“The mass of IT Leaders lead a corporate life of quiet frustration.”
This was the thought that crossed my mind when I read recent press articles on the CIO crisis. This quote is a paraphrase of Henri David Thoreau who has said “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” more than 150 years ago (1). The articles were from the magazine CIO Insight in its May 2009 issue. In the first article, The CIO in Crisis Mode, Brian Watson wrote:
If CIO Insight decided to get in the mix [of choosing word of the year] this year, the early front-runner in the IT leadership arena would have to be “crisis.”
This so-called crisis certainly does not happen overnight. Nicholas Carr has thrown down the gauntlet 6 years ago with the Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter“. But why it takes so long to resurface? I believe that there are 3 reasons:
1. IT people are a quiet lot
IT people are proud of their profession and their contribution to the success of their business organizations. But they don’t run ad campaigns to tout about that.
IT people are the only few in the organization who preoccupy with “doing the right thing” and who talked constantly about “guiding principles”. Notions that non-IT professionals found “weird” in the face of expediency and quick fixes.
IT people are the only few in the organization who proffered a “structured and disciplined” approach to their work, who cared for a high “maturity level” of their tasks and activities.
In short, they live a monk-like corporate existence and make others either nervous or jealous in the process.
2. IT people let others get away with murder
People talked about the Communication Gap between IT and business people. They talked about the tendency of IT people to talk in jargons, as if other functions in business are devoid of gibberish terms. They made fun of IT people with labels such as “geek”, “dork”, or “nerd” which are supposed to be worse than “bean counter” or “used car salesman”.
People talked about Business-IT Alignment as a one-sided issue, that it was the entire fault of IT for not being able to align, because of its lack of business acumen. Nobody considered that “business” is also about IT as much as Marketing or Engineering for that effect. Nobody dared to challenge the people representing “business” that they too have failed utterly in understanding the value of IT or the willingness of IT people to cooperate and to serve. Nobody observed that Business is constantly changing, and other functions such as Marketing have a hell of a time adjusting themselves. Business-Marketing (Mis)Alignment anyone?
People talked about the lack of Performance by IT Leadership because they can’t put a dollar sign to the value of IT systems and infrastructures that run their “business” day in day out. They talked about how the CIOs were preoccupied too much with their investment portfolio and little with the revenues. Nobody considered the impact of NOT making any investment as if the revenues will keep coming undisturbed from the continued use of legacy systems and obsolete facilities.
Every few years (or every 18 months if we believe in Moore’s Law), there is a new business technology concept born. Each time, there was always an attempt to break free from the IT fold by the proponents of the new concept. Right after the 9-11 event, there was a surge of Chief Security Officers, Chief Business Continuity Officers, then Chief Compliance Officers (after Enron and Sarbanes-Oxley), and now Chief Social Media Officers. In between, we have seen Chief Enterprise Architects, Chief Business Intelligence Officers, to name a few. All these attempts have a cumulative erosion effect on the legitimacy of the IT function and its leadership role of the CIO.
A Call to arms
We want to say “Enough is Enough”. It’s time for all IT Leaders to stand up and make our voices count.
For too long, we let the ignorant rules the day.
For too long, we keep toiling in the shadow of anonymity
For the sake of business and of organizational growth, we say: These days of quiet frustration are over.
We are the quiet force of progress, the same way that “hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism (…) are the quiet force of progress throughout our history“ (2).
We have the quiet determination to bring innovation and creativity, efficiency and effectiveness, structure and discipline to bear on the organization, regardless of our ranks and our titles.
We challenge each and everyone who would dissociate themselves from IT to look into the mirror and say with conviction that they deserve our respect because they too have consciously and positively contribute to the progress of business as we do.
For further reading on related topics, here is a 3-part series entitled “CIO: How Do You Stay Relevant To Business?”: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
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(1) Walden (1854)
(2) U.S. President Barack Obama, Inaugural speech, January 2009.
