Can CIO’s Avoid Becoming Irrelevant in the Boardroom?

By Dan Kimble
Chief Executive Officer
Resonance Executive Coaching






At the recent Raising the Bar on CIO Leadership event in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to speak on an expert panel about IT Talent and Teams of the Future. The audience was full of senior IT leaders and it was clear that one of the most pressing concerns on the minds of CIO’s is how to stay relevant in a world where Chief Digital Officer and Chief Data Officer positions are getting so much of the fanfare.

These positions are being created in recognition of the need for not just provisioning IT systems and tracking data but making sense of data: drawing fresh, provocative, actionable insights and putting them to use to drive revenue growth, quality of decisions, and efficiencies in a new and proactive way. In a nutshell - it’s about transformation. Big data, gathered internally by IT systems is the ultimate work-smarter-not-harder opportunity, and we’re only beginning to understand just how huge this opportunity is.

The creation of these boardroom CDO positions is actually the direct result of a failure by IT leaders. Most CIO’s have known that it was possible to turn data into provocative insights and transformational drivers of the business. Yet, many have failed to take significant action on this, or perhaps tried but were unable to achieve sufficient buy-in to get very far. The fact the CDO’s are encroaching into IT territory and getting much of the glory is the result of CIO’s missing the boat on this kind of operational insight that is so clearly right in the wheelhouse of IT.
CIO’s, in order to maintain and grow their influence in the boardroom, must become drivers of the business – and be widely recognized as such - and not just cost centers. Intel’s CIO provides a great example of both driving the business and making sure you’re being recognized as such.

Given all of this, why have so few IT leaders truly raised the bar of expectations on their own teams to deliver fresh, data-driven insights that both drives top-line revenue and increases efficiencies in transformational ways?
IT leaders have allowed themselves to stay stuck in the closet for too long. Everyone knows that IT is a necessary and critical component of nearly any business these days. Yet too often what’s considered critical about it is largely just provisioning of systems and ensuring uptime. These days, that’s just table stakes for any IT leader.

A common complaint I hear from senior IT leaders that are looking to be more proactive in driving the business is that their peers don’t really understand technology and just don’t seem to get it. If others don’t understand what you’re saying, that means you need to do a better job of communicating in a way that makes sense to your peers and superiors who come from outside of IT.

If you can’t do that effectively, it’s your responsibility to improve your communication skills, your ability to draw analogies that make sense to a lay-person, and to effectively evangelize the business value and opportunity you see and can create within IT. If you don’t, then a CDO will…

With the incredible insights and efficiencies available to the caretakers of a company’s data and technical systems, IT leaders are well positioned to grow their influence in the boardroom, yet too often have squandered that opportunity.

Here are six key places to focus your attention as an IT leader in order to fully reap the benefits of your purview:

1. Invest in developing your leadership skills. You need to be the kind of leader that people want to follow, regardless of your functional area.
2. Learn to meet people where they’re at. Communicate in a way that speaks to the business value of everything you and your team do.
3. Don’t just stay on top of the latest technology trends, innovate them on your team. Many IT teams have a lot of great, yet under-utilized talent that would love to be able to innovate more.
4. Run your department like a business. If you’re not driving the business, increasing top-line revenues and not just minimizing bottom-line expenses, you and your team will be increasingly marginalized.
5. Be visionary and proactive. IT is uniquely positioned to understand what the business needs before they know what they need. You and your team need to provide so much value in anticipating the needs of the business that the business can’t wait to talk to you.
6. Of course IT needs to keep the lights on too. Drop that ball and nothing else will matter.

CIO: More than Meets the “I”

By Terry Bradwell

Executive Vice President
and Chief Information Officer

AARP

It is no secret that tech is the key competitive advantage today.  Why then pigeonhole the CIO as simply the head of a commoditized function?

CEOs expect today’s CIOs to be innovative, inspirational, and influential. 

CIOs can fill that challenging role when they work with the CEO and executive team to help shape the organization’s external world and strengthen its bottom line.

At AARP, our bottom line is fighting for and equipping the nearly 38 million Americans 50-plus whom we represent people to live their best lives.  We help them achieve and sustain health security—financial resilience—and personal fulfillment.

As CIO of AARP, I ask myself:  How can I make the most meaningful contribution to that bottom line?

The answer, I am convinced, is not only to direct the operations of IT but also to transform the IT department into an engine of innovation for the people AARP serves.

The answer is not only to support the business, but also to invest in being the business.

I would submit that the importance of connecting IT to the core business in innovative ways applies not only to AARP, but to companies and other organizations as well.

IT departments are recognized for their ability to solve disruptive problems across the enterprise.  It’s time to look beyond that traditional model. 

If we only think of disruption as something to avoid—like disruption of service—we’re missing something.  Disruption is one of my core responsibilities to the enterprise.  It’s not something to be feared; it’s something to be thoughtfully engineered:

• To enable the mission
• To enable the workforce
• To strengthen the bottom line

As CIO I have worked to turn our department from a cost center to a value center by driving an external tech agenda.

Recognizing that millions of older Americans are not online and are missing out on connections they would treasure to family, friends, and their community, we designed and carried out a digital literacy initiative called AARP TEK, which stands for Technology Education & Knowledge.

AARP TEK is a comprehensive national education program tailored to the needs of tech-shy older adults.  These men and women want plain language, free of incomprehensible jargon.  They want one-on-one instruction that is patient and not condescending.

With AARP TEK, they get hands-on workshops, a customized curriculum, and the delivery of user-friendly information.  They get an experience that is accommodating, not intimidating.

The technology training workshops we have held made it clear that a sizable segment of the American population was not being served by the technology industry.  To tackle that issue, we introduced a user-friendly tablet called RealPad, tailored to the needs and wants of older adults who have found personal technology anything but personal.

RealPad is AARP’s first-ever direct to consumer retail product.  It offers a warm and welcoming experience for the technology-shy.  It comes with preloaded apps, large graphics and icons, and it’s Wi-Fi enabled.  It steers clear of impenetrable technology and offers a halo of support through basic videos in clear language and 24-7 live customer service.

RealPad and AARP TEK are prime examples of what we can achieve when IT doesn’t just support the business but invests in being the business.  They demonstrate how we can, in the words of our CEO, Jo Ann Jenkins, “disrupt aging.”

At the same time, we can only enable the mission if we enable the IT workforce.  At the heart of our transformation is building and sustaining an empowered and collaborative team.

That means:

• Elevating collaboration as a cultural value
• Empowering people to make decisions 
• Encouraging thoughtful risk-taking
• Removing bottlenecks like unneeded layers of approval 
• Avoiding rule-heavy governance
• Welcoming streamlined processes and new ideas 
• Creating a flatter organization, where people’s first instinct is collaboration.
• Using data to drive innovation
• Making sure the entire IT team understands the new, broader role in support of the business.

For me and for my management team, it means modeling the kind of collaboration we want to see across-the-board. 

It also means not typecasting staff by their current roles.  As CIO, I’ve found it’s better to ask, “What can you do?” than “What do you do?”

In our new role for IT—focusing not only on keeping the lights on but also on shaping an external agenda—we have combined the hunger and excitement of a start-up with the well-honed execution of an experienced brand.  

By engineering disruption to enable the mission and enable the workforce, we have given strong support to our bottom line:  helping people 50-plus live their best lives.

Sometimes those of us in IT spend so much time on operational business needs that we become disconnected from the core business we are actually in.  In my view, a CIO is a businessperson first, not a technologist.  Our challenge is to drive innovation and leverage technology to support the business.  That is how we provide the greatest value to the enterprise.

An Interview with Jeff Moad, Research Director,Frost & Sullivan

The CIO Impact Awards honor companies or individuals who enable breakthrough new business models and strategies through the innovative use of transformative technologies. Prior to winning an award in the cloud computing category for the global Medical Technologies registration system LICENSALE.COM™, the Arazy Group team spoke with CIO Impact Awards coordinator Jeff Moad.

At the awards ceremony on February 10^th 2015 in San Francisco, CA, USA, Arazy Group also won the Innovator of the Year award, which is given to the top two award-winners with the most outstanding impact on strategic innovation and significant competitive advantage. Arazy Group was represented by President & CEO Benjamin Arazy.

Q: How long have the CIO Impact Awards been awarded and how has the quality of the candidates and winners evolved since that time?

JM: “The CIO Impact Awards are an exciting and relatively new project from Frost & Sullivan currently in their second year. Compared to 2014, there were significantly more nominations and the CIO Impact Awards judges were more impressed with the nominees, scoring the nominees 72% higher on average. The competition was much fiercer as a result.”

Q: How does the jury select candidates for these awards and what are the attributes of an ideal candidate?

JM: “Organizations enter their projects into the program using an online form to describe and nominate the project. The nominations are vetted and scored by a panel of expert judges, which include past CIO Impact Awards winners and Frost & Sullivan expert analysts. Judges look for projects that display exemplary innovation with the potential to transform the market through their technology.”

Q: What criteria are considered in selecting the winners?

JM:  “Applications are judged in eight categories and the winners for each category are selected based on evaluations from a panel of expert judges. The CIOs (Chief Information Officer) whose nominations receive the highest scores are designated as CIO Impact Awards winners and the CIO receiving the highest score in each of the eight project categories is selected as a CIO Innovator of the Year. Judges score nominations on the following five criteria: Process Impact; Bottom-Line Business Impact; Degree of IT/Business Alignment; Appropriate use of Technology; and Project Scale.”

Q:  In your opinion, what made LICENSALE.COM™ stand out to the jury?

JM: “The CIO Impact Awards Judges were clearly impressed with LICENSALE.COM™'s potential to transform the MedTech market by enabling providers to much more rapidly create global markets for their new product innovations. This will not only remove constraints to rapid strategic market expansion, it will make it easier for patients in emerging markets to get the medical care they need.”

Q: In your opinion, what does the LICENSALE.COM™ technology contribute to the profile of the winners this year?

JM: “LICENSALE.COM™ contributes an example of a game-changing entrepreneurial venture enabled by cloud technology. Arazy Group is demonstrating that even a relatively small company can use this ubiquitous technology to disrupt and improve very large markets.”

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See more at: http://www.arazygroup.com/articles/arazygroup/2015/02/12/licensale.com-recognized-as-game-changing-innovation-by-frost-sullivan#sthash.zCGc0SeO.dpuf

Technology Management and the Art of Mastering Change

By Feroz Merchhiya
Chief Technology Officer
Director of Technology
California Insurance Guarantee Association

Technology is at the heart of every business, large or small, nowadays. Technology is what drives profitability in a company. In fact, embracing current technologies has the potential to mean the difference between the success and failure of a company. Many companies, some of the largest out there, have lost a substantial amount of growth over the years simply because they have not adapted as quickly as they should have done to technological changes. As an IT Leader, one of your main roles will be to steer the technological innovation of a company in the right direction.

From Social, Mobile and Cloud to Converged and Hyper-converged infrastructure, technology over the last few years has changed at a rapid pace. Technology which may have been ‘all of the rage’ a year ago is most likely going to be ‘old hat’ now. One of your aims as an IT Leader, and probably where you will spend the bulk of your time, will be keeping an eye on the technological landscape. You will want to see which technologies may benefit your business and look to implement them as quickly as possible.

The heavy reliance on technology for a company has made it difficult to plan. In the past, you were praised if you came up with a robust annual plan. This is not possible nowadays. Some industries are looking at huge changes every couple of months, sometimes even less, and the last thing a company wants to do is have an annual plan in place which simply can’t be changed. As mentioned previously, plenty of companies out there have lost huge amounts of profit because they did not adapt quickly enough. This is, mostly at least, due to the fact that they did not allow themselves to do so. Their processes were too set in stone. They were not willing to adapt to change and their company fell by the wayside. As an IT Leader, you have a responsibility to ensure that this does not happen to your company.

An IT leader, nowadays, needs to take a ‘hands on’ approach when it comes to technology. They need to implement processes which will enable them to analyze how the business is performing on a technological front and whether there is any possibility for change. If there is, the IT leader needs to determine whether that change is the right one to make, and if it is, how to implement that change in the quickest and least-disruptive manner possible. It is difficult. An IT leader, no matter how good they are at their job, who fails on change management front, will be letting down the business that they work for.

It can’t be stressed enough just how important the analysis of technology is. Some companies in the past, FoxMeyer Drug being one of the first that springs to mind, jumped on the ‘change bandwagon’ a little bit too hastily. They invested $100 million into an IT project. While this is a huge amount by today’s standards, it was an even heftier amount back in 1997. They thought that it would help them take their company forward. Guess what? They went bankrupt shortly afterwards. Now, the project they tried to implement was terrible because of various reasons which included  a lack of upfront analysis, project execution and change management. 

However, 1997 saw the start of an age where companies began to shift towards an increased use in technology and FoxMeyer Drug wanted to be the first one there. It didn’t work.
 

Careful analysis does work. The implantation of new IT systems can have a positive impact on business. RFID technology has become huge over the past few years. Companies which have embraced it in the correct manner have earned the expected value. Companies which invested in RFID just for the sake of investing have lost money. 

A good demonstration of the reasoned approach is Disney Resorts, part of the Disney corporation. They have spent close to a billion dollars on the implementation of RFID technology in their parks, which was rolled out in 2008. They have not implemented RFID technology for the sake of it. They have implemented it because it will deliver the value to both Disney and their guests. The point I am trying to get across here is that you need to implement change because it can make a difference, not implement it because you want to keep up with trends. If a technology will not have a positive impact on a business, there is no sense implementing it. 

A more recent example of careful analysis and the implementation of change, more specifically within IT, is PayPal’s adoption of OpenStack Cloud. PayPal has completed a three-year migration and complete revamp of their data center infrastructure including multiple upgrade of OpenStack while going through this change.  Sri Shivananda, VP for Global Platform and infrastructure was quoted in InformationWeek saying, “the OpenStack transition wasn't only a move to a more automated infrastructure. It was an internal cultural change as well, the change undertaken by the IT staff goes well beyond server provisioning,” It was a change in  thoperating paradigm from a traditional manual-build-on-demand model to a multi-tenant private cloud infrastructure with end-to-end automation.

Recent studies and a study back in 2005 revealed that IT Leaders seemed to not be doing enough on analysis and change management. This study carried out by CSC, an IT Consultancy, interviewed 782 IT Leaders. More than half of them felt that it was difficult implementing technology. The most startling figure however was that only 10% believed that the IT project that they were responsible for was actually a success. Again, this could potentially, demonstrate that some companies are a little bit too hasty when it comes to implementing change.

As mentioned previously, change can be a good thing. Innovation and disruption are recurring themes in technology related conversations. Right change is what drives the profitability of a company. A company which is hesitant to change is a company which won’t be in existence for all that long. However, an IT leader needs to strike a careful balance. They need to adapt by all means. This is essential. However, they should not adapt without taking a disciplined approach to the impact on the business. They need to see if the change will be cost-effective and whether it will drive up profitability or drive down cost. It is not just profits that they need to look at either. The IT leader needs to analyze whether the employees can deal with the change. Remember, if you are changing processes on an almost continual basis, staff will become stressed, they won’t know how things work, they will be in a perpetual state of change, and business will suffer. Too little change is bad. Too much change is bad. It is quite a balancing act. 

As I mentioned right at the start, IT is at the center of most businesses nowadays. Almost everything a company does will rely on IT to some extent. This means that the IT department and IT leader can’t just sit back, generate ideas, and tell the rest of the business to just implement them. Or receive requests and execute blindly both approaches will lead to undesirable outcomes. The IT Leader should be the catalyst for change and active partner. They need to be demonstrating how to make and embrace change.  I will close by quoting the Editor’s Note from John P. Kotter‘s article in The Harvard Business Review: “Guiding change may be the ultimate test of a leader—no business survives over the long term if it can’t reinvent itself. But, human nature being what it is, fundamental change is often resisted mightily by the people it most affects: those in the trenches of the business. Thus, leading change is both absolutely essential and incredibly difficult.”

Balancing Act: Innovating with the "Lights On"

By Jay Ferro
Chief Information Officer
American Cancer Society






Today’s CIOs are under attack!! That’s fairly typical in our role, but this time around we’re being bombarded internally and externally by the buzz words du jour: social, mobile, analytics, cloud (SMAC) - and now IoT… the Internet of Things. How are we leveraging these? Why aren’t we doing more?! Don’t we realize that time is running out?! 

Okay - take a deep breath and let’s get our head around what’s going on here.  There’s no doubt that innovation in all its forms (incremental, disruptive, breakthrough) is a critically important part of every organization’s strategy and viability. So important, in fact, that many world class organizations don’t make the distinction between innovation and business as usual: innovation IS business as usual.  Throw in the fact that the speed and competition in the marketplace is unparalleled and now the pressure on CIOs is really turned up.

Luckily most CIOs I know are up for the challenge.  We’ve embraced the idea that we’re now being called on to be Chief Integration and Innovation Officers as much as we’re Chief Information Officers.  There’s just one slight problem: all of that operational stuff that we’re in charge of (aka Business as usual.  Lights On. Run and maintain).  Depending on which survey or research you prefer, estimates for how much time we spend keeping the lights on range from 72%-90% of our capacity, with a recommended goal of 50%-50%.

Clearly we must continue to operate the existing infrastructure and application portfolio that we have - and do it well.  After all, no one cares about innovation when the lights are flickering or e-mail is down.  But how do we shift the balance in our favor and spend more time on work that will truly move the needle in our organizations while still keeping the ship sailing where it needs to go?  Let’s start with 3 key areas:

Operational Excellence:  Continual improvement, to me, is table stakes for any effective leader. Look at this through 4 lenses:

• Simplify Ex. Review your application portfolio and sunset duplicative systems.  Why have multiple versions of the same application OR multiple applications that do the same thing?
• Standardize Ex. Why have 4 different laptop vendors?  Why have 4 versions of Sharepoint?  Choose 1 and do it well.  You’ll regain capacity by needing less specialized skills (obviously helps with cost, documentation, training and support).
• Efficient: Ex. Are you doing things right? Are you processes optimized? Can you automate/integrate manual tasks? Are you measuring and improving? Less wasted time on repetitive or inefficient tasks means more time for more impactful work.
• Effective: Ex. Are you doing the right things? Are you properly prioritizing the work or simply responding to the squeaky wheel? I have found in any portfolio that there are projects or programs that have been there for extended periods of time and no one can really explain why.  Remove these or rejustify them and move them up.  Otherwise they’re a distraction and just noise in the system. 

Strategic sourcing:  If someone can do something faster, better, cheaper and more securely than you can - then why are you doing it?  Yes, it still takes capacity to manage and yes, as CIOs we’re still on the hook for delivery no matter who is doing it - but often handing commodity services off to a partner frees up precious capacity internally for higher level activity. 

Evaluate every area in your shop and determine whether or not it’s a good candidate for outsourcing.  There are certainly other factors in the equation (e.g. regulations, change management, business impact, etc.), but having a matrix of all IT functions with risk and readiness component allows you to pull the trigger when opportunities become available.
 
Make what capacity you DO have MATTER: Even if you’re one of the 90%/10% shops and you’re just getting started - are you making the best use of the 10% you DO have? 

• Do you have a formal innovation process which captures ideas and provides a framework for evaluation/execution?  Start small here - some level of rigor is better than none.
• Do you tolerate, or better yet, celebrate constructive failure? Fail fast, cheap and forward - but be willing to fail.
• Are you allowing your IT team “tinker time” to innovate?
• Are you actively discussing your ideas with peer executives outside of IT to get their commitment to the value of doing this?  Partnerships in the C-Suite are critical. 

This is obviously not a comprehensive list but rather meant to get you started on the path to recapturing a little of that time spent on operational work for efforts that will truly propel your organization forward.  It certainly worked for me:  In less than 3 years my IT organization went from a 90/10% mix to nearly 60/40%.  This has allowed us to deliver truly game changing technology to our staff and volunteers, which ultimately leads to more progress in the battle against cancer.