Are You Maneuverable?
by Rich Karlgaard featuring Peter High, published on Forbes
10-15-2014
Excerpt from the article:
Two executive roles within companies are sure to change: the chief information officer (CIO) and the chief marketing officer (CMO). The CIO must figure out how to keep the company–and its vast numbers of maneuverable small teams–informed and flexible. CIO consultant Peter High writes about the weak link in most companies in his new book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy (Wiley). It’s a lack of coherence between corporate and divisional strategies and, worse, among divisions. Maneuverability is chaos without such coherence. CIOs will need to fix that.
The CMO will spend less time communicating to the outside world and more time shaping the inside story, for employees and contractors. What else can hold a liquid organization together but purpose, values and story?
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
Father Of The World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, Reflects On The First 25 Years
by Peter High, published on Forbes
10-13-2014
This past week, I spoke at IPExpo Europe in London, and I was honored to have Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web as a fellow speaker. He reflected on the 25 years that have passed since he helped create the Internet. He raised a number of interesting topics during the course of his presentation.
First, he indicated that he does not regret baking greater security into the initial version of the web saying, “It might not have taken off if it had been too difficult.” Like the Internet entrepreneurs who would leverage the platform he helped create, he was concerned that the web have an audience first before evaluating changes that would be necessary.
He did go on to say that it is essential that the Internet allow for greater user privacy. “The idea that privacy is dead is hopelessly sad,” Berners-Lee said. “We have to build systems that allow for privacy…People have the right to see how their data is being used.” As examples, he indicated that individuals’ personal medical data should be accessible to doctors and first responders, but not to insurance companies who might use the data to reject potential customers or raise their rates. He went on to say, “We should build a world where I have control of my data and sell it to you. Users should have control, access to and ownership of their data.”
Gartner: Top 10 Strategic IT Trends for 2015
10-07-2014
Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is under way in Orlando. As always, their IT experts have identified what they believe to be the top-ten information technology trends for the year ahead. Strategic technology trends are defined as having potentially significant impact on organizations in the next three years. Here is a summary of the trends:
1. Computing Everywhere
2. The Internet of Things (IoT)
3. 3D Printing
4. Advanced, Pervasive, Invisible Analytics
5. Context-Rich Systems
6. Smart Machines
7. Cloud/Client Architecture
8. Software-Defined Infrastructure and Applications
9. Web-Scale IT
10. Risk-Based Security and Self-Protection
The CIO Takes Over Corporate Strategy: An Interview With Chris Laping Of Red Robin
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
10-06-2014
Chief information officers are playing an increased role in running strategy for their companies. As I mention in my book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy, the reasons for this include that IT now needs to bring to life the strategic imperatives of every part of the company, and it behooves CIOs to become more woven into the fabric of the strategic planning process of all parts of the company. A CIO who finds strategic plans lacking, or where it produces plans that are of differing levels of clarity and granularity (rendering them difficult to compare and contrast) should take matters into his or her own hands, both to ensure that the right priorities are made and for self-preservation.
One of my favorite stories from the book is from Chris Laping, who joined Red Robin as CIO in June of 2007. Laping has the “killer combination” that so many of the people featured in the CIO-Plus and Beyond CIO series have exhibited. He is an engineer with an MBA. He also spent time as a consultant. Therefore, he is a tech savvy problem solver with a mind geared toward developing business ideas that will benefit the entire company and its customers. Laping’s recommendation led to him being named Senior Vice President of Business Transformation, which made him the de facto head of strategy for the company. As someone who personifies the strategic CIO, I reached out to Laping to learn more about how this evolution came about.
(This is the second article in the Strategic CIO series. Read the opening piece in the series, Does IT Strategy Matter?. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Chris, talk about the strategy setting process at Red Robin when you originally joined the company. How was it organized, and who (if any one person) led it?
Chris Laping: When I joined Red Robin, the company was just beginning to build its strategic planning process. I think the team inherently knew that building alignment for the priorities of the business was important, but since the company was moving 100 miles per hour, it was difficult to push the pause button and refocus the energy inward. At that time, the teams were also working cooperatively versus collaboratively. Therefore, to me it felt a little frenetic, disorganized and like 100 Senators in the room representing the needs of their own departments and stakeholders.
High: What challenges did you, as CIO, face in interpreting the disparate plans of the various executives across the company?
Laping: I think an organization’s CIO is often in the position of trying to balance the needs of multiple stakeholders. If you think about it, the theory of optimization says that one thing usually comes at the expense of another…so the biggest challenge a CIO can face is bringing those stakeholders to the table and facilitating an open (and emotion-free, if possible) discussion about the needs of the business. In other words, the company will never be more successful than when all team members are in the boat rowing the same direction. The only other option is to try to make those decisions on your own and on behalf of the business in an ivory tower…and good luck with that.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com
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Tim McCabe’s Journey From Legal And Sourcing Leader To CIO Of Delphi Automotive
10-01-2014
Early in his career, Tim McCabe would not have anticipated that he would lead IT for a multi-billion dollar company. He studied philosophy as an undergraduate rather than focusing on a technical discipline. He joined the legal department at General Motors, and led Global Outsourcing for the automotive behemoth. It was during this time that he integrated more deeply into the IT department, first at General Motors, and later as Director of Strategy and Sourcing for Delphi Automotive. When he took over the chief information officer responsibilities at Delphi, he did so as a business-centric IT leader. He notes that even as CIO, he is a business leader first, and a technology leader second.
(This is the sixth article in the business CIOs series. To read past interviews with CIOs from GE, Marriott, and Texas Instruments, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You took on this role in 2008—it is hard to think about that year without remembering the economic malaise that greeted us all then. You are in an industry, among several, that was most acutely impacted by that. Can you talk about what that experience was like in your early days and the way it helped you form your original plans as CIO?
Tim McCabe: To dial the clock back a bit, Delphi had spun out from General Motors as an independent company in 1999, and in the early 2000s it became clear to leadership that our position in the marketplace was not going to be sustainable. We had to go through a Chapter 11 filing, which we think of as the beginning of the transformation.
In early 2006 I was recruited from GM to come and join Delphi as part of the overall IT activity and company transformation. The objective was to lead a three-prong strategy to align costs to the company’s revenue, so we were focused on outsourcing, driving the company towards common platforms, and working with the internal IT team to align capabilities with business realities. We played a role in helping to return some of the money being spent around the globe on IT, and over the course of three years were able to reduce IT costs from over 2% to roughly 1.2%. We sustained that spend as we went through the overall footprint rotation and product offering transformation that the business went through. The objective through all of this was to reduce costs without creating any additional business risk.
My main objective was to ensure we did not miss a single shipment to one of our customers; job one was to reduce costs, improve services, and better our position in the marketplace. Second, we transformed a relatively large, insourced IT organization that was mostly federated and regionally operated into a single, global organization. We wrote and created over 200 processes so we could execute as a global team. We also retrained the staff that we retained through outsourcing. A big part of our change was to not only inform, but to educate our colleagues on the change we were going through and the value we were going to bring back to them. That was a big part of my formative years at Delphi.
To explore the full collection of Business CIO Series articles, please click here.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Tim, click here.
IT’s Gold Medal: Practicing Top IT Strategy
by Peter High, published on CIO Journal
09-30-2014
CIOs have been accused of being better at tactics than strategy. This may be a result of the legacy of their leading what has long been considered a support organization of the company. Also the quarterly earnings of public companies often force the enterprise to plan more in the short-term rather than the long-term. But imagine if your next major deliverable was in four years? How would you plan?
Peter High, in an excerpt from his new book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy, writes of how Gerry Pennell, the CIO of the London 2012 Olympic Games, leveraged strategic thinking to develop a plan for the games that was flexible enough to accommodate changes along the way. CIOs of more traditional enterprises have much to learn from the way in which he went about his job. What follows is an excerpt from a chapter devoted solely to Mr. Pennell.
In November of 2008, Gerry Pennell became CIO for the ultimate world sporting and cultural event, the Olympic Games, whose cauldron would be lit by the Olympic torch in London on July 27, 2012, and burn for a fortnight. The Beijing Olympics had recently concluded, and he stared down the road at nearly four years of planning and execution as part of the event’s top organizing committee. The scale of what he had to pull off coupled with the high bar set by the example of Beijing were motivation enough for Pennell to assemble a team, and to begin to set a plan.
But his early steps were complicated by the fact that the strategic plans for the other functions the committee oversaw were in their nascent stages at best. To Pennell, that meant setting a direction for the technological approach to the Games that would still be malleable enough to change as he engaged further with his fellow committee leaders. He couldn’t wait for them to get started.
To read the full article, please visit CIO Journal
IT Can Do It! Peter High On The CIO’s New Role
by Gil Press, published on Forbes
09-29-2014
Peter High has an urgent message to CIOs everywhere: You Can Do It! The sub-title of his new book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation, also makes it clear that his clarion call is more broadly aimed at CEOs and other senior executives who seek advice on how to harness the digital perfect storm. The book, says High, is about “how IT can become a tremendous force for improving the strategic work of the company as a whole.”
All businesses and organizations today are digital. They use IT to innovate the means by which they interact with their outside constituencies—customers, partners, suppliers—and the ways by which they manage their internal operations and motivate their employees. But with a half-century legacy of a continuously widening gap between rapid technological change and inadequate organizational adaptation, IT is still regarded in many quarters as a “cost center.” With this legacy IT role goes the definition of the CIO as a cost-cutter and a process expert. IT, even in this digital age, is supposed to keep “the trains running” and the “lights on.”
This perception of the role of the IT organization has led to endless complaints about the CIO “not having a seat at the table.” The CIO has not been involved in deliberations among senior executives regarding where the business is going and has been left out of the development of the strategy of the business. Even in the increasingly common situation where the CIO is involved with the development of the overall strategy of the organization, the short- and long-term goals of the IT organization are developed as a follow-on component of that strategy.
Long-held perceptions are difficult to change, especially for the people being pegged as followers rather than leaders. High references Gary Beach, the publisher emeritus of CIO magazine, who has found in fifteen years of surveying CIOs that only 9%—at most—saw themselves as “game changers” in their workplace. “I am not surprised,” writes High, “that CIOs might have suffered from a lack of confidence in the late 1980s or early 1990s, but during current times when IT is so clearly growing in importance, how could this continue to be the case?”
New Role Needed: Business Information Officer
by Peter High, published on InformationWeek
We’ve been hearing for decades that IT must “align with the business,” that CIOs must form true partnerships with their peers in marketing, finance, HR, and other disciplines. So why do we continue to see new roles and titles emerging (chief digital officer, chief innovation officer, chief data officer, etc.) that co-opt part of the CIO’s strategic responsibilities?
Here’s the challenge for CIOs: While the average marketing or finance executive doesn’t have to become an expert in a range of disciplines, the CIO is expected to develop a fluency in all of them. And this is too daunting a responsibility for any single individual.
Rather than take strategic responsibilities away from the CIO, companies should consider creating a new position — or new class of positions — that helps the CIO establish and cement a more strategic relationship with other divisional leaders. That position is business information officer, or BIO.
In my new book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation, I profile a number of top CIOs who have done just that, typically appointing several BIOs who operate in concert. Among them are the CIOs of Best Buy, BJ’s, Capital One, Kaiser Permanente, New York Life, PNC, SAP, Siemens, and World Fuel Services. Although each company has incorporated unique nuances into the role, there are common characteristics.
To read the full article, please visit InformationWeek
Peter High
9-25-2014
Excerpt from the Article:
André Mendes started working at the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) as CIO in late 2009. In doing so, he joined a global multimedia organization and, like other businesses in that field, technology was and continues to be central to the mission of the organization.
The BBG is an independent federal government agency that oversees all U.S. civilian international broadcasting. The networks—the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio and TV Martí, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks’ Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa—serve as indispensable sources of news for people who often lack access to independent information. They inform, engage and connect with international audiences across television, radio, Internet, and mobile devices in 59 languages and in more than 100 countries.
As CIO, Mendes managed or was involved in content acquisition of video, audio, text and images from all over the world to the management, packaging and distribution of that content, which is front and center in fulfilling the organization’s charter. Because of its longstanding history and the countries and populations that it targets, the Broadcasting Board of Governors actually operates the most diverse media distribution network in the world. It operates the largest shortwave radio stations on the planet, utilizes some of the most powerful AM transmitters ever made, has an extensive network of FM installations, and utilizes dozens of satellites for TV, radio and data transmissions. It also operates hundreds of Websites, social media destinations, SMS and Twitter feeds, and the largest Internet anti-censorship operation in the world.
Partially due to the efforts of Mendes and his team, 2013 was one of the most successful years for the BBG. Its broadcasts reached a record 206 million people every week, up 41 million from 2010. Mendes was rewarded for his work as CIO by being promoted to director of global operations, the de facto COO. He attained this lofty position, in part, by approaching his CIO role as a business executive and not feeling constrained by the traditional definition of what it means to be a CIO.
CIO Insight: You joined the Broadcasting Board of Governors as CIO, director of technology, services and innovation. This position appears to involve a great number of responsibilities. How did you compartmentalize your time between the different functions suggested in your title?
André Mendes: My duties comprised all of the technology infrastructure and global content distribution for the agency. Although it encompasses many disciplines, they are intimately related as part and parcel of the creation of a concept I call “content supply chain management,” which looks at and manages these diverse areas as part of a large, highly integrated “manufacturing” environment where raw content is acquired, formatted, assembled, packaged and distributed through our very diverse ways of reaching our audience.
CIO Insight: Can you give some examples of innovation that your team produced for the BBG?
Innovation is highly dependent on the environment in which one is operating. At the BBG, innovation meant leapfrogging from a chaotic IT infrastructure that belonged to sometime in the early 1990s to a highly virtualized environment that leverages cloud-based services everywhere it can. It meant turbocharging a small Internet anti-censorship effort into a multi-vendor engine that accommodates billions of hits on a daily basis from some of the most restrictive environments in the world. It also consisted of leveraging new and better ways to leverage satellites and a new global MPLS network into a much cheaper distribution network.
CIO Insight: In January of this year, you were promoted to director, global operations. Please describe your new responsibilities.
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
High Tech CEOs Ponder the Strategic CIO
by Martha Heller, published on The Heller Report
09-24-2014
To be truly strategic, CIOs need to think about how value is created. Many are good at cost cutting, but this is almost by definition a backward looking exercise—optimizing something that is already in place. This is not strategic. CIOs need to think about what future possibilities there are to leverage technology for new value and top-line growth. This is what differentiates the strategic CIO.
Some of the best insights into the ever-changing role of the CIO come from people who lead companies that serve the CIO. Here are two:
The Need to Get Intimate
Value: The Ticket to Ride
To read the full article, please visit The Heller Report
