CIO Talk Radio Blog

If you want to be a business leader, you need to speak like one.  I’m not talking about just being able to explain technical complex topics in terms that business leaders understand.  In this day and age, that is table stakes for a CIO.  I’m referring to understanding and discussing business issues using the lexicon that other business leaders are using in your company.

3 Ways of Rethinking IT to deliver more choice, faster, on a bigger scale

In conversation, Jim Fortner (VP of IT Development & Operations, Global Business Services, P&G), Gregory Simpson (CTO, GE), and John Dick (CIO, Western Union) all make it clear, IT is no longer an enabler, but a true business partner at their enterprises.  (See:  Rethinking IT to deliver Choice, Speed, and Scale)

"There is a new paradigm of leadership ... a real strong business orientation in IT staff folks with strong executive management skills, business skills, understand the process, so it is retooling the organization to readily step up to the challenge. ...business telling us we have such a tremendous opportunity to take on more scope and more work. They are looking for us to come back with more choices and strategies. (Jim Fortner, P&G)

Engineers, developers, project managers and other technical members within an IT organization are living repositories of the organization's technology, architecture, software, and processes. What people know and can do is just as important as their ability to manage. Some retain unique technical knowhow that would be difficult, if not impossible to replace. So how do you retain knowledge crucial to your organization's software development project management, for example? ...Information that may reside in the heads of a select few individuals?

Covering the length and breadth universe so to speak, we sought insights from 3 distinguished CIO’s, asking them to look at their agendas for the coming year. Each was from a different business vertical.  NASA, a government agency born out of the cold war competition with the old soviet Union, embodies our national aspirations. NASA has a thoughtful CIO in Linda Cureton, whose IT is charged with facilitating a grand mission. Ameristar Casinos has a strong CIO in Sheleen Quish, who heads both HR and IT, managing people, processes, and technology for an organization in the business of creating an experience for its guests. Guess? is a retail chain whose IT is headed by Mike Relich, a CIO on the cutting edge of an IT that embraces social media and mobility as communication and marketing tools.

I am an ardent believer that your user community should be self-sufficient with the task of training and supporting employees on business application software and related operational processes. While IT is typically responsible for providing training services on the initial rollout of enterprise systems, it is best to equip your end user community with eLearning and instructor-led learning aids to help them be self-sufficient. This practice allows you to keep your IT staffing and travel costs low while ensuring end users are educated on business software and processes. That being said, I am not suggesting that you don’t offer a Help Desk to support end users. Although, you should try and limit the reasons users contact the Help Desk to real technical issues and reduce the number of tickets relating to questions on system use and business processes.