CIO — In my personal life I am an easygoing guy. I like to take long walks through my Chicago neighborhood, which is downtown by Lake Michigan. I like to sit in a coffee shop and read a good book or visit with friends. In my professional life, however, I have been accused of being as easygoing as a drill sergeant. I am a CIO who is passionate about designing and building IT systems that drive business success.
What gives rise to this change of personality? It is the urgency I feel about getting things done. In the very competitive and fluid global economy in which we all operate, a key aspect of CIO leadership lies in ensuring the agile and innovative use of IT. There’s no magic to this. To paraphrase a famous quote from Thomas Edison, the agile and innovative use of IT is 5 percent inspiration and 95 percent perspiration.
Let’s talk about that 95 percent part. It means a lot more than just working hard. IT leaders can create a fast and flexible process to develop and deploy new business applications. That process has to enable agility by showing IT employees how to move forward in quick, focused steps. Since all jobs expand to fill whatever time is available, an agile process requires you to set an appropriate time frame for getting things done and then shape the job so as to finish it within the time available. Agility means that you are faster than your competition. Agile time frames are measured in weeks and months, not years.
Similarly, IT leaders can use process to boost innovation. An innovative process calls for people to feel a sense of urgency in order to overcome the inertia of doing things the same old way. Placing limits on the time and money that your employees can spend to solve a problem is a great way to create urgency. In the past, I have challenged my IT staff to create solutions that cost 10 times less than what our competition is spending and that can be developed four times faster—what I call "10-4 performance."
Three Steps to Agility and Innovation
Agility and innovation is a frame of mind that starts with the CIO. It’s your job to put the proper process in place and make sure people use it. I have created my own three-step process called "Define-Design-Build." It’s a simple and easily understood guide through the three steps of developing any new system or business process.
