Reading these two surveys from CIOInsight got me thinking....
#1 - Top Ways the CIO Role is Changing
From CIOInsight at http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/IT-Management/What-Tomorrows-CIO-Will-Have-to-Do-419113/?kc=CIOMINUTE05132009CIO1
(the survey lists 36 ways! here are the top 5) (“RC” refers to Role Changing)
- Driving Strategic Use of Information
- Reducing Business Costs
- Leading Enterprise Change Initiatives
- Driving Business Model Innovation
- Expanding Current Customer Relationships
# 2 - Top CIO Business Priorities for 2009
From CIOInsight at http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/IT-Management/Top-CIO-Priorities-for-2009/
(the survey lists 23 business, management, and technology priorities, here are the top 5 business) (“BP” refers to Business Priority)
- Improving Business Processes
- Delivering Better Customer Service
- Cutting Costs
- Generating More Business from new and Current Customers
- Innovative New Products/Services
I have an inkling that there could be one grand-unified initiative that addresses all 10 items above. Bear with me:
- BP1, BP3 and BP4 can lead to RC2
- BP1 and BP5 can drive RC1, RC3, and RC5
- RC5 is one way to get to BP2, BP4 and BP5
- RC3 and RC4, BP1, BP4, and BP5 are examples of RC1
...and so on. The point is that these 10 items are interrelated.
So the grand-unified initiative ingredients would:
- Be Customer focused (expanding relationships, delivering better service, attracting & retaining, cross-selling)
- Include processes and technology to help Connect Marketing (capture) to Sales (close) to Development (Innovate) to Fulfillment (deliver), etc.
- Reduce transaction costs (lead-to-close, order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and so on)
- Get everyone in the organization focused on the most important things (customer sat, revenue, and cost)
So it sounds like the # 1 job of every CIO is to enable the alignment and focus of the entire organization on the most important things.
Where do you start? Uncover and agree on what “the most important things” are from each business function perspective, and aligned with strategic objectives (start with the executive leadership team) and document the agreement in a standard way (our clients use our Broadsheets to do that).
Nice post - good analysis.
One of the ways I believe a CIO can identify "the most important things" is to seek out the decisions being made in the business and map them to the company's objectives and measures. And not just "big" decisions but little ones like what offer to make to a customer, when to approve a rebate, whether a claim can be paid or not, which supplier to pick for a particular order. The power of IT to improve these little decisions is great yet the reality of most companies today is that these decisions are made manually and often by the least well paid, least well trained staff.
Automating decisions in this way reducing transaction costs (by enabling more straight through processing), let's different group work together (by defining shared rules for decisions) and frees up people to focus on customers not on rubber-stamping transactions.
Posted by: James Taylor | May 18, 2009 at 05:49 PM