany circa 1944? That would be brutal. 1970 might be a little more tolerable. 2010 even more so. This analogy is not meant to compare the brutalities of war with our current business environment, rather this conscious exaggeration via analogy hopefully crystallizes the concept of being on a border between two different cultures. I told Jim “some people are just drawn to chaos!” with big smile on my face like the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. If you enjoy creating order out of chaos, if you enjoy bringing structure to an unstructured challenge, and you can translate business and technology, then the CIO role is something you should consider.

My favorite insights from this article:

• There are two kinds of CIOs: operational and strategic. Which one plays to your sweet-spot?
• On tomorrow’s CIOs…the future CIOs have to be excellent in negotiating; spend all their time with the business; be a visionary; be a “tweener” – someone who always operated between the business and IT. How do you map into this description?
• A CIO who is transforming their business needs to concentrate on the four P’s: Perception, Profile, Participation and Performance. Rate yourself in these areas.
• CIO = Chief Transformation Officer What have YOU transformed?
• And they have to operate or deliver. Think…DELIVERY is job 1! Don’t forget the daily blocking and tackling.

I recently came across another interesting corroborating perspective on the CIO role as a Chief Insight Officer. I found this very “insightful”.

At the end of the day, technology is disrupting everything. We look back on history and refer to the industrial era, and reflect on the quantity of change that period delivered. We are now working within the “knowledge” era where the knowledge you gain today, might be obsolete in a matter of months based on the pace of change. We are constantly learning and displacing old tools or techniques with new ones to maintain our profit margins and compete with larger and smaller competition. All along, the CIO is in the eye of the storm, and the person who can strategically create order from chaos while operating an environment of increasing complexity and building effective relationships across the business and IT leadership will make a measurable difference to a company’s bottom line.

CIO Perspectives on Business Change

I attended a CIO Perspectives conference in Philadelphia this morning. It was a great session with a lot of relevant content. Definitely worth the investment in time.

The keynote speaker was a CIO who is leading a business transformation for a pharmaceutical distribution company using an ERP implementation as the technology driver. His discussion focused on three key elements critical for transformation, and I want to share that I emphatically agree. While there are certainly other factors in a business transformation, these three are most applicable to the CIO:

1) IT Strategy – providing multiple views of the architecture, platforms, tools, and technologies that are needed to support the business strategy.
2) IT Governance – prioritizing projects, making decisions and living with the consequences of the decisions.
3) Relationships – trust, candor, and discussing the “undiscussables”.

He emphasized relationships as a fundamental component of a transformation because it enables the the first two elements to be effective.

Here is my summary of other key concepts for your consideration in your own change efforts:

• If you struggle to get a busines strategy to feed the IT strategy, create one yourself. IT has a great perspective of your company.
• Commit to the integrity of the IT governance process. Don’t make side deals.
• In order to have any transparency, you need to be able to define what everyone does on a daily basis. Put a time reporting system in. Without it, you are stuck in emotions and hallway sound bytes.
• Trust is critical. Do you have it? Do you want it? Do you want it like you have never wanted anything else? You need to.
• Listen without judgement.
• Decide to make relationships important. Start with your most troubled relationship, turn it around, and then move on to others.
  Change fails because of relationships.
• I would rather have an average strategy with flawless execution, than a flawless strategy with average execution. You can and will always modify your strategy in our current environments.

SOA: Think Business Transformation, Not Code Reuse

SOA: Think Business Transformation, Not Code Reuse – CIO.com – Business Technology Leadership.

This article gets an enthusiastic “thumbs up” from me on the topic of leveraging technology for business transformation.

10 Key Capabilities of Next-Generation Change (Project) Managers

The 10 Key Capabilities of Next-Generation Project Managers – CIO.com – Business Technology Leadership.

Project management and change management are closely related. In fact, I view it more as project “thinking” and  change “thinking” that all people involved with business transformation need to embrace.

The behavioral attributes of project management, or “project thinking” transfer well into the arena of business transformation. With increased complexity comes the need for increased discipline. This has been a motto that I have shared for many years with my troubled project engagements. Business transformations mean increased complexity in the form of “more, better, faster, cheaper”. In this type of environment, project thinking becomes a rising star. The ability and (more importantly) willingness to pay attention to all the details and facilitating progress by segmenting (or what I like to refer to as “bucket-izing”) issues, actions, risks, dependencies, and decisions are but two of the key technical skills.

I like this article from CIO.com because it goes beyond the technical skills and provides a good list of leadership skills for the next generation or transformational project manager. Project managers need to have the basic technical skills, and then need to bring the skills outlined in this article to make a difference. If you find yourself operating as a PM within a fairly predictable environment (I am not 100% sure if these exist anymore) then these capabilities might not be so critical. However, if you are in a transformation or chaotic environment, I suggest that this is a very good list of capabilities, and one that we should leverage. Rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 for each of these capabilities, then define which ones you want to grow. We all have “flat spots”. Knowing them is half the battle.