CIO – Collaboration and Information Officer

The market downturn appears to have set the IT industry back in its journey to being strategically relevant to users. Today the role of CIO seems limited to operational ‘run the business’ type support. In other words the CIO is the 21st century IT manager. 

Of course cost pressure is on and it would take ‘balls of steel’ for the CIO to challenge this redefinition of the role.

I propose that there may be a way to become strategically relevant without having to ask for a rework of the job specification. Businesses need better communication. We have email and it works well. We now have social networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. In some cases these are already in corporate use. However their usage may be in spite of the IT function. I suggest that the CIO takes charge of such collaborative tools with a remit to extend their usage rather than be the ‘collaboration killjoy’ who focuses on making the case for not having such connectivity. This was the case with palmtops until the Blackberry Tsunami caused a rethink.

Also the use of wikis is to be encouraged. Again this is happening in respect of managing IT projects. It needs to extend to the user community to enable them to collaborate. Possibly the most important step is to have wikis that allow users and technologists to communicate.

I touched on this in my IT Value Stack book.

I also touched on it in an article I wrote for the Financial Times a couple of years ago. Click here.

The IT industry’s first attempt at knowledge management failed, because the focus was on control rather than collaboration. The technologies and platforms are sufficiently advanced now for CIOs to lever them (with little investment required) for the benefit of their organisations.

Collaboration provides a means for the IT function to be strategically relevant.

Better to be known as the collaboration guy than the laptop repair guy.