CIOs turn service brokers

The high-speed pace of business is redefining the CIO's job - from managing infrastructure to negotiating services that will best meet business needs.

“Business is now much more volatile than it used to be,” says Lokesh Jindal, vice-president for strategy and business development at Nimsoft, a CA Technologies company.

He spoke to ITWeb on the side-lines of CA World 2011, in Las Vegas, yesterday.

“IT in the past used to be fairly consistent - that can't be true anymore. What business needs to be able to execute these days is so much faster. Take Electronic Arts (EA), they're a very solid company, built over 30 years... and then comes Zynga. In three years the value of that company is probably half of what EA is worth or more. IT now has to move at that same speed.”

Jindal says IT has to match business in three major areas - speed, flexibility and innovation.

“The CIO's job description today is changing dramatically. In future, CIOs won't be IT managers but service brokers. Previously, it was about how to best manage infrastructure, now it's about how to provide the best service to the business - where it comes from doesn't really matter.”

Andi Mann, VP of strategic solutions at CA, says immediacy has become the new standard.

“Whatever people want to do they want to be able to do it now. Business understands this, it realises that it needs to be fast, that it needs to innovate and do new things in new ways - better and faster than its competitors.

“But IT, more often than not, is a roadblock. That's not good enough,” says Mann.

“It's not just about following the business, it's about helping to lead the business as well - but doing it at their speed.”

Mann says much of this is about creating innovation. “Historically, IT has reacted to business, but business is really all about technology now. A lot of the revolutionary concepts driving new revenues are around technology. It's about how to get products and services on a Web site or how to collaborate across international teams - these things are fundamentally in IT's backyard. So CIOs now have to consider how to provide these services.”

A big part of this involves leveraging third-party infrastructure in the form of cloud services, adds Mann.

“How can IT help the CIO figure out what business needs and to provide that before business asks? How does he look at the portfolio of solutions and decide what's important to the business and what doesn't make it better - what can be thrown away to save time and money, what can be outsourced to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor and what it needs to focus on internally to give the business competitive advantage.”

What companies decide to keep or outsource depends on their profile, says Jindal, but the idea of flexibility is key, as delivery “as a service” means functionality can change according to business needs. This focus on efficiency is part of the shift from complex and all-encompassing to simple and good enough, he adds.

These kinds of solutions are very broad and won't go too deep - so you have 20% functionality that meets 80% of your needs, as opposed to something that tries to solve all problems, whether you have them or not, Jindal explains.

“Everyone is under pressure to do more with less,” says Jindal. “When you talk about how IT can service the business, it's strategic - it's about how to solve problems.” He says organisations need to determine whether an operation is core or a chore. “Keep it internal if it's central to the business, but shifting the management function to an MSP is a simple way to manage chores,” he explains.

This allocation of control does bring a new level of complexity, however - something CIOs will now have to manage. “Forward-looking CIOs will have to make sure they have visibility across their various public or private cloud environments.

“How do I make sure the multiple services I'm using can be managed across each other and talk to each other, all while ensuring a seamless experience for the user?” This will be the CIO's new challenge.

Another factor steering the CIO into the role of service broker is a new generation of employees who are bringing their own devices and applications into the workplace.

“CIOs generally take one of two approaches,” says Mann. On the one hand, they try to close things off and block access. But they're not going to stem the tide. They need to accept that this is going to happen and realise that it actually makes the business better,” he adds.

“On the other hand, you have CIOs who realise they need to help people use these tools because it's good for business. If people can use the devices and services they want it makes them more productive. So the CIO needs to give people choice and facilitate lots of different ways of working.”

Jindal adds that from a user-experience perspective, forward-looking CIOs are making use of guidelines rather than prescriptions.

“They're saying 'we will help you use the service you want to use as long as it doesn't compromise the security of the organisation'. That changes the dynamic between IT and business.”

Mann says the biggest question CIOs are asking is how to balance cost-cutting and innovation. “There's been a change in mindset from simply keeping the lights on. CIOs realise there are many opportunities not only to stop things from happening but to help develop and grow the business. They realise IT can come back as an engine for business rather than a barrier to business.”

Lezette Engelbrecht is being hosted by CA Technologies.