Before Changing the CIO Agenda... Get the House in Order...

Though it is my personal view, I belief a CIO is a custodian of all that encompasses information in an organisation; information in all its forms and formats; systems that store, manage, retrieve, safeguard the organisational information; CIO is an analyst who is suppose to understand and guide the organisation on its journey to understand how technology fits into and aligns itself with business strategy.

So, the CIO's role is clearly changing. The advent of mobility, social networking, cloud computing, big data and -  do-it yourself easy applications is only accelerating the need to embark on this journey to change / journet to transform. The CIOs need to change their priorities.

It is said that there is a need for CIOs to look outward from the customer perspective and more importantly from a business-product standpoint of view. To do that the CIO needs to engage with customers to see how they can improve the customer's environment. There is a clear need to align Business and IT Spanning across the entire Customer Life Cycle. This is easier said than done.

As step one, the CIOs need to understand that before looking outwards, they need to get their "IT house in order" i.e to say that CIOs need to get the "basics in the right place". A CIO could take a 4 step approach to "put / get" his / her IT House in Order and is a given.

• Get the Basics Right
• Build on the Basics
• Concentrate on Quality of Service (QoS) and Building Partnerships
• Measure the KPIs and more importantly Publish the KPI Results

The above will help the CIO establish his / her credentials within the organization. The CIO needs to think of IT Services and run them as a "Business", treat the internal users as "customers" and partner with the "customers" to understand business. So, this is the transformation of the CIO role into a "Business Service Manager" role.

Also, traditionally, CIOs have always adopted the path - develop systems solution for business needs. Systems development is always a step-by-step approach, change management is done through software releases / patches creating a ever-existing gap between the business needs and systems. In this fast changing business environment, this will have to change, CIOs will need to think ahead of the business needs and will need to find innovative solution and remain ahead of the curve. In doing so, the CIOs will need to image possibilities, visualize end results and then create pathways to get to the desired; the CIOs will need to be strategic and develop their capabilities through gap assessment, training and a process to communicate with the organization.

It is also important that executive management in organization understand that a CIO with his/ her understanding of systems / technology and the overall business and the business environment it operates in is well poised to participate in the "strategy formulating" process with the CEO, CFO and the Senior Management of an organization; because as Ankush Chopra (Ph. D, Asst. Prof of Strategy at Babson College (U.S.A)) said at the CIO Summit in Pune recently - strategy without systems and /or systems without strategy both yield - no results.

Strategy without Systems and / or Systems without Strategy result in failures of the Critical Business Initiatives that are expected to bring about Business Transformation. It is at this point the blame games start and most of the times a CIO faces himself / herself at the receiving end of the argument without either party really understanding the root cause of the discomfort on not delivering a successful project.