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Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives

Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.

Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices

Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.

Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices

This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.

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RESOURCE CENTER
 
 
 

Better Strategic Planning, Business Alignment and Governance Keys to CIO Success

Right now, CIOs are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one side, there is growing demand for ...

 

October 01, 2003CIO

Right now, CIOs are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one side, there is growing demand for new IT capabilities and high expectations for payoff. On the other, there are greatly constrained resources. This will pose the single greatest threat to CIO effectiveness in the next year and a half, and there’s only one way out: better strategic planning and business alignment.

In a recent CIO.com poll, we asked visitors if they were experiencing an increase in IT requests from the business side. Of 405 respondents, 78 percent said the number of requests is increasing. And 32 percent said the quality of the requests is improving (better spec’ed out, higher-value projects).

If IT budgets were increasing by double digits, as was common in the late ’90s, that might not be a problem. When money flowed freely, as long as the IT organization was aligned with what the business needed and delivered it well, the CIO was considered successful.

That type of alignment is a recipe for disaster for CIOs today. When IT tries to please each and every business unit leader, each and every function head, and those people have competing priorities, there’s no way to win. With resources as limited as they are today, you wind up with a scene from Gladiator, with the CIO stuck in the middle of a very bloody battle.

I recently asked members of CIO’s Best Practice Exchange to describe the most effective thing they were doing to manage this problem. To a person, the answer was better strategic planning and alignment in the business, and better governance of IT.

The only way to be successful when the number of high-value business initiatives (IT enabled or otherwise) greatly exceeds the resources available to deliver them is to get all the business stakeholders to agree on what is most important, and then to agree on how things should be prioritized. That takes a cohesive executive group and some very sophisticated, well-running governance mechanisms.

The challenge in this for CIOs is that, in most companies, this isn’t happening, and the CIO who identifies the problem/solution ends up in a new high-profile role of leading the business to prioritize, define and communicate goals for the entire enterprise—not just for any one business unit or function, and not just for IT. Second only to the CEO, CIOs are uniquely positioned to view the business in this cross-functional, process-oriented, holistic way. Second to no one, they are uniquely positioned to think about and lead discussions on IT-enabled strategy and process change. Think this is a stretch? I’ve talked with two CIOs in the past month who are writing their companies’ five-year strategic plans.

 
 
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