Seven Trends That Will Shape The CIO Role

2008 will see the firming up of several trends that will shape the CIO role in the future, the foremost being the bifurcation of the role itself. Some CIOs will capitalise on their visibility across organisational silos along with their understanding of technology’s potential to grow into the role of a business change agent, but most will remain focused on running the business of IT. In 2008, change agent CIOs will gain more business presence while general manager CIOs continue to make improvements to IT reliability, consistency, and cost.

Business is more dependent on technology than ever before and more conscious of this dependency. The business is anxious to accelerate results through the use of technology, but IT executives continue to focus on operational reliability and project delivery. This dichotomy of expectations and priorities, the proverbial fork in the road, is forcing CIOs to decide on their target role in 2008: either they become the change agent and innovator for the business, or they become general manager for their firms’ IT.

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Seven Trends that will shape the CIO role are highlighted in the following paragraphs.

Strengthen joint IT-business planning through use of model-based planning. Creating linked business and IT plans is a struggle unless there is a common language and framework for planning. Model-based planning tools like business capability maps promote common business and IT understanding that focuses IT investments for the greatest strategic payback. Budgets, performance metrics, and governance are tied together by use of these models.

Restructure organisations to foster alignment. Reversing the trend of centralising IT to gain economies of scale, change agent CIOs will structure their organisations to get as close to the business as possible by dispersing staff into business areas to gain business knowledge and act as technology advisors. This will be more than co-location; change agent CIOs will use this as a means to share work prioritisation with their business counterparts.

Foster strategic planning and architecture as key competencies. For many CIOs, developingIT strategic plans is a “sometime” thing with dubious impact. Change agent CIOs, realising that shaping business perception requires an up-to-date strategy, will ensure that strategic plan development, update, and review is an on-going and tuned process. The IT target state architecture vision is the most essential part of shaping business perceptions; strategic plans will eschew lists of projects in favor of roadmaps to the target state.

Strengthen their roles on the executive team — and with the board of directors. CIOs generally have excellent enterprise wide perspective, with visibility across line-of-business and functional silos. Change agent CIOs parlay this perspective, which complements the perspectives of the CEO and CFO, to identify business model-based opportunities for customer intimacy, operational excellence, and innovation. A role advising the board of directors is a logical outcome, a few CIOs having been asked to join their companies’ boards as inside directors.

Structure their organisations to drive standardisation. Standardisation of technology and applications is the key to driving down IT costs, standardisation of processes is the key to driving up quality and consistency. As cost and quality are key metrics for these CIOs, they will continue to centralise their organisations and organise skills and processes around centres of excellence in order to drive standardisation and achieve higher quality and lower cost.

Improve transparency, measurement, and monitoring to uncover efficiencies. General Manager CIOs will increasingly manage their organisations “by the numbers.” In 2008, more of these CIOs will create performance feedback loops from application, project, and infrastructure efforts, thereby increasing the effectiveness of operational planning and execution. Application scoring mechanisms that gauge the fitness of business applications will become more common as they enable CIOs to justify application modernisation, replacement, and retirement choices, streamline the portfolio, and decrease excessive lights-on IT costs.

Assume management of other corporate “shared” services. In 2008, a growing number of general manager CIOs will assume management of non-IT functions. Recognised for their expertise at running shared service IT organisations, general manager CIOs will adopt other shared-service organisations that might include anything from facilities management to customer service. The new responsibilities will expand CIO career options, with the limitation that these are functions in which the goals are quality service at a managed cost.