The CIO Role on the Business Leadership Team

If you want a seat at the table...what are you going to do when you're there?

IT Leadership Goal

How to leverage technology to make more money…

Continuous Changes driving the future of IT

• Business IT...and IT is the business
• CIO's will more frequently report to the CEO but there's a catch
• Spending on new business services continues to increase
• The IT leadership role is evolving into a "technology broker" expected to enable and advance commercial performance.
• Technology changes are rampant but there's disagreement of what it means and how to leverage it
• Traditional internal technical roles are dwindling while tech-savvy business roles are expanding
• IT leadership frequently underperforms in quantifying the value they provide to the business

Software will define everything

Over the course of the next decade, the evolution of infrastructure technologies and associated application software capabilities will enable absorption of more and more of the enterprise computing and application's portfolio

Soon…

...the enterprise computing and application platform will be available as a service

What can you remove out of the current technology portfolio that would materially impact the business?

Updated Leadership Characteristics

• Leadership must become technology strategists with superior supplier negotiator skills
• Leadership must have commercial expertise and know how the company makes money
• Eliminate techno-jargon and acronym mumbo-jumbo...translate into plain language
• Demonstrating superior cost control and bottom line contribution is paramount
• Understand (and leverage) company culture and politics - pathways to success are circuitous - they must be organizationally effective

Executive IT Leadership Actions

• Assess Organizational skills and readiness
• Define your 'Centerlines' - what is your strategic value
• Define what 'Good Enough' means for your organization - eliminate administrative waste
• Move every part of non-strategic technology operations to the marketplace
• Become a great 'Story Teller'
• Make sure everyone on the technology team knows exactly how your company makes money - send them through commercial training
• Eliminate the 'we know best' syndrome
• Get serious about showing 'Return on Technology Investments' - divert focus on cost reduction to margin creation
• Build Architectural / Solution Engineering expertise - not as a job description - but as a daily way of life
• Push Analytics and Analytics Tools to the Functional Area Personnel - You'll need to Force it - domain knowledge is a critical success factor
• Eliminate tactical level 'pocket veto's' by functional teams (individual contributors working their own agenda)
• Remember; employees are clients NOT customers
• Stand your ground on only the most important issues
• Be mindful of politics and the art of influence - advance your EQ
• There are no absolutes - scale is everything and everything is negotiable
• Be prepared to go elsewhere

Most of his team was retooled into "solution architects' - understanding and helping the business on how to make more business

Lessons Learned

• Putting less focus on internal technical skills results in some team members opting out
• Rewarding the ability for IT professionals to manage through others required many new skills
• Qualifying technology providers / partners with the right commercial terms is much harder and needs more due diligence than expected
• Your technology partners must become an extension of your technology team - need balance between arms length inclusion