The CIO Assistant's Blog

I was recently attracted to a discussion on LinkedIn’s CIO Network Forum started by Mark Chillingworth, Editor at IDG Communications. He referred to a CIO-UK article entitled “IT-business alignment is still on the CIO agenda“, with the sub-title “Align with the IT, not the other way around” and the following teaser:

The debate is switching, the business should be aligning with the IT systems available to reduce costs.
Increasingly CIOs are telling CIO UK that they can get their organisation to modify its practices to fit the applications in order to keep costs down. Is this your experience?
Read what Rorie Devine and Ian Dobb, 2 leading CIOs say here: http://www.cio.co.uk/debate/118575/it-business-alignment-is-still-on-the-cio-agenda

Eager to find an example of unconventional thought on Business-IT Alignment, I read through the article and was fairly disappointed with the way the story was reported. Why? Because none of the 2 CIOs in question were saying that “business should be aligning with the IT systems”. In fact, here is what they have said [word for word, with all the typo intact] in reply to the analyst’s question:

CIO-UK: “If you were approached by a fresh-faced, newly-appointed CIO and she asked you for your advice in how to pursue IT-business alignment, what would you say?” 

Dobb: “First, you need to understand the board’s expectations. Are you expected to be a commidity order-taker, a service provider, a business partner or more of an entrprenuerial innovator? Second, make sure you have the right team around you – you need to be able to delegate on detail issues with confidence, so that you don’t have to constantly check that the email is working OK. Third, you need to be proactive and learn how to influence. If you have some good ideas, make sure you are tabling them with business leaders. Be aware of the business and board and their learning styles; some people like numbers, some like pictures. Don’t talk techie, talk business.”

Devine: “First, you have to understand your opportunity and the environment. You have to really take time to understand the context and challenges that the business is facing – what you’re there for. Second, make sure you realise the potential of your team. Communicate well; your people want to see a clear vision and a plan. Third, don’t let one issue (for example your SAP system’s performance) become synonymous with what you do – don’t become a single-issue team. At the same time though it’s important to avoid focusing purely on the big picture – you have to deliver too! Lastly, measure your performance as a team and try to keep getting better and better. If you don’t measure, how do you know you are getting better? It’s vital to choose the right things to measure – things that matter to the business and the strategies and priorities that are in place. We’ve found that it’s really productive to form specific teams to take those key metrics and take responsibility for improving performance in those areas.”

So how did CIO-UK come to the conclusion (that Business should now align to IT)? I have no idea. Throughout the entire article, there is only one place, one single statement made by Devine that remotely related to this idea:

“… The chance of success is far better if you don’t customise. If you take an off-the-shelf package you are buying standards. Focusing on the customer expectation is where you will find competitive advantage – not in the customisation of a packaged application.”

But he was talking about commodity process:

Dobb and Devine were in clear agreement on this: when it comes to application software that encodes business processes, you purchase a package if you want a commodity process; if you want to differentiate the business based on a process, you shouldn’t buy a package.

As discussed in my previous post What Business Would IT Align To?, I deplored the attitude of some IT press to take pleasure in doing IT-bashing by portraying IT Leadership as out of touch with “business”. This time, it reversed the position and I don’t know which one is worse. By blatantly twisting the statements of two good, honest CIOs into some kind of empty victory for IT, they just stoke the fire of indignant protests from both sides. Once again, the CIO’s were made into shortsighted leaders who forced Business into making changes to save a few bucks while potentially curtail or damage its ability to compete in the future.

What do you think? Am I reading it correctly or does my anti-sensajournalism get the better of me? But before answering the questions, please read the entire article. Aside from the title/subtitle/teaser aberration, the advices from Dobb and Devine are solid. And the absence of their “clarification” once again proves my point that IT is a Quiet Bunch.

Postscripts.- Not all press articles are that bad. I found one much to my liking here: The Changing Roles of the CFOs and CIOs. In this Enterprise Management Quarterly article by Andrew Jesse, VP of Professional Services at Basware Corp., he pointed out a number of opportunities “for CFOs and CIOs to become more closely aligned to provide greater business value for their organizations enterprise-wide.” Happy reading again.

          alignment, business, CIO, IT, quiet force

“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.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

(1) Walden (1854)

(2) U.S. President Barack Obama, Inaugural speech, January 2009.

          alignment, business, CIO, IT, leadership, manifesto, quiet force