Davis says the elevation of the role is being helped by a paradoxical effect where the issues that IT needs to tackle in order to improve its own outcomes are increasingly reflected in the issues of the business at large. “The way [a business] finances capital intensive projects, the way it develops staff, the way it interacts between different divisions — things like that are actually fundamental business issues [that] show up in IT much more strongly than they do in other areas,” he says.
“What I’m seeing is the very beginning of a group of CIOs who are actually capable of providing the leadership it takes to change the organisation to make that difference.” The business — which gets far less practice than IT — typically runs capital-intensive business projects very badly, Davis says, evidenced by flawed decision-making processes, bad business cases that are poorly tracked and nonexistent accountability. Sponsorship from within the business is often hard to find.
The CIO who can draw on his much broader experience of such projects to show the company the way to manage these investments has a real shot at reaching the corporate Hall of Fame. But it’s a perilous path, and one that needs to be managed well if the CIO role is to avoid falling by the wayside.
“I have seen an instance where the CIO has ended up chairman of the Capital Referral Committee,” Davis says. “He took leadership and the organisation went: ‘what a good idea, let’s do all our projects on the sensible and well-managed governance lines that you are recommending. Why don’t you do it?’”
“I’ve seen another organisation where somebody put in some of those guidelines for its IT projects and the organisation said: ‘Gee, what a good idea, let’s do it across the organisation — hold on a minute, you are an IT guy, what are you running this for?’ So they gave it to somebody else, and left the CIO going: ‘what do I do now?’”
In some ways, Gartner EXP research director Andy Rowsell-Jones expects the CIO role of the future to be similar to the role as currently fulfilled, although he says IT shops are likely to shrink dramatically.
Rowsell-Jones says there will clearly be a bigger business deliverables/business value dimension, as the “rate limiting step of legacy infrastructure finally gets unknotted”. As those roadblocks vanish, the traditional role and the traditional justification of having a large in-house staff will erode.
“The traditional role being fulfilled by the in-house IS organisation is moving from being a role of provider of technical services to something else, and the question is what is that something else?” Rowsell-Jones says.
In his mind, the IT component of that something else — except in relatively few organisations like Capital One and Google where “fiendishly clever software” has made a strategic difference — will be much diminished, with most CIOs heading far smaller IT shops.
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