05-13-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
To survive, CIOs need to rethink their roles. They need to be more strategic and deeply immerse themselves in both their businesses and industries. The New Style of Business means external partners now perform an increasing number of tasks once relegated to IT departments. Likewise, technology that was once expensive and laborious to maintain has become much less so.
Traditionally, CIOs have been primarily chief infrastructure officers. It’s only recently that an elite cadre of CIOs has begun treating information as a strategic asset. Yet realigning the CIO role will be challenging. Most companies use a timetable that is woefully short—quarter to quarter, or over one year.
TAKE THE LONG VIEW
In my latest book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation, I describe the experience of Gerry Pennell, CIO of the London 2012 Summer Olympics. Pennell notes how technology changed over the four-year span between games. At the 2008 summer games in Beijing, the iPhone and Twitter were in their infancy; Myspace and Facebook had roughly the same number of users; cloud computing was more hype than reality; and the iPad didn’t even exist.
If Pennell had translated and transposed the 2008 strategy for 2012, it would have been a disaster. This illustrates why CIOs would do well to develop strategies with multiyear timelines.
