Picture the scenario: you`ve just been made chief information officer (CIO) of a large multinational. You`ve earned the position purely on merit, having cut your teeth on various time-honoured standard technology initiatives. You have the production systems running at close to 100% uptime. All service level agreements are being met, users report that they are happy with response times, and you have a data warehouse initiative in place to ensure quality reporting to the business.
The goalposts have shifted significantly, and many CIOs are either not aware of the changes, or they have simply not responded fast enough.
David McWilliam, MD, Cognos South Africa.
All seems to be fine at the ranch ... but you could still lose your job tomorrow.
Why? Because the goalposts have shifted significantly, and many CIOs are either not aware of the changes, or they have simply not responded fast enough.
CIOs - especially those in large, complex organisations with many operating divisions, which often engage in mergers and acquisitions, and which sit across multiple time zones and trade in more than one currency - today have new responsibilities that will challenge and stretch them beyond their current capabilities.
They are required by the business to provide previously unimagined functions. And if they don`t provide these, they will in all likelihood be out of a job in the next three years. Their companies will simply have gone out of business, been bypassed by better structured competitors, or they will have been replaced by someone who`s more inclined to provide the requisite functionality to the business.
So, if you`d like to lose your post as CIO, here are seven imperatives to ignore:
1. Retain departmental planning. Planning should fundamentally be a corporate process, one that flows out of strategy and drives the business. Yet, the record will show, most businesses fail to execute on their plans, which more often than not end up in bottom drawers.
2. Ensure budgeting remains a once-off, annual exercise ignored by all in the business. Former GE Jack Welch calls budgeting the biggest time-waster in corporate life. You can ensure it remains so, or you can make budgeting a dynamic, integrated exercise congruent with and fulfilling strategy at the highest and lowest levels; one that ties in to forecasts, actuals and variances and ensures management has a chance to conduct iterative what-if scenarios. Guess which way most companies currently do it?
3. Keep management in the dark ages by restricting query and analysis to structured reports (ideally printouts!), and prevent ad hoc queries. Can`t have management asking too many questions now, can we?
4. Make it impossible to report cogently and timeously to management and other stakeholders, such as local and international shareholders. Then make it equally difficult to fulfil against the requirements of impending legislation that holds the board accountable for the currency, accuracy and veracity of its numbers. That`s a real showstopper!
5. Make it difficult for management to monitor the business, by creating opaque silos of business. Prevent proactive information delivery and ignore such advanced imperatives as the digital dashboard, which is surely just another fad!
6. Make the balanced scorecard just another over-hyped corporate trend that is bound to fail and disappoint the board in the process. To ensure this, simply keep it separate from other business drivers, let it run in isolation and make sure that when it is automated it continues to stand separate from existing business intelligence systems and neither informs nor is informed by them.
7. Finally, make sure that all of the above activities run off multiple versions of the truth. In other words, let each activity be informed by its own database, and let departmental imperatives over-ride corporate dictates.
There is an alternative: it`s called corporate performance management, or CPM. It`s far more than just another acronym dreamt up by analysts and/or vendors determined to create a new revenue stream to stimulate earnings. CPM leverages on your existing investment in business intelligence and is to business effectiveness what enterprise resource planning was to business efficiency. It bridges strategy and execution, and over the next year I`ll be exploring with you its concepts and precepts.
In the process we`ll learn a little and have some fun, and if I can play a small role in helping you save your post as CIO, well, won`t that be a happy by-product?
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