“I do rogue IT, but I do it transparently” – New Realities for Today’s CIO
The staff at CIO Magazine put together a great discussion at last week’s CIO Perspectives event in Chicago. We enjoyed the opportunity to talk to CIOs, VPs of infrastructure, and enterprise architects from United, Citi, SunGard, and Sears about how they’re evolving their infrastructure to enable IT to drive the business.
A few thoughts that stand out for me:
“CIO success today depends on a great relationship with the CMO.” As a marketing exec myself, I was surprised by the boldness of this statement. But as the morning panel of CMOs continued their discussion, I realized marketing really is that first point in the business that’s driving IT to be customer facing. A lot of shadow IT comes about to fill marketing needs, and the role of the CIO is not back-end facing anymore – it’s all customer facing. True understanding of the customer and how to serve the customer is exactly the juncture of CIOs and CMOs.
“I do rogue IT, but I do it transparently.” This confession from a CMO brought a wave of nervous laughter from the CIOs in the room. The tension between “slow IT” and “fast IT” is very obvious with this group. Marketing needs a new tech capability – IT wants to do an RFP, evaluate several different systems, and figure out where in the IT roadmap they can fit in the project. The marketing exec says, “I can hire an outsourced firm and have the function delivered in weeks.” The good news is, that exec’s at least willing to tell IT about the deployment – rogue IT, coming out of the shadows.
“CIO is as much a revenue driver as any other C-level exec in the company.” The systems to engage customers in new and compelling ways must come from IT. This reality is highlighting the need for different kinds of thinking. “We have to answer questions about our customers that tech people aren’t thinking about,” said one marketing exec. And CIOs chimed in, noting that having people who can do good data analysis is more important than any technology you can deploy.
“There is no ‘role of IT’ – it’s all the company mission.” Throughout the day, the conversation came to the idea that organizations in which IT and business are separate in any way are doomed. It’s not about “serving” the business – IT is the business.
“CIOs need to have the courage to show the organization where the baby is ugly.” One of the best sessions of the day was Martha Heller’s on the changing competencies of the CIO. She noted that CIOs are charged with integrating strategy into the systems – they have to drive change, point out the gaps, and show where the fun of “strategy” isn’t being realized in the systems. Having the guts to point out those missing pieces is crucial to CIO success.
“If a company’s got a Chief Data Officer, that’s just a fix for two execs who can’t get along.” If you need this role, says Heller, it means the CIO and CMO aren’t playing nicely together. A lot of CIOs in the room agree these roles are temporary. Data, and what it means to the business, is simply too big and fundamental to live in a single person.
“CIOs lose their jobs not because security breaches happen but because they don’t know how the data is protected.” The amusing attorney (how often does THAT happen!) Matthew Karlyn talked about what CIOs need to do to plan for security breaches. You’re never going to stop all hacks, he said, but it’s ignorance about how the security systems work that will get you fired.
“ROI is a terrible metric for IT.” In his talk about IT evolution at his company, Mondelez International’s CIO Mark Dajani called CIOs to task for using this bad metric. You can easily demonstrate that a given project has a high ROI, he noted, but that doesn’t reflect on whether the outcome is strategic to the business. His advice? Focus instead on the business KPIs you’ll enable by deploying that technology – then you’re sure to deliver value to the business.
“The most important change to enable at your company is how people use data.” Throughout the day, CIOs kept coming back to data – and delivering insights from data – as key competency. Mondelez’s CIO noted that if you have a shared vision and agree on the outcomes, people will do good work – you just need to enable them with that foundation to help them use data right.
Here at ScaleArc, we love all the focus on data, since we’re all enabling zero downtime access to data. As challenging as it is to be a CIO today, it’s also a time of great empowerment and opportunity. We salute all our CIO customers who are building their success today.
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