The CIO’s job is, by definition, all about information. But on a personal level, just how good are IT leaders at communicating? My latest feature for silicon.com investigates:
The clue is in the job title - the CIO’s role is all about information. A great IT leader manages data to create useful intelligence for the business.
Such knowledge is the lifeblood of the organisation. Executives across different lines of business can use up-to-date information to make crucial decisions about internal projects and external customer-facing services.
Malcolm Simpkin, CIO of Aviva, agrees with the sentiment that the IT leader plays a crucial role in helping to create intelligence for the business. The information-aware CIO, he says, is more than simply a necessary executive evil.
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The finance sector is famously behind other industries in the use of social media. Co-operative Financial Services IT chief Jim Slack aims to change that situation, as my latest feature for silicon.com shows.
Financial services firms are probably not the first type of business you would think of when it comes to the adoption of social media. In fact, they might be the last.
silicon.com recently reported the suggestion that case law from 1924 prevents finance companies from publicly identifying an individual who has an account with them, which makes responding to customer queries via social media a potential legal minefield.
Other reports regularly suggest banking CIOs have been slow to adopt social media. But Jim Slack, the business leader of IT operations and development at Co-operative Financial Services (CFS), is encouraging his organisation to take a different stance.
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Whether blogging about their area of expertise or tweeting about business best practice, more CIOs are choosing to express their views through collaborative technology. Here’s my latest feature for silicon.com about the use of social media by IT leaders:
More senior IT leaders are beginning to dabble in social media and are finding new ways to help the business. So, where will social CIOs go next? Do IT leaders use social media to attract potential employees and do they use collaborative tools to keep new workers engaged?
Kcom Group started to use social media for recruitment in 2010, establishing a Twitter account for potential openings. Dean Branton, director of customer operations and group CIO at the telecoms specialist, said the organisation’s LinkedIn recruitment pages launched earlier this year and are focused on building a network of contacts.
“We have a full recruiter seat on LinkedIn, which allows us to proactively search for candidates, whose information can be imported into a PDF for hiring managers to review,” Branton said. The group’s Kcom recruitment page also provides links to relevant web sites and testimonials from current employees.
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The consumerisation of IT is pushing social media onto the business agenda and blurring links between CIOs and their external lives, according to my latest feature for silicon.com:
JLT Group CIO Ian Cohen is a social media fan who has encouraging words for IT leaders wondering how to straddle the gap between personal and business identities to make the most of online collaboration tools.
“Try it,” Cohen said. “Give it a go, based on the type of things that interest you. The CIO needs to lead the debate on social media for the chief executive, so it makes sense to develop your position.” Finance CIO Cohen is a prolific user of social media, tweeting about business, football and music from his @coe62 account.
He is also a fan of LinkedIn and Facebook, and has taken steps to test enterprise-ready social tools behind the JLT firewall. When it comes to the divide between business and personal life on social media, Cohen suggests the links between work and external lives are blurring at an executive level.
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The days of supplier relationships simply being about establishing a one-to-one partnership seem to be over. The complexity of modern provider relationships requires new approaches, as illustrated by this feature by me for silicon.com on supplier engagement:
People, so the popular adage goes, buy from people. That maxim is particularly true in business IT, where CIOs must first understand line-of-business demands and then create effective relationships with key suppliers to produce anticipated benefits.
But how can CIOs engage with providers to meet those much-desired business outcomes and what type of challenges will need to be overcome? In many cases, the supplier relationship is no longer as simple as the establishment of a one-to-one partnership.
The days of a company outsourcing its IT to a single provider are fast becoming a thing of the past. The total value of contracts worth €20m or more stood at €10.5bn at the end of the fourth quarter of 2010, according to outsourcing advisory firm TPI. That total, although significant, represented a 31 per cent drop from the fourth quarter of 2009 figure.
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For CIOs, one thing is certain: the increasing interest in social media means IT leaders now have to spend more time with the marketing executive. Here’s my latest feature for silicon.com, which shows that a successful social strategy requires a confluence of CIO and CMO expertise:
From Facebook pages to Twitter profiles, executives round the board table will be expecting someone in the organisation to establish the organisation’s social-media strategy. While social media provides a means for the chief marketing officer (CMO) to engage with potential customers, it is the CIO who will be expected to provide the technical knowledge to make such digital marketing strategies a business reality.
“I spend more time now with the chief commercial officer, who is responsible to marketing, because of the criticality of social media,” said easyJet CIO Trevor Didcock, when asked whether he has spent more time with the marketing department during the past 12 months.
Didcock recognises the web and social media are crucial, yet he also recognises the business could do more, suggesting that many of his company’s activities – such as advertising on Facebook and recruitment through LinkedIn – are reactive rather than proactive. The answer is a confluence of CIO and CMO expertise.
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Despite suggestions that the cloud would remove responsibilities from the shoulders of the CIO, the converse now looks to be true – here’s my latest article for silicon.com on the cloud:
“The CIO is dead,” screamed the headline to an article on silicon.com’s sister site, TechRepublic. The story suggested on-demand computing would quickly mean technology purchasing decisionscould be decentralised to line-of-business executives, rather than being made by a dedicated IT department.
Two years later, the cloud remains a work in progress and the management reality behind on-demand IT has hit home. Someone, somewhere simply must be responsible for the policies and strategies associated to the use of the cloud – and that person is still the CIO.
As the executive charged with making the most of internal and external technology resources, the IT chief has to steer the organisation towards secure on-demand computing. And that remains a tricky path.
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The lure of cost savings may be pushing businesses towards the cloud, but who will ultimately balance the financial arguments with the risk factors? Here’s another feature I’ve put together about on-demand computing for silicon.com:
Pressure to look to the cloud, and its potential for cost-effective IT delivery, comes from all areas of the business. But who is more concerned about information security?
Is the CIO the executive who is most anxious about data moving beyond the corporate firewall and into the cloud, or is the finance director more worried about risk?
“There are multiple constituents,” suggests Rebecca Jacoby, global CIO at networking giant Cisco. “By nature, a big part of a CIO’s job is risk management and an understanding of specific security concerns. When it comes to the cloud, security is a real risk and the technology isn’t necessarily at the right level for most organisations at the moment.”
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Lock-in, data security, compliance and lack of control all feature on CIOs’ lists of cloud issues, but this feature by me for silicon.com shows how bigger problems may be sitting on the IT leader’s doorstep:
The biggest inhibitors to the cloud are well known and usually include issues such as data security, regulatory compliance and vendor lock-in. These barriers usually involve external factors, including the stability of suppliers and the influence of regulatory bodies.
Such concerns are crucial, but is there too much focus on external factors at the expense of internal processes? Are CIOs worrying too much about on-demand factors beyond their control and not paying enough attention to the last mile of the network?
IT leaders can spend time and money establishing strong partnerships with suppliers that meet tight demands on information security and data access. But any agreement with external partners, and the potential to use technology on demand, is only as valuable as the supporting internal structure.
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With the rise of the cloud and stronger procurement functions, some organisations may ask whether they really need an IT function. The following feature by me for silicon.com explains why many CIOs think it’s vital they move beyond technology implementation and operation:
“CIOs now have a better opportunity than ever before to move beyond the confines of IT,” says Catherine Doran, director of corporate development for infrastructure specialist Network Rail.
She should know. Doran has followed 30 years’ experience in business technology, and CIO roles at BT and CapitalOne, with what is often seen as the apotheosis for IT leaders: a senior executive position around the boardroom table at a blue-chip organisation.
In Doran’s case, the old adage that CIO really stands for ‘career is over’ is redundant. She has used the CIO position as a means to demonstrate her broader business abilities. The result is that Doran is judged on her capability to lead transformation across the organisation and not just in the IT department. So, how has she managed to make the transition?
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