Let’s continue with our speculation about the nature of enterprise IT organizations in 2017. I’m reminded about a book I read many years ago called When Old Technologies Were New by Carolyn Marvin. In the early days of electrification, most large companies would have a Vice President, Electrification. It made me think then would the time come when Chief Information Officer was a relic of a bygone age?
I’m not sure if the CIO role will have disappeared by 2017, but it will have changed significantly. It already has. Many CIO’s today have responsibility for at least one major business process (e.g., supply chain). Many have expanded their scope to include a range of enterprise shared services. Some have morphed into Chief Innovation Officers. I guess that the question is, if information is everywhere, and if IT is ubiquitous, is there a role for a Chief Information or Chief IT Officer? Does it get closer to (merge with?) the Chief Finance Officer role, and the fiduciary and legal responsibilities that come with that role? Or does it go the way of the Chief Electrification Officer, and the shift from competing electric supply systems (AC, DC, etc.) and huge centralized motors to electricity as a common utility, and tiny motors distributed to the point of application?
I think it helps to think about two different types of IT and two different broad roles. The types are IT infrastructure – the common and shared base of IT capability and services used across the enterprise, and IT applications – those things that sit on top of the infrastructure, but are specialized to address a specific business need. Simply stated, there needs to be a single point of coordination for IT infrastructure, but not necessarily for business-specific applications, which one could argue should be organizationally located within the business function, process or unit that needs them. The only problem with this logic is that things shift over time – what was business-specific application yesterday may well be IT infrastructure today. In fact, what was proprietary IT infrastructure today, may well migrate to public, open infrastructure tomorrow. Managing this trend over time calls for a continuous examination of IT services and capabilities, and decided what needs to be common and standardized versus what can be left to evolve against needs.
The other way of splitting the IT world is into IT demand management roles and IT supply management roles. This is becoming an increasingly common approach with IT leaders (may be called CIO or CTO) centrally coordinating the supply side, and business unit, or increasingly business process focused “mini-CIO’s” leading the demand side. Again, the tendency for things to drift either way across the demand/supply interface complicates the challenge of managing an effective demand-supply engagement model.
With all that said, my vision of 2017 is for there to be much more formality, sophistication and discipline around the IT infrastructure capability, with much higher reliance on “open, public” infrastructures, and a far broader range of infrastructure service providers, all being coordinated the way an effective Procurement function works, and for most of the other roles (e.g., demand management, business innovation, product management) being liberally dispersed deep inside the business, often associated with specific business process oriented roles. Does that mean the end of the CIO as we know it today? Probably!
Filed under: IS Management, IT Infrastructure, IT Management, IT Maturity Tagged: | CIO, CTO, Demand Maturity, IT infrastructure, Supply Management
along with demand management, another area where the business units are asking is to enable them to manage the IT services consumption.
just like demand management is an integral part of any IT shared services, similarly consumption management is going to become an increasingly sought after function by the business units as it would help them streamline their demand and thus control their expenditure on IT.
Excellent point! Good service management should equip service consumers with the information they need to be efficient and responsible service consumers. It’s another of those paradoxes – poorly managed services beget irresponsible consumption, which drives up costs. i.e, being cheap about service management is an expensive thing to do!
exactly.
though i have not seen many CIO’s who are able to provide the address the need for consumption management. in most cases when IT shared services unit send the bill to the business units, there is a huge debate on sla’s and quality of services the IT unit is charging the business unit for.
an important step is to develop the capability as part of IT shared services strategy to be able to measure the the committed sla’s and be transparent to the business owners about it.
my own post on the nuances about topics on IT that have tickled my fancy – inthepassing.wordpress.com
inthepassing.wordpress.com looks like a worthy blog – I have added to my reader – thanks!
Great post!