Peter High, President of Metis Strategy, and author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs speaks at XChange Event’s MES Regional in San Francisco, CA. In this video with UBM Channel, he re-caps his CIO IT innovation workshop session on Red Robin.
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Visit our book page to learn more about World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs.
Not everybody is cut out to be a CIO. Consider these six elements that help shape a successful chief information officer.
by Cindy Waxer, article in InformationWeek
04-23-2012
Excerpt from the article:
At the top of every organization is the boss, the man or woman who has the ultimate responsibility for making decisions, setting directions, and making sure the job gets done right. The position comes with perks and pressures. And while many may yearn to have the word “chief” in their title, not everybody is cut out for such a challenge.
Only “a select few” have the makings of a Chief Information Officer, says Peter High, president of Metis Strategy and author of “World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs“.
“The average person who joins an IT department certainly does not have the makeup to be a CIO, just as the average person in finance does not have the makeup to be a CFO,” he says.
Here’s what it takes to earn the much-vaunted acronym of ‘CIO’ on your business card:
To read the remainder of this article, please visit InformationWeek.
Peter High, President of Metis Strategy, was featured in the Wall Street Journal’s CIO Report, in an article called “The Morning Download: CIOs Get No Respect”
Article by Michael Hickins, Editor, on WSJ.com CIO Journal
Except from the article:
Good morning. If you have a sneaking suspicion that people are making decisions behind your back, the good news is you’re not being paranoid. The bad news is that those people probably include your CEO. New research from Gartner shows just 4% of chief executives consider their CIOs partners in managing either strategy or innovation. This goes a long way towards explaining why so many CIO jobs are advertised as strategic, but end up being largely operational.
(…)
Peter High, president of Metis Strategy, a CIO advisory, says the survey is “emblematic of the CIO’s dilemma,” and reflects the extent to which CIOs are under-appreciated by the rest of the executive suite. High says CIOs can change this perception by leading conversations about how IT can support initiatives for human resources, legal and compliance and marketing departments.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit the Wall Street Journal CIO Journal.
If interested, pleas read a related article on how CIOs can position themselves for business success, written by Peter High and published in ON Magazine.
Peter High, President of Metis Strategy, was featured in the Wall Street Journal’s CIO Report, in an article called “Chief Innovation Officers: The Growth of the Other CIO”
Article by Steve Rosenbush, Deputy Editor, on WSJ.com CIO Journal
More and more companies are adding chief innovation officers to their leadership teams, but companies with innovation strategies to support their role are much scarcer, according to a new study by Capgemini Consulting.
The Paris-based consulting group and the IESE Business School collaborated on the report, which found that 43% of executives who responded to the survey said their companies have an innovation executive, compared with 33% last year. Yet 58% of those companies said they did not have an innovation strategy. In other words, for many companies the title of chief innovation officer is mostly for show. It’s like a new toy. Company boards feel that they ought to have one. They just aren’t sure what to do with it.
“Chief innovation officer is still a very new title within corporate America and beyond, and companies do not know exactly what to make of it on average. Some companies are finding people who have the right skill and mindset, clout within the organization, and bandwidth to be able to lead innovation activities, but they do not necessarily know what is expected beyond ‘more innovative ideas,’” says consultant Peter High, president of Metis Strategy.
To read a similar article, written by Peter High and published in CIO Magazine, please visit CIO.
Call it “CIO squared.” Companies are tapping savvy execs to handle two complementary roles at the same time: chief information officer and chief innovation officer.
by Peter High, article published on CIO.com
02-29-2012
We’ve all noticed that CIOs are acquiring responsibilities outside of IT. Examples include David Johns of Owens Corning (CIO and chief supply chain officer), Sheleen Quish of Ameristar Casinos (CIO and SVP of HR), and Karl Salnoske of GXS (CIO and EVP of service delivery).
But an even more interesting dual role has emerged that I call the “CIO squared”—the combination of chief information officer and chief innovation officer. Examples of the CIO squared include Tim Stanley, former CIO and senior vice president of innovation, gaming and technology at Harrah’s Entertainment; and Ben Allen, who is both chief innovation officer and chief information officer at the professional services firm Marsh and McLennan.
The chief innovation officer position is less than a decade old, and most companies still don’t have one, so there’s certainly no predetermined place within the corporate structure where the role should be located. The position is meant to ensure that there’s someone to shepherd innovation activities (ideas, processes and incentive programs) and be responsible for the success or failure of innovation.
Given today’s business trends, the CIO-squared combo makes a lot of sense. With the rise of social media, mobility, the consumerization of IT, big data, and business intelligence, IT-centered innovation is growing. IT leaders are well positioned to sit at the hub of discussions with the heads of business units and departments about the sources of innovation and the technology to support them.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO.com
With Everything as a Service, CIOS need a new recipe for success.
Full article by Tom Fare in: Smart Enterprise, Volume 6, Issue 1, 2012, Page 32
The trend toward Everything as a Service (XaaS) has CIOs scrambling to set the right strategy. To learn more about how CIOs will succeed in a services world, Contributing Editor Tom Farre spoke recently with Peter High, President of CIO advisory firm Metis Strategy and author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs (Jossey-Bass, 2009).
SE: In today’s enterprise, how can smart CIOs use XaaS to improvethe IT infrastructure?
PH: Traditional on-premises IT infrastructure is typically capitalintensive.The more of it you have to control and manage, the moredifficult it is to keep current; and as demand changes, you can’teasily ratchet it up and back. But by leveraging a service-basedmodel, you are better positioned with a variable cost structure.In tough economic times, your costs should more closely reflectthe realities of the business environment.
Other questions in the interview:
– But with IT and business services available directly from thecloud, how can CIOs ensure that business users won’t bypass IT? – How about people? What impact will XaaS have on IT personnel? – So in a world-class IT organization, what should this “muscle”be doing? – What else should CIOs know about world-class IT? – So how important are internal communications?
Please visit the interactive digital copy of Smart Enterprise, page 32, for the full interview with Peter High.
Alternatively, you can access the PDF version of the interview here: Peter High, President of Metis Strategy- Smart Enterprise Interview on Everything as a Service, Volume 6. Issue 1. 2012.
Norm Fjeldheim, Qualcomm’s SVP and CIO, shares his views on the company’s approach to “everything as a service” (XaaS), the rationale for choosing this strategy, the challenges he met along the way and the value he has garnered for his company.
by Peter High, in CIO Insight 02-20-2012
IN SUMMARY: WHO: Norm Fjeldheim, SVP and CIO, Qualcomm WHAT: Sharing his views on Qualcomm’s approach to “everything as a service” (XaaS) for its 21,000 employees worldwide WHERE: San Diego WHY: To provide CIOs and other IT leaders with actionable advice and insights about how to optimize the complex infrastructure of today’s IT organizations
Norm Fjeldheim, SVP and CIO of Qualcomm, the $15 billion maker of communication equipment, has had an unusually long tenure as CIO, having taken on that role in early 1999.
A 24-year veteran of the company, Fjeldheim has overseen significant changes to Qualcomm’s IT infrastructure. Roughly 1,400 of Qualcomm’s 21,000 worldwide employees report to Fjeldheim.
San Diego-based Qualcomm, which operates 200 offices worldwide, is engaged in the development, design, manufacture and marketing of digital wireless telecommunications products and services. Its divisions include Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, Qualcomm Enterprise Services and Qualcomm Government Technologies.
In January 2012, the company was named one of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For.
In this one-on-one Q&A, Fjeldheim tells CIO Insight’s Peter High about Qualcomm’s approach to “everything as a service” (XaaS), the rationale for choosing this approach, the challenges he met along the wayand the value he has garnered for his company.
CIO Insight: Norm, you first dipped your toe in the water on cloud computing and the SPI model [software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS)] before those terms were well known or widely used eight or nine years ago. What was the impetus for delving into virtualization?
Norm Fjeldheim: We began a little less than a decade ago when members of my team approached me and indicated that they thought virtualizing would add tremendous value to our operations. They indicated that it would render our operation more efficient, and that it would lead to significant cost savings. I asked the team what they needed to begin this journey. They said they needed a modest financial commitment to get started: a couple of hundred thousand dollars. I challenged them, saying that if virtualization was to be such a cost saver, we should expect that these activities would be self-funding after this initial seed investment.
The team began with Windows—and rather conservatively. (In retrospect, I wish I had pursued Windows and Unix together, so that it would not have looked like a Windows-specific effort in the beginning.) However, the efforts quickly built momentum. In the end, the team required significantly less than the initial commitment before these efforts became self-funding.
Our biggest foray into SaaS came by happenstance. We were a big user of Siebel for our CRM solutions. In 2005, a new business unit of ours was ramping up, and as the unit members planned the deployment of their first product, the software requirements did not include any mention of a need to ramp up Siebel in the process. As we found out about this six weeks prior to the launch of this new business unit’s first product, this led to a short time frame to get the functionality up and running and therefore [ramping up Siebel became] a pressing need. We realized we were not going to meet their needs, and it led us to think about alternatives
We pursued Salesforce.com potentially as a one-off instance for us, but discovered that it had as much functionality, more flexibility, and could be implemented and ramped up in a fraction of the time of our solution. We ended up migrating to Salesforce.com completely, and saved 50 to 60 percent in costs as a result, with improved functionality.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight.
To listen to Norm’s podcast interview with us, please visit Metis Strategy’s Forum on World Class IT.
Rarely have IT and HR been led by the same individual. But similarities between these departments, combined with the need to think creatively about each, has caused some progressive companies to consider this combined role. Sheleen Quish is, perhaps, the most prominent example of this. After leading IT departments at Unitrin and U.S. Can, she joined Ameristar Casinos as CIO in early 2007 and soon took added responsibility for the HR department.
Here’s what she learned about managing this dual role.
by Peter High in CIO Insight
Human Resources and Information Technology executives often suffer from the same issues: They are relegated to running support organizations within the corporate structure. These are shared services that are leveraged by all parts of the company, but despite this ubiquity, team members in these divisions, and even their leaders, are often considered second-class citizens of the corporation. Yet, what is more important to your organization than recruiting and grooming great people? Likewise, the expectations of those team members, as well as those of your customers, demand that your technology be elegant and efficient.
The people who make up these two departments traditionally have been very different. Most IT professionals are engineers who are very analytical and who speak a language that is very different from the language used by the rest of the corporation. IT also tends to be male dominated. HR departments are typically made up of people with liberal arts and organizational design backgrounds. HR has tended to be progressive in hiring female leaders. Given these differences, rarely have IT and HR been led by the same individual. Discovering similarities between these departments, combined with the need to think creatively about each, has caused some progressive companies to consider this combined role.
To listen to Sheleen’s podcast interview with us, please visit Metis Strategy’s Forum on World Class IT.
As cloud computing adoption skyrockets and business functions increasingly look to external cloud providers to provision IT services, CIOs need to consider federated cloud strategies to integrate and manage this mixed bag of cloud computing environments.
Article by Patricia Brown on CIO.com
11-11-2011
Excerpt from article:
In many ways the concept of federated cloud is ironic. Cloud computing rapidly gained traction because of its ability to manage the complexity of multiple legacy environments while consolidating infrastructure. But as organizations move forward with various cloud initiatives, many CIOs are now wrestling a sprawl of clouds that seems to be spinning out of control.
“We’ve seen a lot of business people who are going rogue and making investments in the private cloud as opposed to working together with the CIO to develop a unified plan for how best to leverage the cloud,” says Peter High, president of Metis Strategy. “While many different parts of the business are making these decisions independently, when you add them up, these decisions may be very disparate.”
Beth Cohen, technology thought leader with Cloud Technology Partners, echoes those sentiments. “We’re also seeing a lot of business units hopping onto the cloud in various ways that is causing a headache for CIOs,” she says. “There is no question that CIOs are starting to think about the federated cloud.”
To read the remainder of this article, please visit CIO.com
Topics covered in this article:
Randy Spratt is the EVP, CIO and CTO of McKesson Corporation, a $112 billion company based in San Francisco, providing medicines, pharmaceutical supplies, information and care management products and services across the healthcare industry. In this one-on-one Q&A, he tells CIO Insight: “In my mind, business Nirvana is top-line growth. IT Nirvana is making everything the same, efficient, secure, leveraging economies of scale. In this scenario, IT controls things to a greater extent. In [too] many organizations, there is a pendulum that swings between these two scenarios, between Business Nirvana and IT Nirvana, never quite reaching either side before the momentum shifts in the other direction.”
by Peter High, in CIO Insight
10-24-2011
Randy Spratt is the EVP, CIO and CTO of McKesson Corporation, a $112 billion company based in San Francisco, providing medicines, pharmaceutical supplies, information and care management products and services across the healthcare industry. Spratt had been CIO since July of 2005, responsible for the global applications that serve the entire corporation and for the overall IT strategy and information security for the company. In April 2009, he added the chief technology officer role. In the company’s Technology segment and, to a limited degree, in its Distribution segment, Spratt is responsible for guiding the technology direction, strategy, and quality of the medical systems that the company sells, implements, and supports in the healthcare community.
Given dual internal- and external-facing roles, Spratt has had a chance to think a lot about the value the IT departments ought to deliver to the companies and customers that they serve. He also recognizes that they must solve the riddle of both remaining efficient and secure, while also forging efforts to innovate and add to the top-line of the company, as well. CIO Insight contributor and Metis Strategy President Peter high recently spoke with Spratt about his perspectives on “IT Nirvana” and how it can be attained by any CIO.
CIO Insight: Randy, you have spoken about the two sources of value that a CIO must bear in mind, one is growth oriented, and the other is leverage oriented. These can be at odds. How have you successfully managed this paradox?
RANDY SPRATT: It truly is a paradox. But it is the paradox that any business leader, any CEO faces. On the one hand, you need to innovate and be agile to serve the strategies of the business. On the other hand, you have a lot of activities that are commodity driven, and if you are not competitive with other entities that can provide those services, then you will be at a competitive disadvantage as a company. The more you can standardize, the more you can gain economies of scale and render the IT operation more efficient. On the other hand, the business needs non-standard technologies for innovation.
In my mind, business Nirvana is top-line growth. This suggests business-driven IT activity, and a high degree of IT agility. The businesses will want and expect new devices, new capabilities, new applications, new tools to reach and delight their customers. They are looking for social networking, iPad apps, smartphone apps, and linking into cloud-based services to reach their markets and deliver innovative products and services. IT nirvana is making everything the same, efficient, secure, leveraging economies of scale. In this scenario, IT controls things to a greater extent.
In many organizations, there is a pendulum that swings between these two scenarios, between Business Nirvana and IT Nirvana, never quite reaching either side before the momentum shifts in the other direction every three to five years. An innovative CIO is hired who focuses almost exclusively on enabling the business vision, and, for a time, achieves tremendous things for the organization. In many cases, this is a CIO within a business unit that is seceding from an overly controlled central function. In the process, our innovative CIO creates a shadow infrastructure, replicates existing functionality, and buys products and services at sub-optimal purchasing power and from unproven vendors. Projects fall behind, costs accelerate, and the desired speed and agility are not attained.
Next, a cost conscious CIO is brought in to rectify these issues. The business executives speak with great frustration about the cost and inefficiencies of the IT department and demand double-digit percentage cost reductions. That new CIO spends a lot of time fixing the mess, cleaning up the architecture and infrastructure, cutting staff, and instituting practices to make things more efficient. That CIO de-emphasizes innovative, top-line growth opportunities in favor of more efficient operations, greater buying power through standardization and scale, and more stable, reliable operations through solid IT processes. After a period with a lack of innovation, however, that CIO’s business leader peers become antsy about the lack of velocity and agility and the unproven top-line value IT is achieving, and the pendulum swings back again.
The remaining questions covered in this article are:
To hear more from Randy Spratt, please visit his Forum On World Class IT podcast interviews with Metis Strategy:
