At the Gartner CIO Leadership Forum in London in March, there was much focus on 'the leadership flip', a set of leadership principles the research house has laid out for CIOs who want to grasp the digital opportunity.
In the executive summary of their report, Flipping to Digital Leadership: The 2015 CIO Agenda, Gartner stated: "Incrementally improving IT performance isn't enough. Enterprises and their CIOs need to 'flip' from old to new in terms of information and technology leadership, value leadership and people leadership." It spelt these areas out a little more clearly as follows lows: moving your technology and information leadership from legacy first to digital first, your value leadership from what's visible to what's valuable, and your people and cultural leadership from control-led to vision-led.
The report further stated that a Gartner CIO survey showed that not only do CIOs expect and aspire to a leading role in digitalisation, but CEOs expect them to step up and lead the digital charge. "To do so, CIOs must accept this third-era 'digital now, digital first' reality, address long-standing challenges in value and risk management that could thwart digitalisation and replace pragmatic command and control with visionary leadership.
Do South African CIOs or IT leaders agree with these Gartner directives? How do they assess the state of the 'flip' in their own organisations or industries?
Volumes of data
Carel Wessels, CTO at Tracker Connect, buys wholeheartedly into all three points. "If you consider flipping to digital first, we live in an era where our IT is accelerating at a massive pace in terms of this whole move towards the Internet of Things, where objects are starting to communicate with each other. These objects are being rolled out at a pace of millions per year - all around this concept of smart homes and smart vehicles," he says.
He says this is all a testament to the fact that we're currently living in this digital era, and we have to start making sense of and extracting value from these volumes of data.
In terms of flipping from what's visible to what's valuable, he says that in the past, his industry was very focused on the vehicle itself - the piece of metal - whereas now, with Telematix devices being installed in all Tracker Connect's vehicles, they're receiving millions of transactions that tell them what the vehicle and its driver are doing.
"Now, suddenly, we have to go through all these millions and millions of transactions to find a way to add value from a safety, cost savings or convenience point of view. The future is not known in this case - it's not visible any longer - so we have to literally explore our way along this and learn as we go until we put our finger on something that has value."
The more you control, the less people can be creative in thinking about outcomes.
Kevin Wilson, Stefanutti Stocks
And on the final point, that of becoming vision-led, he says it's important, in a space where people are bombarded from all directions by digital media, systems generating information and things generating information, to create an environment in which people can innovate. "If you can't make sense of it and give guidance as to where it's all headed, your business will get disrupted and you will have to close your doors," he says.
According to Hugo Timmerman, the head of IT at British American Tobacco South Africa (BAT), 75 percent of any organisation's IT infrastructure remains legacy, but this is rapidly changing to digital- and cloud-based solutions. However, the people who are highlighted are those at the forefront, and he says BAT is still starting the journey.
"I believe the key trend is moving from technology leadership to information leadership, which is replicated in the move from legacy to cloud," he says. "CIOs were managers of technology, but now we manage information, and ensure that each employee gets the level of information they need. And we're not worried about uptime anymore because our servers are in the cloud."
In terms of focusing on what's visible over what's valuable, he says: "In the past, CIOs were measured in tangible terms - response times, servers running, customer satisfaction. We were in the back office making the business processes happen. But now we're talking about ways that we can enable the business, sparking a thought rather than responding from a tech point of view. By focusing on where systems tie into processes, we're expected to add far more value."
And he concludes that it's an absolute truth that people leadership needs to become vision-led. "Historically, we've controlled every bit and byte of information coming into an organisation, which, to an extent, blocks leadership from thinking beyond those control limitations.
"If we step over the barrier into how we could do things differently, we become far more vision-led. The role of the CIO should be to get people through this change journey, to understand what their added value is that will lead to change. CIOs should be sparking the push and pull."
Kevin Wilson, the GM of IT Services at Stefanutti Stocks, says that construction has historically been at the back of the IT adoption charge. However, because of the relatively limited legacy infrastructure they've traditionally had on the ground, they're now able to move faster than the other industries in adopting digital and cloud solutions.
"We had a green screen system and we topped it up as we went along. We now have the opportunity to sweep it out of the way, and go to cloud, so that's now a massive market for us."
Adding value
At the same time, mobility has solved significant challenges around paper-based communications like leave forms being submitted from remote sites. "This is the first time I've had a device in everybody's hands in construction," he says. "Before, everyone had a brick and a hard hat; now, they all have mobile devices that we didn't give to them, but we can now send stuff to them."
He says that while they haven't quite perfected this process as an organisation, they're working on it.
At the same time, he's dealing with similar issues in the area of adding value. "It isn't about having infrastructure anymore. It's whether I can use Dropbox, and how I can get it to do the stuff I want it to do to add value for the guys on the ground."
He acknowledges, though, that this is a shift for an industry that's used to owning visible things like big yellow machines.
In this industry, he says it's very hard to change mindsets, because of the heavy reliance on controls and parameters in everything they do.
"It's interesting having a vision of how IT will change the way we build things in the future. We're starting to look at that now. The more you control, the less people can be creative in thinking about outcomes. That's where the vision needs to come through. Our industry is behind the times, but we're pushing ahead."
Unsurprisingly, it appears that Gartner is squarely on the mark, and that IT leadership, if they haven't yet completely flipped their leadership priorities, are certainly aware that they need to in these areas.
This article was first published in Brainstorm magazine. Click here to read the complete article at the Brainstorm website.
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