Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »September 05, 2007 — CIO —
"Those who are skilled at executing a strategy," Sun Tzu wrote, "bend the strategies of others without conflict." This fundamental principle helps to explain why some CIOs are now having more success than others at executing strategy. The IT department that once held a monopoly over its company's IT is gone, and with it the control-based, IT-centric strategy conceived for the mainframe era. Changes in the business environment have rendered such strategies un-executable.
With the advent of Web 2.0 and the bizarrely named "shadow IT," CIOs know that their span of control over IT decisions is more limited by the day. Instead, the executives, managers, staff and customers at their companies all have their own "de facto" strategies for exploiting IT. Faced with this challenge, CIOs are exploring their options, which include abandoning the idea of an IT strategy, sticking with the old way (but often only on paper) or forging a new generation of IT exploitation strategies. Wrapped up in this decision is the ultimate destiny of the CIO role itself, which in some companies is becoming marginalized as a quasi-supplier of technology services and in others is disappearing altogether.
The CIO's strategic challenge now is to capture and channel the energy of individuals' personal strategies for exploiting IT. Backed by a corporate purpose to maximize total value, innovate, constrain overall cost and mitigate risk, effective CIOs must focus on, as Tzu might say, "bending" some of these personal strategies toward a better conclusion or—in the case of individuals who are pursuing goals not aligned with the company strategy—into a dead end. Many personal strategies can simply be encouraged, or strategically ignored.
Why IT Strategy Is No More
Two critical inflection points have directed us to where we are today. The first was the switch from dumb-terminal to client-server computing that started 20-odd years ago and went global with the Internet. The second was the business executive's response to Y2K and the dotcom boom. Business people stopped believing the IT hype and techno-speak, suspecting that investments were being driven more by suppliers' strategies rather than their own. They took control of the IT agenda at the big-picture level and focused on two things they understand very well—cost, and business innovation.
These two inflections put IT decision-making in the hands of non-technologists at both operational and strategic levels. Yet formal strategies for IT have largely remained the province of IT departments and vendors. Few non-IT executives and managers have defined their strategies for investing in and exploiting IT; such strategies are, therefore, de facto. CIOs can make a tactical choice to either let these de facto strategies be, to rely on an orthodox IT strategy or to take the initiative and lead a business-defined strategy for exploiting technology.