In the old days, and I am not talking about that long ago, if you were a CIO chances are you will retire as a CIO. You took care of the company’s electronic plumbing so that your users can do their work. Well done, thank you. Enjoy your gold watch.
However, today’s business is driven by digital thinking: how to push products in front of people’s electronic devices, how to transact over handheld tools and channels and how to enable devices to interface with each other to make life simpler for everyone. All these are enabled by IT technologies; so what IT knows is beyond plumbing and could make significant differences in a company’s future prospect.
In the mean time, your counterparts on the business side are trying to make sense out of the digital world, and they are creating ways of using technology. Shouldn’t that be your job? If someone else is doing your job, what value are you demonstrating? A lot of companies still confine their IT in a back-office role: keeping the infrastructure cost low, making sure the applications and their support centralized and cheap, keep the data safe and flexible. Atta boy.
You understand technology, you know how things are put together, and you are experienced in building business framework inexpensively in the digital world: you should be telling business what they should do instead of waiting for them to hand you projects.
Today’s digital world is a levelled playing field: it allows people who don’t have your background to create value out of IT; but at the same time it allows technically-minded people to create things of commercial value.
If you are a CIO chances are you are working in a big and complex organization. One challenge of a large organization is that its agility, which is vital to survival in today’s business climate, gets constricted by business processes designed based on historical reasons. Chances are, old rules that escorted the money making process was made is likely have been disrupted by technology or innovative business model.
What is your advantage? You understand the technologies that make those things happen, you understand the possibilities that these technologies can bring, the step you are missing is the audacity to tell the business people what your insights are.
Frankly no one has the right answer on how the future comes together, change is the engine that propels an organization and you can use your expertise to drive change. To make that happen, technology architecture knowledge, project management discipline, solution integration insights are what are behind new business models; all are your forte. It is time to jump in and help your company disrupt others!
Of course what you do have to make sense. What you need are allies in the business. Nowadays everyone has a smart phone and they are familiar with phone Apps. I am willing to bet that they all have an App or two in their heads that help them with their jobs; they just don’t know where to start. This is where you come in and become a hero: people will be happy to be partner of you if you help them succeed in your tech backyard. During the process, you will be learning the issues that are important to them and you can enrich your business street cred.
For those who do not have business counterparts that are interested in part-timing as App designers, your Business Relationship Managers are your conduit to success. As opposed to making technical people Business Relationship Managers you need to hire business people (preferable with sales background) as BRMs, train them on technology fundamentals and new, relevant technologies. These people will be able to do good things with your internal customers, protect your technical team whose strength is to sort technical problems out, and help your technical team to present themselves in a business-focused manner.
At the end of the day the fundamental service has to be provided in a solid way. You do not want mature things such as network speed, VPN intermittence, slow application response define your reputation. So spend your money to get good solutions in this category. If you choose to focus on the plumbing, you will be treated as a plumber. So you have to control the conversation by focusing on the things you want to be taken seriously as – a serious businessman.
