Phillips thinks that in the future the CIO’s organisation will act as a quick change artist, operating as a business in its own right, adding measurable intrinsic and client value, and accepting sole accountability for the outcomes and results of the various business systems within the corporation. The CIO will also control the spending mix to better enable future-oriented strategic innovation whilst providing world class IT support to the current business requirements. Their organisation will adopt a projectised product management approach in order to enhance or divest the various service offerings made available to the business.
“The future CIO will need to fully understand and be able to work with the CEO and CFO in a leadership triangle, with the CEO focused on growing the top-line and making the corporation more agile to the clients’ demands whilst the CFO is confronted with various global regulatory pressures, as well as traditional tight cost controls,” Phillips says.
“It will be the CIO and IT teams who enable the top-line growth and control the cost of services delivered, thus the future CIO will also need the interpersonal skills to work collaboratively within the various operational cultures and generational work ethics to empower the teams to make these various mature and immature service offerings add the measurable value required of the corporation’s strategic agenda.”
In IBM’s global CEO study, “Expanding the Innovation Horizon” (2006), CEOs identified three ways to accelerate innovation: through substantive business-model change, through collaboration with external partners, and through tighter orchestration and team-like behaviour among business and technology decision makers. Many business and IT leaders continue to behave as if they are on opposing teams, competing against each other, rather than competing against new and established external competitors, the research group says.
Not for much longer. Gartner’s February 2008 report, “The Hyperconnected Enterprise: Anticipating the Next Wave of Business” describes the emerging “hyperconnected enterprise” as one in which numerous people and parties have the power to influence and make decisions, often quite randomly. Gartner says in such enterprises the bulk of business and technology strategies will be inextricably linked, with optimal decisions made by blending and balancing insights, implications and context, and by erasing territorial lines between organisational units and stakeholders.
“Two related predictions will have substantial decision-making implications for IT, business and functional leaders,” Gartner says.
“Behaviours that reinforce the separation of strategic business and IT decision making will disappear by 2009. Forget alignment. This is about assimilation, with business and IT leaders working integrally, openly and collaboratively to leverage their insights and knowledge. Projects once considered IT-only, and strategic initiatives once considered business-only, become intertwined as they exploit IT to deliver greater business value.
“By 2009, 40 per cent of strategic decisions will be made by people with blended business and IT expertise; by 2012, the percentage will rise to 60 per cent. Decision making is moving clearly and inexorably toward people who have knowledge and experience in business. And why not? Mission-critical business processes are inextricably linked to IT in a symbiotic relationship. In the long term, the new decision makers will need both business and IT knowledge, balancing opportunities and strategies with operational practicality that enhances execution. Meanwhile, they become catalysts for business, IT and functional leaders to understand one another’s points of view.”
Danny Davis, executive director of the CIO Institute, predicts that as the number of senior executives shrinks over the next five to 10 years CIOs will be among the few senior executives left in typical organisations.
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