Who needs a CIO?

I'm still musing over an eye-opening experience a few months ago when I spoke at CIO Magazine's annual conference. You might have expected, as I had, that most Chief Information Officers wanted to know about the latest trends in technology so they could keep ahead of the curve. Nothing of the sort. CIOs, it turns out, are mostly business people who have been given the thankless job of keeping the lights on, IT wise. And the best way to ensure that they stay on is to change as little as possible.

That puts many CIOs in the position of not being the technology innovator in their company, but rather the dead weight keeping the real technology innovators--employees who want to use the tools increasingly available on the wide-open Web to help them do their jobs better--from taking matters into their own hands.

In fairness, the CIOs have a pretty tough job. Nobody thanks them when the network works and the data is backed up, but they get fired when things go wrong. No surprise that they're so risk-adverse and conservative. The pesky users keep trying to, you know, do new things. This causes unpredictable outcomes. Which must be avoided.

The consequence of this is that many CIOs are now just one step above Building Maintenance. They have the unpleasant job of mopping up data spills when they happen, along with enforcing draconian data retention policies sent down from the legal department. They respond to trouble tickets and disable user permissions. They practice saying "No", not "What if..." And they block the ports used by the most popular services, from Skype to Second Life, which always reminds me of the old joke about the English shopkeeper who, when asked what happened to a certain product, answered "We don't stock it anymore. It kept selling out."

The most dramatic example of this is on college campuses, where a generation raised on Google and MySpace meets its first IT department. Needless to say, the kids want nothing to do with "disk storage allocations" and "acceptable use policies". The life of a university CIO is like the life of a telco CEO, fast forwarded by about five years. The users want a dumb pipe, preferably at gigabit speed. They neither need or want the university to administer their email, wikis, blogs, video storage or discussion groups. They want it to simply get out of their way.

No wonder that the prevailing discussion among the university CIOs was about "relevance". Users no longer value what they do. It doesn't require a "C" title to keep fat pipes to the wide-open Internet open. A zillion free hosted services on the web have replaced the functionality of the IT departments service by service, just as minerals replace the cells in dinosaur bones. Talk of extinction was in the air, and rightly so.

Here's a quote from CIO magazine's own coverage of the event:

CIOs don't seem to care all that much about the needs and desires of the next wave of workers, who come from Gen Y and are also referred to as Millenials. The gestalt of the Millenials (a.k.a., the "I'm special" generation) is that they grew up with a boundless sense of self-importance, always have had the Internet, love to share digital content, need to be constantly challenged, want high-level responsibilities immediately, expect a work-life balance with telecommuting options, and will go around IT practices and policies without hesitation. The old-school CIOs I spoke with seemed both annoyed with their audacity and mildly interested in what this new wave of employees could deliver in the IT department.

Emphasis on "mildly".

Comments

[saç ekimi]

thanks

[evden eve nakliyat]

However, they encourage junior/younger staffers to offer up new ways of addressing business issues

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[Sohbet]

thanks for this article.

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[JL Graham]

I've been a CIO for years. Trust me, it's not worth the money.

[Skater]

Excellent article, though I must say that I know CIO''s and they seem very content with their jobs.

[örnekleri]

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[Misafir]

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[vacuum cleaners]

You're quite right, in my opinion,that CIO's have become nothing more (or less) than glorified building maintenance operators. This is because most shareholders, CEO's and MD's don't care much about technology – they expect that what they bought when the company started, should still keep us going. After all, we 'already bought computers' didn't we? Why do we need any more? Strangely, though, the CEO probably has a new laptop every year but thinks that somehow it's appeared magically out of thin air. Every one else can be happy with their 'computer' because – obviously – their job hasn't evolved much, nor are they as 'busy' as mr CEO or MD actually is. Argh! It can make me go crazy.

[Web Tasarimi]

Every one else can be happy with their 'computer' because – obviously – their job hasn't evolved much, nor are they as 'busy' as mr CEO or MD actually is. Argh! It can make me go crazy.

Good Working.

Posted by: vacuum cleaners | October 29, 2007 at 07:59 AM

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[amerikan kapı]

Chris. it is open season on the CIO. But check out any large corporation's IT budget and 80% is spent on external vendors - sw, hw, services and telecomms - and only 20% on CIO and IT staff. And that 80% is stubbbornly difficult to bring down (I know - I help CIOs negotiate IBM, SAP, Oracle and the incumbent vendors down). And the savings that do come out of this has been increasingly forced into compliance/risk mgt spend especially in companies where the CIO reports to the CFO
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[resim]

However, they encourage junior/younger staffers to offer up new ways of addressing business issues. In many cases they will allow "junior" members to lead projects because they are "senior" by virtue of their technical expertise.

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[makyaj]

That's a pretty self-serving and, at least in my experience, inaccurate statement.

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Business case? This is obviously a real corporate bureaucrat talking here. This is just the kind of corporate rigid nonsense ?

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Every one else can be happy with their 'computer' because – obviously – their job hasn't evolved much, nor are they as 'busy' as mr CEO or MD actually is. Argh! It can make me go crazy.

Good Working

[kadin]

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And the savings that do come out of this has been increasingly forced into compliance/risk mgt spend especially in companies where the CIO reports to the CFO

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