SIDEBAR: There's No Place Like Home
Enterprise- wide architectural transformation should begin within IT
Starting your forays into more mature architectural stages within the IT department itself lets you test approaches to make sure they work and reduces the chances that a botched effort in a business unit could kill further evolution, says Jim McGrane, former CIO of MeadWestvaco. Such inside-IT efforts also give CIOs the proof of concept you need to gain business buy-in. Plus, starting within IT disarms the common complaint that "CIOs like to change everyone else's processes but their own", he says.
Merck is also taking this tack, says Joe Solfaro, executive director of information management. "We're going to work our way from the inside out," he says. At Merck, IT is using an integration platform to unify the messaging architecture at the company, which at first seemed to be a very IT-focused efficiency gain. But the effort is forcing IT to change its own internal operations and provides a natural interface with the business. "Layering information into a single bus gives us access to information that we know the business will want, such as process management, and it gives us more visibility into business processes," Solfaro says.
Approaches such as the Capability Maturity Model for Integration (CMMI) and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) are good process methods to help IT transition to Stage 3, note both McGrane and Solfaro for ITIL best practices, see "ITIL Power", CIO October 2005). "They help focus the organization on a process basis, and they force you to determine the value of services and to run like a business," McGrane says.
EA Changes Everything
As the architecture changes, so does the CIO role
As an enterprise evolves through the various stages of architectural maturity, the CIO role evolves along with it, says Jeanne W Ross, the principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan Centre for Information Systems Research. In Stage 1 companies, the CIO's job typically is focused on maintaining the technology plumbing. In Stage 2, the CIO needs to play a more strategic role to coordinate the shift to a common platform and its effect on the enterprise. Sometimes, as organizations go through Stage 2, "there's a weird tendency to bring in a non-IT person", Ross observes. As the technology stabilizes in Stage 2, process issues come to the forefront and a technology-focused CIO may seem less able to handle them, according to Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at SOA consultancy ZapThink.
The CIO role begins to cross organizational boundaries in the journey to Stage 3. Ironically, as an enterprise moves into Stage 4 and business leaders gain more control over the deployment of IT services, the CIO role can again become more tactical, says former MeadWestvaco CIO (now VP) Jim McGrane who, seeing that shift begin at his own company, has decided that's not a job he wants. (He left his position in April 2006 to focus on other areas.) But losing the policy dimension of the CIO role is not inevitable, argues Judith Hurwitz, CEO of the consultancy Hurwitz & Associates. "You can focus on innovation because the operational efficiencies achieved [by SOA] give you that time," she says.
As enterprises move through latter maturity stages, Ross argues that IT "should be part of something bigger, such as shared services, operations or finance", shedding its role as a mere technology provider. In that evolution, the CIO becomes the head — or a leader — in a more broadly defined operation. At financial services provider State Street, for instance, IT and operations have merged. Pharmaceuticals company Merck has made IT part of shared services. And paper maker MeadWestvaco has recently done the same.
But it's the enterprise's view of the individual CIO's abilities that really matters in determining what role he will play in a Stage 4 organization.
Schmelzer notes that many companies have a VP of marketing and sales, a role that combines two very different functions, while other companies have a separate VP for each. IT's role is even broader, he notes, combining architecture, design, and integration and operations. Few CIOs will be strong in all three; some will be strong in only two. Management may view IT as a discrete function or as a subset of a greater services organization.
But no matter the organizational structure, the CIO needs to be as knowledgeable about the business as the technology.
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.