Next Up for the CIO

The CIO of today has heard enough about:
• Cost cutting
• Getting value from offshoring
• Aligning IT with the firm’s strategy
• Building a knowledge-driven organization
• Building applications for differentiation in the marketplace..

None of these are irrelevant, or obsolete – but there are few new insights about all this. They are all issues CIOs have wrestled with for years, with greater or lesser success, depending on the CIO and also on how intractable the issue itself is. In this article, we look at altogether new issues the CIO will be dealing with in the next 18 to 24 months – issues that have become manifest only recently, and present a different set of challenges for the CIO to deal with.

Issue 1: what to do about mobiles?

All employees already have them, use them in their official as well as personal lives. Sometimes their kids use them, sometimes their maids. New applications are being pushed onto their phones every day, with nary a thought for security, viruses, confidentiality, or for the simple fact that every one of us can now be tracked and located at any moment of the day or night.

Meanwhile, the power and capability of mobile phones and the entire mobile system, is growing by the day – at the upper end, mobiles are every bit as capable as the laptops of, say, a couple of years ago. As has been pointed out, a mobile phone today contains more computing power than NASA had when it put a man on the moon. Whether that is strictly true or not, the fact is, mobiles are getting incredibly more capable, and will only continue to get more and more capable.

Given that every employee already has a mobile, how should the CIO deal with them? She would love to bring every mobile under the umbrella of her IT policy, but is it really feasible? Or even desirable? On the other hand, are there minimum standards that must be enforced? What are they/ how does one enforce them anyway?

More to the point, how should the CIO leverage the fact that every employee has, and uses a mobile – should key corporate applications, production applications, sales and marketing applications, be mobile-enabled and be put on the relevant employees’ mobiles? Or would it make more sense to write new applications optimized for the mobile’s current and future capability? How is classical configuration management to be done when applications are spread across hundreds, or thousands of mobiles, across continents?
Managing data that mobile applications access, is yet another issue that comes up against laws in several countries that are ultra-sensitive to letting information flow across borders.. What will happen when somebody takes his mobile out of such a country? What will happen if the mobile gets lost, stolen, compromised? What when the employee leaves for a competitor?

When we talk to organizations around the world, we see very few that have made a serious attempt to deal with this really significant ‘tornado’ ripping through their lives.

Issue 2: Social Networking and Enterprise Collaboration

The rise of social networking applications presents yet another challenge to the CIO. On the one hand, social networking sites offer a wonderful technology solution for the classical knowledge management riddle organizations have been trying for years to solve. On the other hand, they pose the very real threat of information and, worse, loyalties, spilling across organizational boundaries.
One approach is to simply ban the use of them, or try to replicate them within the organization, as with wikis, for instance. Yet, it is evident that allowing the use of social networking across organizations offers many advantages. And, more importantly, such use cannot be stopped, for employees will find ways to do it anyway.

How can the CIO stay ahead of the game by proactively embracing and using this technology, rather than fighting the inevitable? How can collaboration be encouraged and leveraged, not only within the organization, but outside it – to customers, vendors and partners? What technology infrastructure and controls would be required to make this collaboration powerful yet safe? These are issues the CIO will be expected to answer, and the sooner the better.

Issue 3: Is the Cloud real?

Nothing had prepared the CIO (or any other senior leader, for that matter) for the kind of downturn and lifeless recovery we have seen lately. The CIO must prepare his organization for a long, hard haul back, and, at the same time, make sure he doesn’t get submerged again by the next tsunami, whenever that comes.

We have argued elsewhere that the CIO must move to a world of flexible budgets, pay for use models, which will require him to move his applications to a cloud, let a cloud operator manage them, and charge him only for use. The cloud represents an opportunity and challenge the CIO can no longer ignore.



Issue 4: Making sense of mountains of data

This issue is not exactly new – all organizations are awash in data. Until recently, however, organizations tolerated the situation because it didn’t hurt, at least not too much. The recent downturn would have made CIOs recognize that they cannot let data simply float around unused – they must squeeze the most out of what they have, before they invest in getting more of it.

For a start, this means better, more disciplined, more structured use of analytics across the company – learning what questions to ask, what will always be asked, and how to get the data to yield usable answers to these questions, will become extremely important. Of course, there is no point in implementing analytics solutions if managers don’t use them – so all the usual ‘IT led change’ issues continue to be relevant.

In sum, the next new set of challenges for the CIO are rooted in technology, and the way technology makes things possible, for individuals and for organizations. Which is how it should be, and always will be.

From Tennis to Life

From tennis to life..
Reflections on the game and what it teaches me…

• I enjoy watching tennis more than I enjoy watching cricket or football… why? Because I don’t play cricket or football…
o Being a spectator is no fun! Even watching is more fun if you also do…
• These days, my first serve is booming but my second serve has become shaky – which has affected my entire game..how true it is that ‘you are only as good as your second serve’
o A good plan B gives you more confidence to execute plan A
• The tennis court is no place to think ..
o The mind gets in its own way a lot of the time.. we are much more than conscious thinking machines..
• When I come up with a complex plan to beat my opponent, it never works – I get confused and beat myself.
o Only simple plans are executable – if people have to work out too many variables on the ground, they will only get confused. Keep strategies and plans simple.
• When there is noise all around, the timing of your shots goes off: you need to hear the sound of the strings to know where the ball is
o The subtlest of ingredients, if it is missing, the entire experience can go wrong
• When you are playing well, go for you shots, they will go in..the more risky they are, the more likely they will go in..
o ride your luck when you have it
• Coming forward to the ball generates amazing power
o If you come forward to meet the opportunity, you have momentum on your side..
• tennis is about movement.. if you can get to the ball, you can do anything you like with it.. if you can’t get to the ball, it doesn’t matter what shots you have in your armory
o being there is everything.. no matter how talented or capable you are..
• shots go best when you keep your head still
o at the core of every activity, however vigorous, there has to be a still centre
• the great tragedy of tennis is this: you have to be fit to play tennis but playing tennis doesn’t keep you fit
o exercise is exercise and fun is fun: don’t confuse the two with each other
• even after 40 years of playing tennis, my second serve still deserts me sometimes..
o never take any of your skills for granted.. bad habits can creep in when you take something for granted
• nowadays I am trying to hit a topspun backhand – it gives me a thrill when I get it right
o learning something new all the time keeps you alive

Governance, not Management: the role of the corporate board

The Role of Corporate Boards: Governance, not Management

Should the Board set strategy? Should it review the performance of all senior managers? Should the corporate budget for the year be approved by the Board? What exactly do we want corporate boards to do? Where does the role of the CEO end and the role of the Board begin?
We argue that the Board has only 3 functions:
1. To ensure the long-term survival and health of the company
2. To protect the interests of all stakeholders, including the public and the environment
3. To appoint the CEO

Does this mean the Board should not be concerned with strategy, then? Or with gross mismanagement? Obviously not. On the other hand, is it not the role of the CEO and his management team to formulate the company’s strategy? These are the delicate questions that we need to find an answer to.

On Strategy, clearly, the Board must ensure there IS a strategy, and that the strategy appears to make sense and is likely to be a winning strategy. If the company’s strategy is weak or nonexistent, it threatens the long-term survival of the company, which is the Board’s concern no. 1. But it should not be the role of the Board to formulate, or direct the formulation of, the strategy – that is clearly the prerogative of Management. The Board will seldom know enough about the day to day work of the company and the functioning of its markets, to be able to direct strategy formulation and execution. The CEO should present the strategy to the Board, who should then test it to make sure it holds water. Certainly, if the Board, in its wisdom, can suggest strategic ideas, they should be welcomed by the CEO, but it remains his prerogative to accept or reject those ideas.

Gross mismanagement, again, threatens the viability of the company. If the Board comes to know of such mismanagement, it should insist on the problem being fixed, and replace the CEO as a last resort.

In the same vein, the Board should not get into the details of the annual budget, for instance. But it should make sure that a budgeting process exists, that it is appropriate to the nature of the company, and that it is being followed. Reviews by the Board should focus on these perspectives, and these only.

Should the Board concern itself with the nurturing of talent? To the extent that a culture in the company resists fresh talent, and thereby threatens the long-term viability of the company, the Board should intervene to make sure that the management team takes steps to change the culture. To the extent that there is no replacement available for the CEO, the Board must concern itself with the matter. But reviewing the HR processes in the company, the compensation practices and policies, are clearly not the Board’s field of play.

Unfortunately, many executives become Board members after having been successful executives elsewhere, and bring to the Board role the same mindset that made them successful as executives! Neither will they be good Board members, nor will they allow good executives to succeed…