Corporate IT in a World of IT Proliferation

by Bill Haser – VP and CIO – Tenneco

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In today’s world grandmothers are seamlessly connecting to their pre-school grandchildren using devices and capabilities that a decade ago would have required a couple of IT technicians to test, set up and operate. This is just one example of how technology has been taken out of the hands of the traditional IT organization. Today’s tools, delivery methods, and interfaces are changing the role of IT. My question for the conference is how should IT evolve in the face of this shift?

Today it seems anyone can find a solution provider to provide capabilities that used to take IT months to provide. So what can IT do to ensure the value from IT is driving the right business results? In my opinion there are four capabilities the IT department is uniquely positioned to deliver.

Select the Right Technology Portfolio: IT architects should be very knowledgeable on developing technologies. They must also understand what the business success drivers and opportunities are. Combining the two areas allows IT and the business to identify which technologies to place their bets on.

Solution Integration: IT solutions require access to data and information from across the enterprise to be truly effective. IT is uniquely positioned to provide the integration functions to get the right data to the right places at the right time. CIO’s must ensure that they can provide for seamless integration of new tools and solutions.

Information Security: Information security is a bigger risk for companies today than ever before. There are too many examples of someone not considering a risk, and entrusting critical data to an unsecure solution. IT must be in a position to evaluate the risks, propose counter measures,monitor for intrusions, and react to threats for both internally and externally provided solutions.

IT Solution Provider Management: All solutions providers would prefer to work with naïve customers. Besides security, these customers are not always aware of what service level requirements are and how they can be tracked. IT departments have this knowledge, but are frequently seen as a hindrance to quick benefit realization from a new solution. IT must evolve to quickly bring new solutions on board with the right service levels and performance management tools.

These capabilities diverge from the last decades key competencies. Running a data center, developing new programs, and managing the network are evolving away from the corporate IT department. There will be a significant shift in the competencies required to manage in tomorrow’s environment. The IT leadership team must be thinking about how their people need to change, and putting plans in place to ensure they have the right human capital to support the new IT model. Just as in the past, the ability to attract, develop, and retain talent is still going to be the key to ensuring an organization maximizes the value of IT.

A new CIO : The Chief Innovation Officer

by Wole Akpose – CIO – Morgan State University

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Innovation is the wellspring of excellence and excellence is the arrowhead of quality. Organization excellence, the reward of organizational commitment to total quality is the hallmark of the most innovative, productive model organizations across industry verticals from not-for-profit entities (including government agencies, aid organizations, public institutions such as schools, medical facilities and research organizations) to for-profit organizations or commercial entities.

For more than a century, technology, particularly information related technology has provided the fuel that helped drive innovation across various organizations from improvements in vote-counting to medical advances and of course to the many innovations in pedagogy and research. Technology has simplified and expanded the reach of admissions offices and has served as the critical glue for retention, early assessment, creativity in the classroom and a key tool for many other functions in the education space.

The interconnection between technology, quality, excellence and innovation is leading many organizations to rethink their information technology strategy and operation into an innovation generating strategy. While organizations transitioned into a role of chief information officer at the beginning of this century; where the chief information officer’s role was the oversight of technology deployment enterprise-wide and the assurance that such deployments are in alignment with organization’s mission, an increasing number of chief information officers are being tasked with an innovation portfolio in recognition of the outsized contribution technology could make in corporate agility and innovation.

Innovation varies across organization (intra or inter), but increasingly, leading organizations are concluding that innovation often stems from or can be contributed to by the alignment of technology with corporate mission. Many organizations, including the State of Maryland are beginning to carve out a innovation roles and title such as Chief Innovation Officer, Directory of Technology and Innovation, Chief Medical Innovation Officer, Director of Corporate Performance and Innovation etc. But the title in itself does not define the role, rather it is a recognition of a the need to have a corporate arrowhead for innovation. Indeed, the role of a chief innovation officer needs to be defined and clarified, as that of the chief information officer was in the late 1990s and the Chief Information Security Officer was in the mid- 2000. Here is a description of what the role of chief innovation officer is in an organization.

Like all other executive positions, a chief innovation officer is an agent of the chief executive officer whose job is to help execute the vision of the CEO. In an increasingly networked, global and competitive world, a chief innovation officer’s role would be to help identify resources, tools and opportunities to maintain the sustainability of the organization. This process will often lead from the use of technology to enhance capabilities, optimization of resources and the delivery of services which customers would always be willing to pay for (in whatever the industry’s currency is) and for which customers would always be glad to pay for.

Since innovation has two critical parts, quality (excellence) and technology; a functional chief innovation officer will have a portfolio that crosses both segments. In an ideal situation, a chief innovation officer will have the reporting of a chief technology officer, a chief quality officer, and perhaps a chief risk officer (whose function would include all types of risks). Such structure will ensure that quality programs, which can often benefit from technology, are fully coordinated with technology programs and that all these are appropriately appraised for the risks and opportunities they provide.

Figure 1 The New CIO – Innovation, Technology, Management

Mature organizations usually have chief operations officers (although the role of COO is imbued in that of the CEO/President in smaller organizations) to whom chief information officer and a chief quality officers (or in some organizations, an ombudsman) report. With the increasing adoption of corporate quality programs such as Six Sigma and Lean, some organizations have even created a role for chief performance officers, but such role mirrors the chief quality officer. Indeed, some will argue that performance and quality are not synonymous, but that is a function of perspective. If performance is defined in terms of quality, then the two are indeed synonymous. Today, there is a need to fundamentally align corporate information technology, quality and performance into a forward-looking, capacity-optimizing and capability-enhancing paradigm for organizational innovation. An engine of corporate sustainability, value creation and growth.

Thus, a chief innovation officer (the new CIO) will provide an organization with appropriate leadership to channel its resources optimally so as to maintain and or retain a leadership role in concert with its vision. It is a role that focuses on value creation for the enterprise (yes, that is the role of all members of the organization, but innovation is truly the art of value creation). Value is what consumers demand from products and services, it is what consumers consider quality, it what they reward. Innovation is the engine of value creation. So a “new CIO” is an organization’s chief value creator.

For a university, a chief innovation officer with direct reports to the President will, depending on resources and size of the university, have a technology and quality portfolio and can discharge such directly or via deputies. In a small or medium sized university, or in cases with minimal staff, the portfolios are better imbued in a single individual.

The technology role will include coordination and alignment of all technology resources to assure optimal use of investments, security of data and information, and enhancement of research and pedagogy. The quality role will include helping entities within the university optimize their processes, leaning out wastes and measuring productivity to align overall University resources with University mission.

The expectation is total quality and an endemic proliferation of a culture of excellence. The structure is presented in fig. 1

Exposure to the technological revolution

By Jeff Wieczorek CIO at Member One Federal Credit Union

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Information technology is becoming less of a technical skill and more of an entrepreneurial service; not to diminish the role of programmers, but change the way we view them.

Many CIOs today are astute with the proven standards of technology that have provided a more efficient means of doing business and proven successes; however, the greatest change being witnessed today is that the same technology is being used in a non-standard way and spans across all industries. Therefore, CIOs that have a more operational service approach to their business model will be better suited to understand and react to the technology shift that is occurring today.

As young professionals navigate their careers, they are bringing more creative usefulness to the technology landscape. The developer, marketer, and operations professional are displaying a level of technological skills and understanding that are changing the way we design and operate within our organizations. Exposure to the technological revolution is hitting us at all sides and these young professionals are capitalizing on that experience. They are using it to drive change and challenge the seasoned technology leaders wherever they are and at whatever level they reside in the organization.

This newly evolved approach to changing the current standard practices is already gaining traction in industries that typically lag behind the leading edge corporations. Financial institutions are taking advantage of these young entrepreneurs by enlisting them in advisory committees and discussion groups to hear in real time what the end users are demanding. This direct line to the end user and combining it with the emerging professionals is proving to be a competitive advantage over those who do not mine information from their supporters. This is a long way from the IT professional that drove business models based on his level of knowledge, budgets and the software limitations.

Successful technology leaders of the future will be molded from more artistic and visionary backgrounds and less scientific as the two very different approaches become melded together.

Google© Glass is a great example of the merging approaches to technology providing a service that is driven by infusing creative artistic approaches and technology for providing information to the user. In recent articles posted in Venturebeat.com specifically about augmented reality is evidence that the tech user of the future will have more available knowledge and repetitive exposure to information than ever before. The technology channel becomes your future organizational subject matter expert and not the person.

So as our IT leaders and drivers of change traverse through the organizational landscape it would behoove them to not only chop down the silos for functional reasons but also to mine for human capital and talent.