"For me, the position of CIO is simply the most interesting and challenging job in the business world, and guess what? The job will continue to change and morph in the years ahead, making it more interesting and challenging than ever."

The CIO's Role: Keeping the Lights On

Nicholas Carr had it right — IT is a commodity. An effective CIO will focus on keeping systems up and running at the lowest possible cost. You want competitive differentiation? Look elsewhere.

The CIO's Role: Keeping the Lights On Us

Nicholas Carr is so wrong — IT is not a commodity. An effective CIO’s role is much more than keeping systems up and running at the lowest possible cost. You want competitive differentiation for your company? Look in the mirror. You can be the star!

Opening Statement

This issue of Cutter IT Journal is dedicated to exploring the question, "Is the CIO a technology manager or a strategic visionary?"

What is this total fascination with the CIO? I don't know about all CIOs, but I am just doing my job. Some days are better than others -- sometimes I am strategic, and sometimes I am just grinding through the reality of business. I think it curious that CIOs are studied and analyzed on a regular basis, and theories about the role abound. In fact, a recent industry publication asked the question, "What kind of CIO are you?" It hypothesized that there are four kinds of CIOs: innovation agents, business leaders, turnaround artists, and operational experts. There is even a test CIOs can take to discover what their type is. Frankly, it is not that simplistic. Today I was all of those things before lunch time!

I would suggest that the best kind of CIO is a survivor. That's something all CIOs can aspire to be, and in this issue we aim to help with that goal by offering a further exploration of the mystical role of the CIO.

We have assembled a group of authors from different industries and different roles, and they bring a variety of perspectives on the subject. I have found their comments interesting and insightful, and although I have some qualms about contributing even more rhetoric to the CIO discussion, I can't help myself! For me, the position of CIO is simply the most interesting and challenging job in the business world, and guess what? The job will continue to change and morph in the years ahead, making it more interesting and challenging than ever. If we can offer you ideas on how to improve your success today and into the future, enhance the value of IT in your business, or just get you through the next set of frustrations with the recognition that you are not alone, then we have done a good job here.

Believe it or not, there is an entire generation of IT and business professionals who are looking forward to the day when they are appointed to a CIO position. They are watching the CIOs in their midst, and they are building their strategic plans to ascend to this lofty office. To those who fit into this category, good luck! This issue is dedicated to CIOs looking to improve their performance, folks who aspire to the role of CIO, and those who simply need to better understand the CIO's role and how it can bring competitive advantage. We hope we are providing some new perspectives on this complex position.

Our first author, Vince Kellen, states that he is tired of all this CIO navel-gazing but proceeds to jump right in, sharing his views on how to, as he puts it, "avoid unexpectedly getting voted off the island." One of his more interesting discussions is about internal politics. Most CIOs that I have met over the years don't want to talk about the politics. They prefer to believe that the purity of technology supersedes the landscape of business pettiness. That is a fatal error. Every time there is more than one person in a conversation, there is a level of politics, so you cannot avoid it.

There are some CIOs who are such political animals you would think they were made out of Teflon. At the other end of the spectrum are the customer service CIOs, who rate their success like a Holiday Inn guest experience. As Kellen observes, "These accommodating individuals may not have the necessary political instincts and skills to survive." While I believe you should never underestimate the value of people liking you, Kellen advises CIOs and would-be CIOs to school themselves in the principles of competition and combat, citing such authorities as Sun Tzu and Machiavelli. To fend off political challenges, he recommends that CIOs "build a strong team within IT that can meet and exceed internal and external expectations" and work to "keep IT well positioned within the firm." Check out the author's views and see if they make sense to you in your environment.

Over 12 years ago, when I took my first CIO position, a reporter interviewed me and asked me this question: "Why do you want to be a CIO?" I promptly answered, "Because it is the next most logical step toward becoming a CEO." Lesson 1: Never say anything to a reporter you don't want to see in print. Lesson 2: Figure out how to explain that remark to your CEO when it comes out in print. Lesson 3: Recognize that being a CIO is like being a CEO of IT. That is the premise of our next piece, which was written by Cutter Senior Consultant David Rasmussen. I would have to agree with that argument, as I have been an HR, Purchasing, Legal, Operations, Customer Service, and IT leader for my IT organization for years. It also gives you a powerful sense of destiny when you manage your function as a profit center, not a cost center.

Once you have read Rasmussen's article, the CIOs and would-be CIOs among us will want to challenge themselves and evaluate their own skills and experience. Rank yourself on a scale of 1-10 against this "CEO of IT Characteristics" checklist and see where you stand. It should be interesting! Do you:

• Communicate and delegate effectively?
  
  
• Ensure effective accountability for performance?
  
  
• Establish a strong team of functional managers to manage implementation details?
  
  
• Translate IT issues and needs into total enterprise business value?
  
  
• Ensure the organization has sound business practices and can continue operating indefinitely?
  
  
• Develop trust among all stakeholders?
  
  

If you're not pleased with the results of this self-examination, it may be that some extra IT leadership training and development are in order.

A logical question that probably now comes to mind is: how does one get training and development for the skills and expertise one needs in today's IT business world? How do you develop a team of solid managers and future leaders for the 21st century? In our next article, we get the inside view on one company's experience in developing an outstanding training and coaching program for its IT organization. Cutter Fellow Steve Andriole shares the journey of the very savvy CIO who initiated the program, outlines the program's major components, and reveals the lessons learned along the way. In his article, Andriole considers an age-old dilemma: the wildly different perceptions the "two sides" of a company have about IT. The business side thinks IT is a mere operational necessity, often creating bottlenecks to progress, while the IT side thinks they are the core of the business. Andriole discusses how one company, specialty chemicals maker Rohm and Haas, took the opportunity to focus on the intersection of business models, technology, and management best practices in its quest to achieve a holistic view of business-technology interrelationships and roles. You will hear how the company envisions this holistic alignment and identifies the skills needed to get there.

What do you think 21st-century CIOs are passionate about? Our next author, Patrick Moroney, identifies the elements he perceives as critical these days. They are:

• "De-massifying" and driving agility, which includes aggressive efforts to reduce and eliminate complexity in the IT environment and to measure the results in real dollar impact.
  
  
• Cultivating peer business relationships, which is going to be especially challenging as new members of the management team come to their roles with a lifetime of technology usage and, thus, much more aggressive expectations than the business managers of yesteryear, who had to rely on what we told them.
  
  
• Executing on two full-time jobs, which doesn't mean CIOs are moonlighting (even though the average salary for CIOs has dropped by $24,000 from five years ago). Of course, Moroney is referring to the CIO's technical leadership job and business leadership job.
  
  
• Seeking top talent and building great teams means just that, but I also think it means opening our minds to creative ways to use external associates to get the job done.
  
  
• Working to ensure their staff understands why they come to work every day has a huge impact on productivity, in my opinion. One of the best compliments I ever got from a member of one of my teams was when a seasoned programmer analyst told me that my approach to managing the team gave him an understanding of what he was programming for -- and why -- for the first time in 25 years.
  
  
• Pursuing highly predictable outcomes from investments and managing out risk is all about preventing surprises.
  
  
• Finding the right way to serve explores the value of service-oriented architecture (SOA).
  
  
• Measuring and making fact-based business decisions is a basic necessity.
  
  
• Being a "forever learner" is essential, because how else will CIOs stay fresh enough to move at a fast enough pace?
  
  

Our final offering is from Nancy Mead and Dan Shoemaker, who focus on one of the toughest issues we face: explaining why we need all that money, what we did with it, and why it is OK. As the authors observe:

It goes without saying that if the money spent on IT does not directly support the purposes of the business, then there is the potential for waste in deployment and inefficiency in the achievement of business goals. In order to have optimum impact on business results, then, all technological processes and practices ought to be specifically traceable to an organizational purpose. That general condition is termed "alignment."

And who is going to produce and maintain this alignment? Why an alignment-savvy CIO, of course. Mead and Shoemaker devote the rest of their article to a discussion of the competencies and skills required of the alignment-savvy CIO and how and where these capabilities can be acquired. It's clear that a conventional computer science curriculum doesn't provide the needed strategic and interpersonal skills, while a strictly business-oriented preparation (i.e., an MBA degree) doesn't equip an individual to deal with the technical responsibilities of the CIO role. The authors recommend a hybrid program of study that incorporates "the critical thinking and big-picture content of the liberal arts areas, the organizational and business know-how of business administration, and the technical elements of computer science." Acknowledging that this extensive list is probably more than any one person or curriculum could handle, they're willing to swap out some of the technical elements (e.g., intelligent systems, algorithms) in favor of the required leadership preparation.

In the end, we come back to the central question of this issue: is the CIO a technology manager or a strategic visionary? The answer, my friend, is both, and a whole lot more, as is evidenced by our authors' insights. I believe the role of the CIO is destined to grow in time, not go away. As you read through the perspectives served up by our authors, pick and choose what makes sense to you. But do it with one word of advice: be prepared to learn, grow, and challenge the status quo. Life (and IT) is a never-ending series of temporary events. Be agile and enjoy the ride!

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