Knowledge Aggregator

"I have always believed that the role of the CIO was to affectively aggregate tacit knowledge to solve explicit knowledge requirements and strategic objectives of an organization," says Christopher Goh, a peer review manager from South Brisbane. "Being more technology savvy helps you have a better idea of a solution or enterprise architecture to enable that vision, but doesn't necessarily give you the governance and process modelling required to leverage the information into the real value proposition of ICT, which is knowledge."

The CIO role has been interpreted by different organizations and their accompanying executive to having different purposes, Goh says. While many CIO roles particularly in smaller enterprises have a heavy IT focus, others are more focused on governance, alignment and enablement.

"I think the most significant difference IT literate CEOs will bring to the table, particularly in service-oriented businesses, is that information aggregation presented in applied knowledge will finally be considered as core business," Goh says.

The role of the CIO has evolved from being the manager of the IT function to a business-focused IT knowledge resource to the business, agrees Marc Lachance, president of business operations consultancy M E Lachance and Associates. With outsourcing of IT, the CIO has only one focus: Help the business grow by educating the business about what IT can do for them, and helping them to deliver those results effectively.

"If IT is not outsourced, the CIO has a challenge: They can't focus on the technology; they must focus on the business. In most organizations, even though the title is CIO, there is still too much focus on technology and day-to-day operations," Lachance says.

"Whether or not, the CEO understands technology is not the issue. The CEO understands the business and what the business needs to grow. Managing technology does not need technical skills. It needs management skills, process skills. The CIO needs to focus on the business results that IT can achieve."

Know Your Domain

The CIO will not only require an advanced understanding of business and IT domains, but great skill in defining how domains relate and what interfaces, organizational structures, processes and documents are needed at different levels of detail, says Tim Williams, security architect lead at UK company Trusted Borders.

"Over the last two to three decades there have been numerous attempts to implement unified governance processes and documentation, such as SSADM, CMMI, ITIL, COBIT, RUP, SOA and BPEL, that span business and technology domains," Williams points out. "The impact of constantly changing methods has been mostly disruptive.

"Most organizations do not have effective review controls over the selection and implementation of methods. Most organizations do not explicitly define and control the agreed scope of methods or provide effective guidance about which methods should be used under which circumstances. Unlike many other corporate control mechanisms, such as finance, security and personnel, methods are not reviewed annually, tested for effectiveness and governed effectively," Williams says.

"In many organizations, things are allowed to drift with competition and ambiguity between the methods, processes and documents of various factions and interest groups. There may be a general hope that what will emerge will from the melange of different processes will be best practice but rarely is this the reality.

"In part CIOs of the future will achieve alignment by securing explicit support for appropriate separation of concerns, ensuring that disruptive 'burst through' between IT and business domains does not occur outside control. For example, in a well-directed, well-managed information ecosystem, why should a technical change occurring in the hardware infrastructure ever be allowed to impact the business outside agreed constraints?"

Williams believes agreements between the parent organization and the IT function will in future deal explicitly with different levels of decision making (for example, strategic, tactical and operational); different decision-making time horizons and different levels of quality/sustainability.

Sustainable alignment will also be achieved by explicitly developing, strengthening and supporting appropriate governance interfaces between business and technology domains. "For instance, control of the creation of new logical data items or the permanent deletion of expired data will not in future be left to a committee of one in IT," Williams says. "There will be a broad understanding shared between IT and the business domains of what matters.

"Currently in most organizations junior developers are given free rein to define new XML tags as they see fit. At an enterprise level, the costs of the information 'Tower of Babel' created when each individual invents his own language are enormous and potentially threaten the profitability and sustainability of the parent organization.

"Many organizations allow individuals to make their own decisions about what business data is retained and what deleted. Most organizations allow their business managers to select new IT applications without adequately assessing the full lifecycle costs of integration, support and decommissioning.

"When junior business managers are able to cause the purchase of COTS applications with tens or hundreds of thousands of data items without any effective analysis of the enterprise impacts, the CIO role isn't working," he says

The CIO of the future must implement mechanisms to ensure that gross misalignment does not occur between the business side, demand-driven decision-making process and the IT side supply-driven decision-making processes."

In short, CIOs must start controlling the scope, lifecycle and ownership of methods, Williams says.