It is no news that large established organizations are being threatened by small start-ups in today’s frequently disrupted business world. Small businesses with good ideas can now create viable products or services by using public IT infrastructure; from network to hardware, to enterprise applications, to personal productivity tools, to B2B platforms; anything can be rented and easily plugged in together. Disruption is cheap these days.
If getting the traditional IT stuff done is easy, then what value does enterprise IT serve anymore? Not that many years ago, data were mostly stored in enterprise applications, off-line storage and self-contained function specific hardware, etc. The CIO role was important because they can extract information out of data for the business to make good decisions.
Now that useful business information are available from the Internet, what enterprise business users want now is to have the same access and agility that their young small competitors have but combined with data only found in your legacy environment.
If one can take a peek into the future, it is not hard to imagine that in 10 years a typical IT organization (those with less than 25,000 users) would be much different than today’s from a structural and functional perspective. The job of today’s CIO should be to bring today’s legacy environment into the future environment; and before you can do that you need to bring your team into the future first.
Recently I heard a story about a business unit in a large multi-national chemical company requested a straight forward change on their ERP system. When IT replied that it would take 9 months, the business went around IT and asked a system integrator to build them a work-around on the mobile platform. The solution went live in less than 2 months. I would hate to be in the shoes of that company’s CIO when the CEO find out about this.
In a large organization as a CIO you may not have total control over all the actions due to organization structure, processes, legal requirements and economic realities. But there are still things that could be done within a reasonable framework.
First, you start with having a team that is future oriented. Important elements of the future that your team needs to ingrain in their thinking are global economic development, technology trends and how they affect what your company does, a consulting mindset and the audacity to participate in business discussions. In order to demonstrate value, you and your team need to beat the end user community in coming up with business solutions that involves using technology. For that you will need a different kind of skill set on your team: end-to-end problem solving and the ability to traverse between business and IT. People with such skills are rare, you need to know how to identify them, motivate them and construct your organization around them.
Second, outsource as much as you can; lower the capital asset your company has to carry. You will score two points with this move: you show the business that you are proactive in addressing their doubt regarding the value of IT, and you demonstrate to your boss that you are also a businessman. You have turned your focus away from the boring and low value items (as perceived by the business) such as network, storage, and applications, and your new focus is to really align with them and serve their needs. This will give you credibility of being a different kind of CIO. Besides, with transferring daily-used applications to the cloud and mobile platform, the need for end-user support and operations diminish.
Third, create an organization model that allows your future thinking team to thrive. Get ride of clearly defined job descriptions of your staff and unnecessary SLA between IT and business users; if you act like a vendor, you will be treated like a vendor. If you serve them like a family member, you will become an integral part of the organization. In doing so you need to have a culture that is goal oriented and responsibility centered. If you look at the organization model of start-up companies that beat their Goliath competitors, you will see that they are organized along the value chain rather than by functions. Forget about being a process-driven organization, you and your team have to take a page from product management thinking in a startup technology company. Such organizations are usually agile and have good communication mechanisms to ensure information exchange between management layers, teams within a layer, and individuals are comprehensive. This is how they can be quick to respond, or even lead, from a business solution standpoint.
All transformation comes with pain. But the two important keys to a smooth transformation are detailed planning and abundant communications. Plan clearly what you want your future IT to look like, get business involved early on to get their input and buy-in. Let your organization know that this is coming and what you look for in your future team. With enough of both you will see some of the desired results happen naturally.
Yes I am encouraging you to be a Maverick, but at the same time I am also assuming you are already a master of balancing risk and reward. In any case someone may not like the change because it is not what he or she are used to; but then they are not the one who has to face the consequences of the diminishing IT value problem. So I encourage you to stay tough and do what’s right by your company, your team and most important of all, you.
