Speaking at and attending the recent Forbes Magazine CIO Forum meeting, I had the opportunity to explore the emerging trends in the strategies and concerns of the CIOs of corporate America.
At the end of the year, it’s always tempting to write a year-in-review or a year-to-come prediction article, declaring the movement of the herd, giving shape to the attitudes and ideas of the populace.
But the ideas and concerns being discussed there led me to believe that there are really two distinct camps of CIOs. It seemed that there’s a bifurcation, a split among CIOs as to where the IT organization and the CIO’s job is heading.
First, what the camps agree on: After almost 30 years, the CIO role is getting some respect. The corporate CIO is more and more being viewed as a business executive rather than as a technical lead. Other C level executives (CEO, CFO, etc.) are beginning to understand how pervasive IT has become and how much more so it is likely to be in the future. And as such, they are now looking at CIOs as partners in strategy and operations and not just as internal service providers.
This newfound prominence will bring both opportunities and challenges to the IT department of the future. Technical groups will no longer be able to just accept passively the requirements of users as guidelines for action. They will have to be more proactive in seeking out and implementing ways to improve the bottom line competitiveness of the entire company. And they will be under constant pressure to reduce their own costs while improving the productivity of the whole enterprise.
But how the IT organization achieves that goal seems the subject of some debate. One view seemed to hold that the role of the IT organization of the future is that of a brokerage of computing resources and people. The employees within an IT group would be responsible for negotiating and monitoring outsourcing contracts without performing any technical tasks. Ralph Szygenda, CIO of General Motors, said that even with their multi billion dollar annual budget for IT, there was no longer a single employee writing code. Think of this as extreme outsourcing.
Advocates for this view focused mostly on cost reduction, flexibility, and rapid cycle time for definition and deployment of new systems. The conversations around this view did suggest that the IT organization would be part of strategy discussions within the enterprise, but never mentioned how outsourced technology could become a competitive weapon.
More common though, was the view that the IT organizations will carry the dual roles as both broker and partial implementer. Most agreed that for some functions, outsourcing, especially to India and China, would continue to grow as a way of reducing costs for support and operations. For other functions, such as application development to support process or product innovation would likely stay in house or be done in partnership with local service providers.
But regardless of which view prevails, most agreed that being a CIO today is still a very difficult job that few possess the skill mix to perform. It will continue to be the job that Forbes magazine recently called “America’s worst C-Title job.”
Paul Glen is an IT management consultant and the author of the award-
winning book “Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead People Who Deliver
Technology” (Jossey-Bass Pfeiffer,2003). He regularly speaks for
corporations and national associations across North America. For more
information go to: http://www.paulglen.com. He can be reached at
info@paulglen.com.
