The CIO Challenge: It's Not About Server Up-Time

Did you know that the venerable Booz Allen & Hamilton has truncated its name to "booz&co."?  Not only abandoning a name with tremendous recognition and brand equity but, in a "what were they thinking!?" blunder, shining a spotlight on the unfortunate bibulous associations of the name "Booz."  Did they engage a management consultant before pulling off this stunt?   They're not talking.

But that's not what today's column is about.

It's about their article, The Practical Visionary, which covers one of the great unsung heros of 21st Century business:  The CIO.   Although I've written some about IT and its separated-at-birth sibling, Knowledge Management, the importance of it cannot be overestimated and it's worth recurring to some of the key learnings we now have about IT and the CIO function in general. 

Doubt the importance of technology?  Earlier this week I had the opportunity to ask the Chairman of an AmLaw 30 firm what had surprised him most during his 20 years of practicing and his answer was:  Technology, and how it had transformed the practice to an unrecognizable and unimaginable degree.

Shall we jump to the conclusion?

"The strategic CIO has never been more important to the future of the organization. As operations and markets become more fragmented, there is an ever-greater need for IT to bind together a company and augment its collective intellect (to paraphrase computer interface pioneer Douglas Engelbart). IT can be used to address problems of mounting complexity and to help an organization move into new products, new processes, and new markets, at home and around the world."

What precisely does this mean?

In May 2003, Harvard Business Review editor at large Nicholas Carr "ignited a firestorm" with an article titled, "Why IT Doesn't Matter."  This prompted a rejoinder in August 2003 , and led Carr to turn his article into the 2004 book, Does IT Matter?, which, incidentally, was a core assignment to the class when I taught "Strategic Technology & Innovation" at SUNY/Stony Brook's executive MBA program for law school leaders last year.

Carr's argument is not precisely that IT doesn't matter; it's that IT has become a commodity, available to all, and therefore incapable of providing lasting, meaningful competitive advantage.  “What makes a resource truly strategic,” wrote Carr, “is not ubiquity but scarcity.” He employs the analogies of the railroads and electricity as earlier technologies that seemed revolutionary at the time but became utterly commonplace utilities. 

Many have been the critiques of Carr's argument, but two strike me as particular bulls-eye strikes:

• Previous technological revolutions were rooted in the physical world.  Trains may have speeded up from 20 mph to 80 mph over 40 years, and the continent-wide build-out of the track network may have been accomplished, but Moore's Law shows no sign of abating.  Over a comparable 40 year period, the computational power per $1.00 spent on IT has not quadrupled but has increased by a factor of 10 to the 7th power, or 10-million times.    Your BlackBerry has more processing power than the Apollo lunar landing craft (and your BlackBerry will be obsolete in 18 months or less).
• Far more important, but also stemming from the rootedness of prior revolutions in the physical world:  The only limits to the IT revolution are limits of the human imagination.  Which is to say, no limits at all.   Who, 15 years ago, would have envisioned the Internet?  And once the Internet arrived, who could envision eBay, YouTube, Google, Facebook, wikis—or for that matter and keeping it within the family, the global readership community of "Adam Smith, Esq."?

Swimming in the water of IT, as it were, we may become forgetful of how profoundly it has changed our lives and our careers, but every once in awhile you realize the power of its achievements so far.  I experienced one of those micro-epiphanies two weeks ago standing in the checkout line in a store on the Upper West Side where I downloaded on my BlackBerry near real-time pictures being returned by the Phoenix Mars Lander of the Arctic Plain of  Mars.  Think of the enormous chain of interlocking and coordinating IT assets, hardware and software, involved in bringing me those 2" square images—and until I took a moment to reflect on it, I took it utterly for granted, as unremarkable as expecting my watch to actually keep time.

But back to CIO's.

There's a baseline requirement you need to meet, and after that there's a strategic opportunity.  The baseline is the obvious:  To keep the proverbial trains running on time.  Depending on the infrastructure you have to work with, that may be a challenge requiring months or years to meet.  The story is recounted of Michael Gliedman arriving at the headquarters of the NBA in 1999 as the brand-new CIO, finding a silo'd IT environment with "isolated pockets everywhere."  It took him 18 months to bring everything together and ensuring the core technology requirements worked reliably and efficiently. 

Only then could he embark on his real job:  Making a strategic difference to the NBA.  “There’s no way anybody in the business is going to take you seriously if it’s taking your guys 20 minutes to answer the help-desk phone,” he says.   But now he:

"... is the model 21st-century CIO. These days he is training his focus on the demand side of the IT business equation, where the needs of the business are paramount, rather than spending most of his time on such typical supply-side concerns as cutting IT costs — although these responsibilities are still very important. He has become a serious contributor to the league’s business results by harnessing powerful new technologies that make real-time information attractive and accessible both internally and to the NBA’s constituents and fans around the world. That’s why he — like any other truly strategic CIO — needs to be among the inner circle of senior leadership."

Gliedman—and his fellow senior leaders of the NBA—now views his job as deploying technologies that will support the League's three key strategic goals:  Boosting international interest, building the female fan base, and increasing the audience overall.  As markets and operations become more global and fragmented, the role of IT in binding a firm together has never been more important.  And in a way this is "back to the future:"

"In [supporting the strategic direction of their firms, CIO's] will bring back one of the almost-forgotten aspects of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s: It made work more engaging by making people more powerful. That shift turned out to have enormous strategic value. Word processors allowed people to pull their thoughts together, revise, and bring in new ideas iteratively, without having to retype each time. Electronic spreadsheets spawned thousands of “what if” scenarios that made business options clearer and eliminated the need for painstaking calculations conducted on paper by roomfuls of clerical staff. Databases provided the means to store and analyze huge amounts of data, providing insight into the supply chain, customers, and more at an unprecedented level of detail. E-mail made it possible to connect with many more people quickly. And the presentation program, though much derided, has been a vital tool for helping people convene teams and organize ideas. The resulting boom in productivity in the developed world has yet to slacken. Another result was an increase in scope: Organizations could do much more, with much less, than they could in the past. Without IT, as it soon came to be called, globalization would not be possible.

"But by the mid-1990s, that sense of liberation had turned to a sense of being shackled by the tools themselves. E-mail became a source of spam and irrelevancies, and took more and more time to tend. Word-processing software led to unnecessary revisions and overwritten documents. PowerPoint was actually banned at some companies."

So today the goal is not to be guided by the vision of the desktop PC but to embrace the range of Web 2.0 technologies—social networking software in general, which enables people to collaborate at a distance.  Because, after all, what do lawyers do?  They collaborate.  And in today's economy, they are almost surely collaborating "at a distance"—in space or in time or both. 

Don't underestimate the challenge:

"Given the degree to which IT has infiltrated every aspect of large enterprises, strategic CIOs must be able to speak a wide variety of corporate languages — operations, finance, manufacturing, marketing, sales — and to work with top executives, including the CEO, COO, and CFO; the heads of procurement and HR; and the leaders of individual business units. That demands an unusually broad set of business and communi­cation skills, a combination not often associated with “techies.”"

Gratefully, there are some guidelines:

• Start fast.  Don't be an "order taker," but give people tools you know will help them without waiting for them to ask.
• Be a capable executive in your own right.  Easier said than done, perhaps, but realize that decisiveness and effectiveness in project management will go a long way towards earning your peers' respect.  Make sure your staff understands your vision of what IT is all about.
• Once you have management's respect, don't ask for permission.  Move forward freely on initiatives you've earned the right to handle.
• Keep looking ahead.  No one else in the firm is responsible for peering out five or ten years to envision what new technology coming down the pike might—when it "grows up"—fit into your firm's strategic direction.

What do I mean by "keep looking ahead," probably the most important part of your job? 

I mean this:  Brainstorm out loud with your lawyers about what they could use to do their work better.  They don't know what's possible and you don't know what they need, but together, all of you can, if you're candid and imaginative, come up with applications that are truly useful.

One of my favorite examples is what I call "caller ID on steroids."    Now, caller ID is an antique and timeworn technology, and one well-understood by the most Paleolithic among us.  But imagine putting it to new and inventive purposes.  One firm I know of is working on a project that would do this:

• Instantly examine the "caller ID" info when a lawyer's phone rings;
• Match it against the known phone numbers of the firm's clients;
• If there's a match, "grab" the lawyer's computer screen to display not just the name, title, and company of the person who's calling, but also pull up a list of most active matters for that client, responsible attorneys on each matter, and Reuters newsfeeds about the company (all with hot clickable links, of course).

Think there's nothing new under the IT sun?  Think again.  It is not, with apologies to Nicholas Carr, a commodity.  It is limited only by your imaginations.

And good luck, because the challenges of deploying IT to support and turbocharge your firm's strategic direction are only going to become more intense, and accelerate.  Just imagine what a BlackBerry from 2018 will be able to do.