CIO as a Manager of IT Leaders with no other portfolio?

 I often see impressive, even daunting lists of responsibilities and deliverables for the CIO role.  They are usually arrayed in a meaningful way, often in hierarchies that mirror the IT organization itself. I have two questions about them:

1) Can one re-organize these responsibilities, issues, services, benefits, etc.  into two categories? One category would be this list from the perspective of the CIO looking at the IT organization as the object of performance enhancement, a second category would be looking at this list from the perspective of the enterprise as the object of performance enhancement and how IT can make it happen. I suspect that a great majority of these are more about making IT better rather than the enterprise better, but I could be wrong. And I think there are deliverables for IT in the area of making the enterprise better that need to be added to a typical CIO responsibilities list.

2) Our research has arrived at the following possibility:  have the CUSTODIAL (operational, focused on running the IT ship better) duties grown so large because IT permeates so much of the enterprise that the STRATEGIC (transformational, innovational, market share growth, top line growth, cash flow growth) duties are getting short shrift?  Or in some cases vice versa?  Looking at typical CIO responsibility lists my thoughts are that each and every one of the responsibilities is likely to have an IT leader in charge of them.  Someone who might report to the CIO or to someone who reports to the CIO.  If every single one of those IT leaders is doing a bang up job -- then perhaps our hypothesis is wrong. 

So the question is, does the CIO really have direct responsibility for anything?  If not, if they just "manage IT leaders" and "chat with the C suite" then our hypothesis that CIO job is too big, needs to be split between operations and strategy,  is probably wrong.

Another way of putting this might be, which of the typical CIO responsibilities DON'T have an IT leader in place to manage them?  What does the CIO have to own directly, as a big part of their 60 hour work week, with or without an IT leader nominally in charge of the issue/responsibility?

The one that immediately comes to mind is integrating a large acquisition....  are there others?

What problem does social networking solve in the enterprise?

My thoughts this morning turned to a dichotomy between having not enough information (typical of a hierarchical control of information flow) and having too much information that may STILL not be what you need (what email, Web, and non-hierarchical information flows have brought about), adding in the variable of time (the information you need is never stable, always changing).

We covered some of this several years back in the context of the changes in the media industry wrought by digitalization in the "Lifestyle Media" white paper.   I used a buzz word phrase back then: "the attention economy."  The idea was that as the "media economy" has moved from one of scarcity to one of plenty, the last scarce resource is a customer's attention.  I think there is a direct parallel in the enterprise to an employee's attention.

Consider the following thought experiment.  In the hierarchical / limited information context the analog is being in a small work group focused on a common functional role. If you need information you'll have a mental map of who to go to in the group, which covers some but not all of your information seeking.  If you can't map an information need to a person you can "shout out" to the whole group; that will work some times.  But in many cases you'll hit an information wall, your information need won't be filled.

Now imagine you are at a huge conference in a massive room with thousands of people in it.  You know a few people, perhaps colleagues, near you.  You have an information need but those near you can't fill it.  Because there are thousands of people there you know there are people in the room who have the information you seek but its too loud to "shout out" to fulfill it, so you just move around randomly asking people.

This latter situation is like today's email / communications environment in a large enterprise. Yes, email can empower you to go beyond the hierarchy, to reach out to anyone for information.  And perhaps in not a completely random way, you seek and find information with rifle shot emails guided by "I think Jim in marketing knows, send him an email."  Often this too fails -- Jim doesn't respond or doesn't know.  You can consider an enterprise-wide "shout out." But in a large firm if everyone tries to virtually "shout out" (send emails to 10,000 people) in search of information you get email overload, people stop looking at emails, and the information need isn't filled.

We recently interviewed a social business expert.  One key point he made was that enterprise social networks are more about following topics than following people.  Consider the large room situation again.  What if  all the people in that room were self organizing into topics of interest or "birds of a feather" groupings, with a big sign above them displaying their topics.  Perhaps there are 100 topics, in alphabetical order arranged around the room.  Now the information needy person can navigate to the topic of interest and immediately ask someone in that group for information.

In Facebook we are following people, not topics (well, I follow the Roku place page so topics are coming into Facebook).  Whatever, the point is to bring in the time dimension into what / who you are following.  When you are following people the time dimension is less important -- friends don't come and go at high frequency.  In an enterprise context you might follow a topic for a long time as well if it is core to your role.  But you might follow some topics briefly for a specific reason, then drop it. 

The point is, by following topics in an enterprise social network where people are posting questions and answers and links and documents and such it creates a way to move beyond the immediate work group to fulfill information needs - to "shout out" -  without overwhelming or being overwhelmed by 10,000 other people shouting out at the same time.  It can be a self-organizing, dynamic topic environment that can branch and subdivide if topics get over-subscribed.  Like a large room divided into BOFs.

In short, just as in the media world, the most valuable asset is staff attention -- are staff using their attention efficiently and effectively?  Enterprise social networks help direct and manage attention by supporting information seeking and fulfillment in a highly scalable way - a way not available to alternative forms of direct (face to face) or electronic communication.

10 New Questions for CIOs

1) What's your new technology adoption process?

2) Who focuses on the conceptualization of new business applications?

3) Is the current CIO role that combines ever more operational responsibility with stategic change sustainable?

4) Is your relationship to the chief influencers changing and are you one of them?

5) What parts of the CIO role warrant a seat at the C suite; what parts don't?

6) <placeholder> Is there any other significant enterprise spend less transparent the IT spend?

7) How do you balance risk with the need to change? And balance business risk with IT risk. Is the CIO disincented because of lights on responsbility from making changes in core operations?

8) Do you see any serious disruptions coming down the road that will cause a fundamental change in the CIO role?  What are they likely to be.

9) How much value do you place on deep understanding of transformational technologies like cloud, semantic Web, social media, big data, context-driven architecture? Do you have time to understand them? If not you, who? If someone else, who integrates the business and technology vision?

10) Is the push for CIOs to own shared services AND IT a push to being the CAO?  Can you be the CAO AND the head of IT R&D at the same time?

Cable,Telco CIOs -- how do they do it?

Separate groups -- one internal IT, one technology for production/network management. It creates its own challenges -- lack of integration when needed (single view of customer, cross selling/up-selling, etc.).

If all companies become "telco's" - Think banks, Web companies (Amazon), E trade, where bits are the deliverable or run processes of business units. How do they separate the operations and technology futures roles? Amazon separates CIO role and responsibility from the AWS responsiblity (CTO).  On the other hand ADP's CIO had an expansive role across operations, R&D, and new services and offerings.

When things are blowing up there is no pattern.  Our inability to find a pattern may be the best indication that the role itself is unstable in its current "standard set of responsibilities?" 

Back office versus Front office

Back office versus mid or front office. Former is stable (if consolidating).  Latter is moving fast.

Differential in rate of change between front and back office is creating problems. 

The mindset is that it's all IT, but the differences in front and back office are substantial.

Do mini-CIOs just recreate the fundamental problem that center CIOs face? Just at a business unit level?
IT pushes operational responsibility for ALL processes to the CIO.  Business unit leaders opt out of OPERATIONAL responsibility because IT controls their operation.

Are CEOs the problem?

They want a single person accountable for BOTH 5 9's operational reliability AND strategic investment in change to deliver higher performing organizations.

If a seat at the table requires operational excellence, when does the CIO have time to understand the future?

Think of the parallel in product companies. Design versus manufacturing. Are they under the same boss?

Design and/or R&D report to division presidents or CMO or head of engineering; manufacturing reports into COO.

Does IT need the same split?  Does CIO go with design/R&D?  IT ops go to the COO?

Role overload? Time for a split? Ops versus Improvement

What part of the CIO role truly needs to be part of the C-suite conversation?

What parts of the CIO responsibilities are never worthy of the C-suite conversation (except in failure mode)?

Do the answers to these questions suggest a "role and responsibility split" is at hand for CIOs?

Delivery/operations continuity is so important today -- companies can't do much without it. But that is not the same skill set as strategic thinking about ways to improve the organization with technology. Why should the ops person even report to the CIO? 

Even if you delegate ops to a subordinate... you're never released to think about what's next.