The Essential CIO by Matt Graham-Hyde

Author:Matt Graham-Hyde
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909623330
Publisher: Panoma Press
Published: 2013-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

PEOPLE AND GROWTH MATTER

These four areas of focus can provide significant change momentum to the future state of the IT function and CIO. In a great number of organisations, the majority of the IT staff do not have the necessary skills to address future technology needs. They are also the product of the system of organisation and technology that has remained relatively stable for the large part of their careers. The processes we use and the right skills, the way we think about our plans and projects, develop our requirements and create our development programmes and applications has become a set of best practices that are now less reliable and applicable with these new technologies and the expectations of an experimental and rapid approach to system development.

Our infrastructure, in a way, will need to become more, not less, technical, needing new skills akin to programming of some description to manage cloud technologies in this new technology business model.

Culturally, IT functions are not aligned to the requirements of new technology and have spent a good part of the last two decades with the perceived wisdom being to avoid the new and avoid the cutting edge. We have management and working practices which are not attractive to newcomers into the IT job market. Our IT organisations with their traditional thinking get in the way of managing our people creatively.

Our IT organisations have roadblocks to changing people management. We have human resources policies that are not focused on the needs of these new technologies and technologists, as this has not been the business growth driver that it is about to become. We have made a virtue of costcutting and retraction, not creativity and expansion. Every company will need to take new approaches to the management of their technical staff, both individually and as a whole. I will visit some of these ideas later in this book.

We have to move to a growth and revenue generation model for IT. Business models are rapidly being reshaped by new technologies and CIOs need to respond. That response cannot come from IT functions that are focused solely on endless cost-reduction programmes. These programmes by their nature are internally focused and take up massive amounts of management time and company resources. A shift to focus on supporting revenue generation and growth is also required to help business in the depressed markets across the industrialised west.

Obviously a CIO still needs to manage costs tightly. Many will need to be in the business of saving to invest with some businesses unable to support additional investment in times when markets are slow. But if these savings are simply used to support profit targets to please the investment community, these quarterly obsessed companies will not move forward in my view.

It can be very difficult to change the way businesses measure and think about the performance of the technology function, which are based on supporting the way we have worked over the last quarter of a century. A revenue-focused IT function faces the challenge of adding a complete cultural change not just to the IT function but the overall business.

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