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CDO: The Chief Déjà Vu Officer

Whac-a-mole. It’s my favorite of all metaphors, at least when it comes to applicability to IT. For those who don’t know the background: Whac-a-mole  is a commonly seen arcade game, where plastic moles pop up at random through holes in the game panel. The job of the player, of course, is to pound them down again with a mallet, accumulating points with each kinetic, mind-clearing, vigorous whack. And, of course, the game keeps speeding up. The moles never stop coming.

Any readers who don’t instantly get the clear analogy to IT are probably reading the wrong blog.

A career spent in IT feels like a constant bout of Whac-a-mole. But here, again, is one key recurring “mole” that I find especially irritating: the proliferation, against all logic, of articles and tweets about the demise of IT, the death of the CIO, and how technology is now so easy, so omnipresent, that experts are no longer required.

I wrote about this ever-repeated meme a year ago in a post titled “IT consumerization, the cloud, and the alleged death of the CIO”.  I railed against the meme, pointing out that “this frequent linking of cloud and IT consumerization to the looming demise of the CIO and IT is not just misguided, but actually gets it completely backwards. In fact, I argue that IT consumerization and the cloud will actually elevate the importance of IT within a company, as both a service and a strategic focus.”

But IT moribundity is a meme that somehow refuses to, uh, die.

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Filed Under: Industry trends, Role definition, Strategy
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Novels of IT: The Phoenix Project

Nerd alert: it’s an exciting day for me when someone releases a new “novel of IT”. I’ve made it my mission to find and review several of these (now four) over the past couple of years, and I may be one of the few people out there who has read and reviewed all of them.

To recap: what do I mean by a “novel of IT”? It’s a term I coined to describe a fictionalized depiction of life in a corporate IT environment, usually bearing a number of intended lessons in tow about IT best practices, approaches, pitfalls. They’re generally not works of serious fiction; their audience is usually the lot of IT professionals rather than the broad public. (For example, I don’t include in this category two fine and recommended works that in fact aspire more to literature than to IT didacticism: Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs and Ellen Ullman’s The Bug).

As I’ve traveled through the fictional scenarios depicted in these four books, I’ve evolved criteria for what makes them successful (or not) in my eyes. In a novel of IT, I’m looking for a book that is both reasonably engaging as a novel and one that accurately portrays a broad swath of the inner workings, nuances, and personality types that are typically part of the landscape of IT in today’s world. Reading the book should provide a window into common dilemmas and disagreements regarding IT issues, lending perspective and insight into all parties’ motivations and interests.

I looked forward for many months to the release last week of The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford,  after meeting and chatting with Gene Kim at a conference back in May of last year. I was greatly impressed at the time with Gene’s general demeanor, enthusiasm, and articulateness. He gave a rip-roaring presentation at the conference on “ITIL at Ludicrous Speeds: Rugged DevOps”: I recommend seeing him speak if you get the chance. I felt certain that his long-promised “novel of IT” would be a worthy addition to the collection of works in this category.

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Filed Under: Book reviews, General, Overview, Recommended reading, Role definition, Strategy
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IT consumerization, the cloud, and the alleged death of the CIO

As with just about any area, IT is a discipline subject to fads and memes, “received truths” that seem to arise in the press or the blogosphere and then ricochet around the echo chamber until they sound plausible even to skeptics. A number of these roll across my Twitter stream every day. But one such meme rises so high to the top that it has to be the sole focus here. And that is the much-repeated “death of the CIO” meme, coupled as it is currently with dreamy visions of the world brought to us by the consumerization of IT and the cloud. They’re all linked, at least in many pundit eyes.

Here’s the gist of their argument: users can go out and get their own technology now; they don’t need IT to do it for them. End-users are now IT-savvy, and can fend for themselves.They’ll bring their own devices (BYOD); they don’t need or want IT to provide devices for them. They’ll procure the services they need and want from the various SaaS offerings in the cloud or from outsourced vendors, and they’ll handle it all themselves.

All this ultimately gets not only expressed as the question of who needs a CIO anymore, it goes even further: who needs an IT department at all anymore? Says one article, “If IT does not provide the end user with the infrastructure they need, the latter can rent it, by the hour or month from companies like Rackspace or Amazon… All you need is a credit card and no approval from IT.”  Other CIO “thought leader” articles feature astonishing blanket statements like, “With the consumerization of IT, consumers can create value for themselves and the enterprise, using technology that costs the enterprise nothing.” And people even take this so far as arguing that the CIO at this point should just leave technology up to the VARs.

Let me be clear once again: this frequent linking of cloud and IT consumerization to the looming demise of the CIO and IT is not just misguided, but actually gets it completely backwards. In fact, I argue that IT consumerization and the cloud will actually elevate the importance of IT within a company, as both a service and a strategic focus.

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Filed Under: Role definition, Strategy, Top 25 posts
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Novels of IT, Part 2: Haunting the CEO

Last time, I introduced this series by pointing out that reading what I call “novels of IT” could serve a few very useful purposes for those of us who work in and around information technology.  In fact, I presented a number of criteria that come to mind when answering the implicit question of why anyone should bother to read a novel of IT.

Ideally, it’s because such novels, at their best, can do the following:

  • provide a degree of engagement and entertainment in making their points
  • provide a realistic insight, in a “show not tell” kind of way, into what motivates the typical players in these business scenarios,
  • help all factions (inside and outside IT) come to see the other side’s perspective and arrive at deeper understandings of common problems and disagreements.
  • allow the CIO to hand the novel to his or her CEO or CFO and trust that everyone’s reading of it will help reach common ground in how to collectively and collaboratively approach the company’s goals.
There are, of course, pitfalls involved in constructing such a novel, the foremost of which is falling into blatant stereotypes: most notably, the nerdy CIO who clings to technology and can’t see a larger role for himself or herself. The book I covered in my first post on IT novels, Chris Potts’ FruITion, not only fell into this trap in spades, but took it to a whole new dimension, painting IT in general as basically no longer needed as a separate discipline, and as having become so trivial as to not need an executive at all.
This time, I’ll discuss John Hughes’ recent and excellent contribution to this genre, Haunting the CEO.
Filed Under: Book reviews, General, Recommended reading, Role definition, Strategy, Top 25 posts
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Novels of IT, Part 1: Turtles All The Way Down

Novels are harder than most technology-oriented people typically realize. The backbone of a good novel is character development, meaning that the character learns and grows — which makes it easy for especially amateur novelists to start off with a character who is, frankly, little more than a one-dimensional dolt. This is an even more dangerous pitfall when it’s a “novel of IT”: the temptation is almost unavoidable for the author to create as protagonist a stereotypical technology leader, clueless as to what is really important or how to be effective, who is then gradually enlightened by wiser individuals as the novel progresses.

There are three IT-related novels I’m aware of, all relatively recent, that fall essentially along those lines.

All of them are worth reading, but I had majorly different reactions to each. While I’d intended to cover all three in one blog post, the complexities involved in discussing the first, very problematic example have led me to divide this discussion into more than one post.

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Filed Under: Book reviews, General, Industry trends, Recommended reading, Role definition, Strategy
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“ASAP” considered harmful

When do you want it?  “As soon as possible”, comes the ready answer.

Everyone says it. Everyone knows what they mean by it, in essence, and it seems fairly harmless.  But more often than not, I’ve seen it overused as a substitute for real thought and real leadership.

Especially in this new era of “internet time”, the declaration of “I want it ASAP” has often turned into an excuse not to plan, a rejection of due diligence and careful preparation, or even an intentional ignoring of previous lessons learned.  Taken to an extreme, it can represent the triumph of pure testosterone over diligence and caution.

Meg Whitman, former CEO at eBay, writes in her recent book, The Power of Many: Values for Success in Business and in Life about how one positive performance differentiator of individuals at eBay was their sense of urgency.  “eBay never would have prospered as it did without a team with a strong bias for action,” she states.  Having worked in a couple of places that were unnecessarily and infuriatingly slow in their decision-making, I too tend to generally applaud a bias towards action in business.  It reflects a philosophy that an imperfect plan executed right now is usually better than a perfect plan executed next year.  Or, as Seth Godin puts it in his book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable: “Real artists ship.” Or, as a tweet I saw recently had it, “if you’re not embarrassed by the first launch of your product, that means you waited too long.”

However, one can take a bias towards action too far.

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Filed Under: Anecdotes, Pillars of Purview, Projects, Strategy
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Countering a disturbing bandwagon: rich vs. poor IT organizations

It’s time for me to speak up.  Not that I haven’t before, here and here. But sometimes I just have to shake my head. I read certain IT-related articles on the web, or tweets by some colleagues, and they’re so out of sync with IT reality that I feel like it’s Opposite Day.

Here’s what I mean.  Let’s look closely at the latest item of this ilk that has spurred my head to swivel: this rather stunning recent Forbes interview with Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research at Gartner Executive Programs. At core, McDonald is touting and praising, and with much reasonable-sounding eloquence and assurance, an abandonment of common long-standing lessons in IT.  In fact, such an abandonment is being presented as the only path to goodness, success, and truth; traditional areas of focus for IT are deprecated as being either of lesser importance, or even as the veritable hallmark of a clearly backward CIO who just doesn’t get the new order.

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Filed Under: General, Industry trends, Strategy
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Yes we can, yes we must: the ongoing case for IT/Business alignment

How do we (IT executives) get away from being typecast as technologists, unconsulted on core business issues and approaches? Face it, that’s a common situation and dilemma that we all encounter, early and often, and it’s the grist for a constant mill of articles and blog posts and books on business/IT alignment.

Lately, though, a part of that mill has started insisting that focus on technology should be avoided altogether by what they usually cast as the “next generation” of CIO.  So I’m going to (again) be a bit of a contrarian here: it’s possible for the pendulum to swing too far in the wrong direction. I think that we can at times go overboard in our desire to avoid being seen as the geek with the pocket protector.  Examples: some preach outright denial that there might be such a perception problem: don’t even think of using the terms “IT” and “business”, they urge, and they recommend against ever discussing “alignment” as a goal.  Stop referring to the “business” as something separate, they recommend; IT is just as much part of the business as anything else! Similarly, their advice is “avoid discussing the technology itself.” As if a mere shift in language could solve the perception problem and automatically propel the CIO into the inner circle of decision-makers.

Here’s the gist of how I see it, though: in many (I daresay most) companies, the path of IT from high priesthood to strategic key playerdom has not really been fully traversed: in other words, greater alignment IS still needed of IT with “the business.”

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Filed Under: Anecdotes, Communication, General, Stakeholders, Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,
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