Global Cio Suicide Strategy for Cios

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Global CIO: Suicide Strategy For CIOs: Aligning IT With The Business

CIOs won't survive if they accept the back-bencher status that "align IT with the business"

mandates. It's time to bury such CIO stereotypes and start connecting deeply with customers.

By Bob Evans, InformationWeek

October 13, 2009

URL: http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/global-cio-suicide-strategy-for-cios-ali/220600344

Earlier this year I proposed that the good ol' predictable days of "aligning IT with the business" have come and

gone, and that such an approach has become counterproductive and career-threatening. Since then, a series of

factors--from the withering global economy to the relentless demands from customers for more engagment,

more choices, and more control--have only strengthened my belief that CIOs who don't make the

transformational jump from that old model to the new one of aligning IT with their companies' customers are

hurting their companies and stunting their own careers.

That CIO transformation from internal operations guy to customer-facing business leader was at the heart of a

discussion I had last week with about 100 CIOs and IT executives at a dinner meeting of the Philadelphia

chapter of the Society for Information Management (SIM). The topic was "Why CIOs Need To Align IT With

Customers," and the richly historic Union League building--with presidents, generals and other statesmen gazingdown at us from their framed perspectives--provided an ideal setting for us to talk about where the CIO

profession has been and what is has achieved, but more importantly to then consider where it needs to go to

reach its next level of achievement and relevance.

I've trotted out this strategic-realignment idea throughout this troubled year to CIOs and CEOs, academics and

analysts, and while some believe it's important and transformative, others have been quick to say it's misguided

and silly at best, and dangerous at worst. So in the hope of continuing to push this conversation forward and of

getting your opinions on the matter, I'd like to share with you the basic framework of the talk I gave last week to

the gracious and high-achieving folks of the Philadelphia SIM chapter.

I began with a few remarks about why CIOs seem to get less respect than they should, and I used a number ofanecdotes that individually were perhaps "funny" but in aggregate were not really funny at all when they

combine to form the foundation of a profession that's too often seen as out of touch with the marketplace, earnest

but on the fringe, and tactical rather than strategic. And my overarching point was this: what are we doing to

wipe out those "funny" but ultimatly corrosive stereotypes that collectively reinforce the patronizing "align IT

with the business" canard that is hurting CIOs?

(For more detail or deeper analyses on the points raised in the rest of this column, please check out the

"Recommended Reading" list at the bottom of this column.)

http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/global-ci

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Global CIOs: A

Site Just For

You

Visit

InformationWeek's Global CIO --our new online community and

information resource for CIOs

operating in the global economy.

"Funny" Truisms About CIOs

How many surveys do you see asking if the CFO reports to the CEO or the CIO?

Why is it big news rather than the norm when a CIO is on the Executive Committee?

How many dozensor thousandsof times have you heard the urban myth that CIO stands for Career Is Over?

And its corollary that the average CIO tenure is 16 months? First, where's the research to support this? And

second, does that sort of "joke" help or hurt CIOs?

At a global exeutive search firm, the head of the CIO practice said on the firm's website that "few IT executives

have the business qualifications or capitalist killer instinct for making money."Hey, don't laughthis is a guy who

gets paid to try to find jobs for you milquetoasts!

A writer at a magazine ostensibly in the service of CIOs--I mean, after

all, its name is CIO Magazine--said the only way any CIO has ever

achieved his or her position is through political scheming,

back-stabbing, and in her exact words, "butt-kissing." Hey, with

supporters like that, who needs detractors? More important, where does

this type of preposterous, know-nothing commentary come from? Is thisan indication of how truly distorted the public perception of your

profession is?

And even accepting that Fortune magazine is only a thin shell of what

it was just a few years ago, it ran a similarly stupid piece earlier this year in which it described CIOs as socially

inept bozos who are being "called out of the wiring closet" to help contribute to strategy discussions in these

hard times. Is that how your boss sees you? If not, where does the sterotype come from? Let's take a look:

How Those Truisms Reinforce The Dark Side Of "Alignment"--and Vice-Versa

Taken together, these perceptions are really neither "funny" nor funny, are they? But the real danger is how theyperpetuate the ugly stereotype of CIOs as one-dimensional tacticians so bound by their linear and tech-centric

thinking that they can't be trusted in front of customers. As the headhunter noted above said, few CIOs have the

business chops to know how to make moneyis that sort of image a good one to have these days?

In that context, then, consider the old bromide that I think is killing a lot of CIOs: "The CIO's job is to align IT

with the business." The overriding and enduring and unmistakable message in that clich is this: CIOs are not

part of the business. They're out there in the weeds somewhere, doing whatever it is they do, spending lots of

money while staying detached and removed from the marketplace and its concerns about revenue and growth

and customer engagement and new products.

They are not part of the businessinstead, they must spend all their time chasing after "the business" in the hopeof retroactively aligning all their techy stuff with the latest business strategies. In this line of thinking, IT doesn't

help shape strategyrather, it sits at the Kids' Table and waits until the big folks sitting at the Grown-Ups' Table

have hammered out a strategy and gotten up to go execute it. And then the IT folks jump up from the Kids' Table

and grab their pocket-protectors and computers and dash away, trying not to fall too far behind as they struggle

to understand the new strategy and then retrofit what they do to "align" with it.

I don't know about you, but in today's massively interconnected and always-on world, that doesn't sound like the

right approach for optimizing technology's impact and extending its reach out to customers and prospects and

partners and suppliers around the globe. Retroactively jamming IT into a pre-set strategy sounds like a sure


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recipe for lost opportunities.

Breaking The Deadly "Alignment" Chain

I then offered the audience some questions to consider that could help stir up some thinking about how they're

regarded, how they set priorities, and how to start blowing away those corrosive stereotypes that reinforce and

are in turn reinforced by the outdated "align with the business" theory:

How are you paid? Not how well, but based on what? Is your compensation tied to internal IT arcana, or toyour company's most strategic imperatives? If your bonus package reads like this: "SLAs for ISP's T3 carrying

SMTP packets at XYZ bps 24/7," should you really be surprised if you're not the first person the CEO calls to

brainstorm new competitive opportunities?

How does your boss measure your performance? Are those metrics based on the right things, or on the old

things? Are you judged by the issues at the center of your company's strategy and financial success, or is your

success/failure tied to Help Desk issues?

What's your greatest accomplishment of the last 12 months? Yes, it's been a brutal economy with equally brutal

implications for you and your budget and your team, but set that aside for a second and think once more about

that greatest accomplishment: are you proud of it? Does it make your C-level peers regard you as a businessleader or as a polished IT manager? Does it represent the best you and your team can do, or just the best you and

your team did do?

Are you paying enough attention to new and disruptive technologies and approaches, or have you shunned

such thinking because, well, times are hard and you're really busy and maybe right now's not the best time to be

taking risks and so on and so on? Are you practicing career-management, or are you trying to dazzle your

customers and devastate your competitors?

Social media: do you think it's garbage or great? If you think it's garbage, have you formed that opinion after

considerable hands-on scrutiny or because, geez, I'm busy and I don't have time to mess with stuff which, after

all, could trigger more changes around here?

If the economy starts to improve, and your CEO says it's time to light up all those great new customer-facing

ideas the company was stockpiling during the recession, will you and your team have the infrastructure ready to

pounce on those opportunities? Or will you have to ask for 12-15 months to catch up because, geez, the CFO

told me to cut my budget during the downturn?

Do you regulary inspire your team by sharing with them stirring examples of innovative thinking and

approaches from other companies that have aggressively leveraged new IT ideas and processes to boost revenue

and lower costs and delight customers and prospects? Or have the members of your team resigned themselves to

being permanent residents at the Kids' Table?

The good news is, lots of companies are making dramatic business breakthroughs with IT,and here are some of

them:

Inspiration Comes From Aligning With Customers, Not Hiding From Them

I then offered about a dozen examples of companies whose IT teams are intertwined with the business and are

accelerating and enhancing connections with customers instead of sitting back and waiting to be told by

someone else what's happening out in the world and what, in turn, the IT organization's reactive response should

be as it tries to keep up and stay relevant.


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Progressive Insurance: Their new online "Name your own price" business lets customers, well, customize their

policies based on needs and budgets. Powerful and externally oriented IT systems allow Progressive to get away

from the traditional insurance-company model of "here's what I'm selling; which one are you buying?"

CME (formerly Chicago Merc Exchange): Customers today do more trading, demand more options, require

more speed, and insist on greater security than ever before. And they expect global scope with no jitter. Building

on its longtime willingness to lead with new technologies and capabilities, CME--the #1 company on the

InformationWeek 500 list--has surged forward to exceed its customers' demands: five years ago, CME's monthly

trading volume was about 30 million trades; today, it has reached 6.5 billion. And during that time of massively

scaling out, it has also scaled up just as impressively: over those five years, it has cut execution time per trade

from 180 milliseconds to 6 milliseconds. (It takes 300 milliseconds to blink.) They've also intereconnected with

Brazil's top exchange to allow trading across both marketplaces. I'll bet the CME IT team is very proud of that,

and very inspired by it: what's the value of employee morale like that in your quest for ongoing brilliant ideas

and execution?

JetBlue: After its peak summer months, the airline wanted to sustain its revenue momentum so it offered a

fixed-price "all you can fly" promotion for $599. The campaign was expected to run for 14 days, but was sold

out in three days. New business models, new power in the hands of customers, new revenue opportunities, new

confidence to go beyond best practices into next practices: could your IT systems handle such an idea? Valero:The Fortune 500 energy company has begun working so closely with SAP to push out new applications and

capabilities that the two companies have begun sharing the IP they're developing together. Where do you have

the opportunity to drive growth and accelerate processes by pursuing new relationships with strategic vendors?

Coca-Cola Freestyle: It's hard to imagine that buying soft drinks can be an exciting experience, but just do a

YouTube search on "Coca-Cola Freestyle" and watch some of the videos from young people as they confront

this breathtakingly cool, innovative, customer-centric, and tradition-shattering device that oh by the way is

jammed with IT and useless without it. It also marks the first time in the 100-plus-year history of the company

that its IT team worked with its R&D team. Are some organizational silos preventing you and your team from

doing fabulous things? Do you think your company's products just aren't the type that can ever engage

customers? Did you ever think a soda-dispenser could be cool?

Realign, Redefine, And Shine

"Aligning IT with the business" is an old-fashioned idea that needs to be put away in the museum with the other

outdated antiquities from this business, from 8-inch floppy diskettes to punch cards to luggable "portable"

computers. It's time has come and gone, and it is hurting many more CIOs than it is helping.

One of the most-intelligent and wonderful people I've met in this business is Professor Jerry Luftman of Stevens

Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Jerry is a huge proponent of align-with-the-business and he

recently said that there's 30 years' worth of material documenting the ongoing struggle to make that business/IT

connection, and that body of work cannot be ignored as future solutions are explored.

But I think that's exactly the problem: the reason this riddle has been under study for 30 years and is still

unsolved is because it can't be solvedit's a theory in search of validation, and three decades have shown the

answer remains out of reach. I say that with the greatest of respect and admiration for Prof. Luftman, who has

surely forgotten more about IT than I will ever know, and I hope he will turn his prodigious talents toward

exploring the power IT can unleash when it is focused on, engaged with, and aligned with customers.

If you want to move yourself and your team permanently away from the Kids' Table and up to the Grown-Ups'

table, the best place to start is by dropping the sclerotic "align IT with the business" bromide and joining the rest


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of your organization in the relentless effort to excite and delight your customers. That's the real future of the CIO

profession.

Bob Evans is senior VP and director ofInformationWeek's Global CIO unit.

To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit hispage.

For more Global CIO perspectives, check outGlobal CIO,or write to Bob [email protected].

Recommended Reading:

Global CIO: Prove IT's Value To Your CEOOr Else

Global CIO: Why CIOs Without Customer Engagements

Will Fail

Global CIO: Six Lessons CIOs Must Learn From Coke's

Dazzling Innovation

Global CIO: Why Do CIOs Get No Respect?

Global CIO: Align IT With Customers, Not Business

Welcome To The CIO Revolution: A New IT Manifesto

CIO As Chief Cost Cutter: It's Not Enough

Global CIO: The Excellent Opportunity Facing CIOs

Global CIO: JetBlue Genius And Hollywood Lunacy: 5

Essential Lessons For CIOs

Global CIO: Why CIOs Need The Transformative PowerOf Twitter

Global CIO: What CIOs Must Do To Survive The

Recession

Copyright2012UnitedBusinessMediaLLC,Allrightsreserved.


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