IT Value Stack

DeGeeking IT

The IT industry certainly needs degeeking. There is little hope of ungeeking individuals, its a DNA thing. The best we can do is dilute the gene pool. Women offer that potential. Typically strong on the traits that geeks are so typically poor on, eg. empathy, nurturing and social skills in general. We need to encourage women into the industry.

Women need to be made aware that you can have a career in IT without being a technical person. Sales, marketing, training and recruitment come to mind. I meet a lot of IT graduates and sadly those women who have taken the brave move of entering a career in the technical side of IT are faced with males that to varying degrees promote the notion that to fit in around here you need to ‘geek up’. Thus I witness young female graduates pretending to be excited about the latest version of Vista, Linux, Star Wars etc. It’s very sad but that is how it is.

We need to reward the renaissance techies such that the males mimic the new role models and thus behave in a more socially acceptable way. Then women will feel more inclined to get involved, on their own terms.

Failing that a series of promotional ads starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney to promote careers in IT should do the trick!

A Renaissance CIO

Tom Gosnell, CIO, CUNA Mutual Group is another renaissance CIO. His Information Week article has very little talk about technology. His themes revolve around the internal and external 'customers'. His IT function even has a mission statement "Helping our customers to be more successful." Their focus on financial products and services means that they are selling technology solutions. This provides a golden opportunity for the IT function to support the sales process.

Gosnell is living proof of how IT can truly deliver value to the business. As mentioned in my book he uses his unique pan-organisation perspective to help the business forge strategy. His view that CIOs must talk the talk of the customer is very refreshing.

IBM's Scary Move

In his post IBM Wants to Bypass Tech Departments, Too Ben Worthen notes that "It isn’t just Google that’s bypassing corporate tech departments. Old guard business-software companies, too, are starting to realize it may be more important to win over workers than the IT guys."

Scary stuff from IBM if you are a CIO. Up until now the assumption was that the CIO was the final arbiter of what users could and could not do. Sometimes the exec team overrode that assumption, eg. the CFO demanding that SAP be used because that is what he used at his last company. But IBM is taking the view that there is no need to involve the middleman (the IT department) when you can go straight to the users.

This highlights a number of industry changing issues:

• The traditional IT department has lost the respect of the technology vendors who feel that involving the IT function will not add value to engaging with users.
• The traditional IT department is on the verge of losing control of the IT assets within the organisation and all the issues that go with that, eg. security and support.
• IBM would appear to be wedging out the IT function, probably with a view to replacing it with IBM's IT service offerings.

This is all smart commercial stuff from IBM. It should serve as a wake-up call to CIOs globally. If users perceive that dealing with IBM is more valuable than dealing with the IT function then Darwinism will run its course. At some point the CIO's position will become untenable as it becomes apparent that his/her role as head of IT is purely titular.

The CIO is the CEO of IT

Helge Scheil, a VP at CA, writes in CIO's Soapbox The CIO is the CEO of IT (and they need their own General Ledger).

Helge's perspective is interesting. I support the idea of the CIO running IT/IS as a business. The idea of their 360 degree view being underpinned by asset management is quite compelling, as it provides traceability and rigour. Value management linked to asset management is the 'challenge in waiting'.

I would also like to see the CIO adopt other business leader practices such as having a sales and marketing function to promote the IT department's capability. In fact I would like to see the CIO be the actual CEO. But that requires a set of skills and an thinking that most CIOs and boardrooms are not quite ready for.

I discuss this further in my book.

The CIO's Choice

Abbie Lundberg, editor in chief of CIO, writes in a recent blog post:

I miss Peter Drucker. He was both visionary and pragmatist: a Wise Man for the dawn of the information age. Brilliant, with  an amazing historic perspective, he was nevertheless approachable and down to earth. Business and business leaders owe him a debt of gratitude. His death at 95 two years ago was a huge loss.

I had the priviledge of meeting Drucker a few times at CIO conferences, and we ran a number of articles about and with him, the last being a conversation between Drucker and Tom Davenport about 10 years ago.

The reason I’m thinking of him today is that a) I recently received another collection of his writings, which I’m looking forward to reading, and b) a few nights ago I attended a dinner of the Boston SIM chapter where one of his predictions from at least 15 years ago was presented as having finally arrived.

The talk was given by Alex Cullen, vice president and research director at Forrester. What Drucker said back in the early ‘90s was that there would be a bifurcation in the CIO role. What Forrester is saying today (to paraphrase Yogi Berra), is “There’s a fork in the road. Take it.” I.e., bifurcation. Split.

Good piece. There is indeed a bifurcation awaiting. I don't think this poses a dilemma for the CIO. She must take the path of innovation and strategy. I believe the CTO must take up the second path and handle the day to day operational aspects of IT. The challenge is to revise the job specs and career paths for CIOs and CTOs so that they arrive in position with the right DNA profile.

I get into this in my new book The IT Value Stack. One of the book's contributors, Sam Lowe from Cap Gemini presents an interesting perspective on this in the book.

The Emotional Intelligence of IT

In his Forrester blog post Thoughts On Recession...And ECM Adoption, Kyle McNabb writes:

"To put it bluntly, implementation teams know who their users are, but they know very little about the people that will use the technology. And focusing on users often leads to implementing technology in a way that materially changes the way people work...a big cause of poor document management adoption in particular."

He makes a good point. The solution is simple but far from easy to implement. In my experience as a technologist and now as an adviser / writer (FT columnist advising business leaders on IT issues) the majority of technologists do not have the emotional intelligence / motivation to want to get into the shoes of the users.

Systems are traditionally built to requirements either articulated formally or informally. The underlying motivations of the users are not typically documented. Nor are the power structures / politics within which the systems will operate. Nor are the real business processes or business imperatives documented.

I agree that any attempts at user segmentation would be a good thing. But that would just be the start of a very long journey.