CIO: Your baby is ugly

I have just returned from having attended two CIO ‘lunches’ overseas. I was supposed to be the ‘starter’ with my presentation on the ‘Death of The IT Function’. What was supposed to be a short presentation turned out to be somewhat longer, thus ensuring that I did not have an active role in the eating element of either lunch.

In both cases all CIOs turned up. Some openly stated that they were curious about the implications of my topic on their career path.

The degree of interactivity was very high. Interestingly the guests at the public sector CIO lunch were interested in the implementation of some of the detail I was proposing. Many, though not all I have to say, of the private sector CIOs challenged me at every step. I was clearly not relaying a palatable message. Renaming the presentation ‘Your Baby is Ugly’ would have cultivated less ferocity.

Much of the push back hinged around that old chestnut, ‘Does IT Matter?’.  A number of things became apparent:

• Not everyone grasped that whilst IT is core to information management it is not of great interest to either users or the boardroom in end user organisations.
• Not everyone could see that technology was increasingly becoming commoditised and thus increasingly less of a competitive differentiator.
• Not everyone saw that the more they held onto the view that IT mattered the more likely they would be tarred with the operational manager brush rather than that of strategic information leader.

The push back was extremely robust from some corners. And at times I was caused to reflect on the validity of my own perspectives (which at the end of the day are only perspectives based on trends I am witnessing. Nobody can claim to see the future).

One particularly robust challenge came out of the Financial Services Sector, “My business will be dead if our IT systems failed to operate for 24 hours, so surely IT does matter?” Whilst the survival period may differ, that is of course largely true of most organisations today.  But the same can be said of the electricity supply, which would have been a great retort if only I could have thought of it at the time.

Failure of an IT system in the eyes of the users is a service failure not a technology failure. And the sooner IT leaders realise that we deliver service and not projects or IT systems the better. The Cloud vendors understand this clearly.

Users fundamentally see more and more elements of IT in the same way they see electricity. If you believe they really care about IT ask them what platform their CRM database is running on. Or ask the CEO whether .NET or J2EE will prevail. They don’t know because it doesn’t matter to them.

But in fairness to these guys, they are working harder than ever to deliver more with less budget. They are managing legacy systems that were never designed to cope with the increasing fickleness of the users (driven by a fickle market) in respect of their requirements.

That said if their focus is on stopping the house of cards from collapsing with every new service update they are most likely to be spending the majority of their time on operational IT issues rather than strategic business opportunities.

CIOs need to break out of this operational mindset by whatever means necessary, otherwise the IT industry and its associated ecosystem will crumble into a pit of operational obscurity. 

People talk about the elephant in the boardroom. The lesson for me today is that elephant is not a universally welcomed menu addition. Possibly I should have served it up thinly sliced? Bottom line, I want the elephant out of the boardroom to make way for the CIO. But until CIOs in general get their strategic act together, many CEOs may feel there is more value in the elephant being in the boardroom than the CIO.