Can CIOs and IT executives help transform General Management?
I came across an interesting blog post in WSJ talking about “Toughening Up Chief Information Officers,” how Chief information officer jobs are getting ever more demanding. The blog quotes Egon Zehnder (an executive recruiter) saying “Over the past 10 years, CIOs’ jobs have morphed from technical-oriented roles to increasingly becoming business partners who can help influence a company’s strategy.”
I found it interesting that the WSJ blog also adds that “recent Egon Zehnder CIO survey found a quarter of respondents thought they would be changing their roles within a year, with 60% saying they believed they would change jobs within two years. Of those, one in ten respondents said they expected to move into non-tech jobs and take on a more business-oriented and operational role within a company.” Note the transient nature of a CIO's job that the blog is alluding to?
Nothing surprising here…. but it makes me wonder if the shift is moving CIO’s role closer to that of General Managers. In which case, one would perhaps find an answer to Prof. Andrew McAfee’s blog musing “Is General Management Being Transformed by IT?”
Prof. McAfee makes a few interesting observations in his blog asking “If IT is so great for general managers, why are so many of them so lukewarm on it? Why don’t more of them believe in the power of technology? Are they just missing the boat? Or are we?” I would add the following corollary to the questions: Can CIOs and IT executives help transform General Management?
Here’s a hypothesis: CIO’s who are looking to “take on a more business-oriented and operational role within a company” should seek out General Management responsibility. Which means, they should delegate more of their “operational IT” taks. In many cases, the operational IT responsibilities could/should be successfully delegated to a sourcing partner.
Even before I can elaborate on this hypothesis, I can see several challenges. The first on the list would be the vendor management dynamics. Echoing this, Mark Kobayashi-Hillary blogs “How many times has outsourcing gone wrong, not because of a hopeless supplier, but because the company buying the service just can’t interact with the supplier?”
There is a strong business case for CIO’s to delegate some of their responsibilities to their sourcing partners, especially if over 60% believe they would change jobs within two years. One can make an argument that even many sourcing contracts last much longer than that; so I wonder why are consultants seen as and treated as outsiders and not stakeholders?
There are several instances where my colleagues have successfully graduated to being “trusted advisors” to CIOs, helping them expand beyond their traditional boundaries. However, those instances are not a norm for all clients ... and the trend is much less widespread in the industry. Why is it so?
Comments
Mohan,
Managers are lukeworm on IT simply because the software developed does not really solve their problem. Moreover the paradigm shift in CIO's responsibility is to bridge the gap between the business and the technology; to bring more business knowledge into technical people so that they can develop solutions for real business scenarios rather than hypothetical business scenarios. I work in the IT Operations consulting division of my company and this is where I find most of my clients fitting in.
Posted by: Thirukkumaran Haridass | January 8, 2008 03:24 PM