A Twitter comment yesterday quoted a CIO as saying, “It’s hard to be strategic with your pants on fire.”
No doubt about it--unless that CIO’s wearing asbestos long-johns, that’s definitely a tough maneuver to execute.
But if we're trying to conjure up truly difficult scenarios, I’ll see that pants-on-fire bet and double it: what’s really hard for CIOs is to be strategic when they’re unemployed. Out of a job because they couldn't juggle the brutal but essential loads imposed by the strategic urgency of today's always-on global economy.
In that clever pants-on-fire line, substitute CEO for CIO: how much confidence will a CEO earn if he or she attempts to hedge responsibilities with the conditional qualifier that “It’s hard to be strategic with your pants on fire”?
As my dear mother used to tell her knucklehead sons, “If it was easy, anybody could do it.” And in that context, I think that bet-hedging attitude among CIOs has got to go the way of the TRS-80: it was novel and convenient in its time, but today it’s hopelessly out of date, overmatched, and irrelevant.
In fact, I’d submit that that sort of attitude is one of the primary reasons CIOs in some organizations—perhaps many/most organizations—are seen as last among C-level equals. And with an outlook like that--strategic thinking and action requires calm and static environments--they deserve such a ranking.
It’s not quite a trigger for career suicide, but it sure as heck puts limits on that executive’s potential to advance, to gain credibility with the CEO and the board, and to be seen by peers as indispensable to the organization’s growth, innovation, and success.
Speaking of career suicide for CIOs, today’s business challenges and the rapidly evolving pace of technology change are combining to generate a new set of career-ending threats for the chief information officer, and I’d like to suggest four in particular.
Of course, this list isn’t meant to be all-encompassing, and doesn’t include catastrophic failures such as transaction systems going down for extended periods, lousy security, or out-of-control spending and such. Rather, these new threats arise from the parallel new opportunities that await business-driven CEOs who are willing and eager to transcend the old confines of the CIO position and move up to being strategic leaders primarily focused on growth and innovation and customers.
Threat #1: Lack of Vision. No matter how technically astute, no matter how many wildly complex projects have been completed, no matter how dependable, CIOs today will not succeed and will need to be replaced if they don’t have an ability to see not only where their company and industry are and have been, but where they are headed, why they’re headed that way, and what all-new minefields and opportunities are looming. Business models and processes are mutating faster than ever before, customer tastes and requirements are moving even faster than that, and new technologies—social, mobile, customer experience, cloud suites, private clouds, in-memory computing, and more—will continue to pour into the market. CIOs have to have the vision to be able to stay on top of and harness the power of those changes rather than be intimidated and overwhelmed by them.
Threat #2: Lack of Leadership. For too long, many CIOs have been willing to sit at the kids’ table, waiting for the grown-ups at the big table to decide what would be done and how it would be done and why. CIOs today need to be active and inspiring participants in those conversations and relentless contributors to new ways for their companies to get closer to customers, find new sources of revenue, create new products more quickly, accelerate all facets of their operations, and embed value-creating technologies in not just the IT infrastructure but in the company’s products, services, processes, and culture.
Threat #3: Trying to Resist the Social/Mobile Revolution. Whatever the objection to them and however valid those objections might be in theory, social and mobile technologies and processes are triggering sweeping improvements in how companies communicate with customers and employees, monitor discussions around their brands, engage customers and prospects more immediately and precisely, and gain real-time insights into powerful market trends and possibilities. Just a few years ago, this level of change and opportunity would have been almost unfathomable, and any CIO who tries to hold back the surge because of well-intentioned but tactical concerns over security or governance or standards is going to get overruled, then marginalized, and then reassigned.
Threat #4: Surrendering to the 80/20 budget trap. In a recent column called The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2013, I ranked this as the #1 priority for CIOs in the coming year. The rationale is simple—not easy, but simple: unless CIOs lead the way in reducing the portion of their overall IT budgets now spent on low-value infrastructure and keeping the lights on (it’s typically between 70% and 80%), then they will never liberate the funds necessary to invest in and create customer-facing applications and other innovative approaches to growth and engagement. In the past, suitable alternatives to server sprawl and grossly underutilized storage weren’t available; today they are. And those alternatives represent the key for CIOs to modernize their infrastructure to match the performance needs of tomorrow while also bending the spending curve away from low-value clutter to high-value innovation. The CIO’s mantra should be this: more innovation, less integration.
Is it easy? Certainly not.
Will you sometimes have to be strategic while your pants—heck, your entire outfit—are on fire? Absolutely.
But that’s the price of being a world-changing business-technology here in the transformative days of late 2012. Onward!
(Recommended Reading: The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2013 )
