I cannot believe that it has been almost two decades of the CIO role in
the making; not the EDP manager which precedes the title by around another two
decades or so; a score of years of making enterprise adopt, adapt and leverage
IT; twenty years of educating CXOs on why they need to invest in IT for their
own benefit if not survival; definitely a decade if not more of fending off ROI
models for every initiative; a little less than a decade of helping the CMO get
digital savvy and finally riding the waves of disruptive technology innovation.
With every changing paradigm or rather hype in some cases, starting with
Client-Server to the most recent Internet of Things and everything in between
(Internet, ERP, CRM, e-commerce, m-commerce, mobility, BYOD, Cloud, Social
media, Big data to name a few) there were predictions of demise of the CIO. It
was predicated that the CIO will lose relevance with power shifting to other
parts of the enterprise, democratized decision making and budgets no longer
under CIO control. Many joined the chorus, the technology king is dead.
A decade back, the article IT doesn't matter made a splash; it had many proponents and a collection of
CIOs defending their position citing the author had lost it. Many CIO bashers
interpreted the report to suit their hypothesis of why the CIO will soon be
dead; clarifications from the author were brushed aside brusquely. Lectures
were delivered by all and sundry proposing remedial steps for the CIO for
his/her survival. Suddenly as it came, the brouhaha withered away and everyone
moved on to the next issue, whatever it was.
CIOs need business skills, soft skills, technology skills, people
skills, vendor management skills, project management skills, change management
skills, financial skills, legal knowledge, customer management skills, and
should be politically savvy at the same time. Probably any CXO job description
may fit the above profile but they rarely get discussed in the open akin to
washing dirty linen in full visibility of the world. Or maybe the IT media is
obsessed with the role’s gaining prominence and thus attempts to find avenues
to diminish it.
Recently when I read a few mainstream business publications headlining
IT and the CIO, it revealed two things to me. The message that emerged is that
IT effectiveness is diminishing with time and unable to keep pace with changing
business expectations. Contrary to this is the fact that business pressures
have led to risk averse attitude to investments in new technology; discussions
on the management table however expect outcomes that can be achieved only when
business works lockstep with IT rather than a customer-supplier relationship.
The world today is digital and connected in ways that were only imagined
in the past; digital natives are consuming information very differently when
compared to what makes enterprises run. Digital commerce has moved the power of
choice to the consumer; however big enterprises are influencing choices using better
tools and technologies to find patterns from unstructured data. Possibilities
are opening up with large volumes of data being analyzed for patterns that can
now predict events with higher probability breaking the choice mirage.
The future belongs to the enterprise which has mastered the art and
science of consistently finding needles in the haystack of data. The individual
who can make this happen shall be anointed the new high priest; only time will
tell whether s/he will be the Chief Digital Officer or the Data Scientist or
the CIO making a transition to becoming the orchestrator of such services. It
is certain that sooner or later this will become commoditized and challenge the
adopters to find new differentiators sooner than later.
I should also highlight the fact that there will continue to remain a
need to manage the unseen parts of enterprise IT which are basic hygiene for
business as usual, the network, the data center and cloud, the database and
apps, information security, data warehouse, transactional manufacturing and
supply chain systems or for a services organization the customer and related
data. The CIO and the IT team have to keep this foundation strong for the
digital enterprise to flourish and to that extent the role will not go away.
Individuals will make their choices on evolution; what is yours ?
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