The Right Place to Start

Once you've determined the time is right to introduce a new technology, your next step is to decide where in your organization is the best place to use it. This requires you to understand the operating model of your company and how it uses technology to support those operations. Understand what operations will benefit the most from a new technology and then weigh the risks involved with the introduction of this technology against its potential benefits. Select an operation where the risk is manageable and where there will also be big rewards.

This selection process is not entirely an analytical one. There is also a strong element of intuition involved, based on your assessment of potential impacts that a new technology will have on the operations where it could be used. This combination of analysis and intuition is what makes up the operational art. It's the ability to know where a tactical move (such as introducing new technology) will produce a strategic result (such as the realization of significant new revenue or cost reductions).

I employed this operational art when I introduced the BlackBerry into my company. I implemented it first with the company's national account sales team instead of providing it to my own IT staff or other internal people. The vice president of sales said his people could use them to increase sales. This would have a bigger impact on our company than would be gained by providing it to our internal staff to increase their productivity.

Plenty of people in the company wanted this technology, but as the IT leader, I had to make the call. I figured the sales team was the most motivated to use it productively instead of fussing over its shortcomings. The first generation of these units had plenty of limitations. They had low-resolution screens. It was cumbersome to open and scroll through e-mails. As phones they were bulkier than cell phones. I felt that the internal staff would be more prone to fixate on these limitations, and as a result, the project wouldn't generate the returns I knew were needed to prove the concept. The salespeople were highly motivated to overlook the limitations and exploit the opportunity the technology provided. They could use it to stay closer to customers and thus earn more money for the company.

The likelihood of success made the BlackBerry project worth the risk, and the returns more than covered the cost of installing and learning how to use and support the technology. Once we had moved up the learning curve and the devices had improved, we rolled it out to my own IT staff and other internal users.

Winning CIOs make use of their analytical skills to see when a new technology has promise. They understand how their companies make money and what the cost factors are in their companies' operating models. Then they develop their practice of the operational art - that blend of business knowledge, street smarts and technical savvy - to determine where to best introduce new technology. This is how they guide their companies through the process of selecting and deploying the latest technologies. CIOs who learn to excel at this become indispensable players, and they become leaders in the transformation of their organizations.

Mike Hugos is a partner in AgiLinks, a software company specializing in agility training and the development of agile supply chains. He is a former CIO of Network Services and author of Essentials of Supply Chain Management. He can be reached at mhugos@yahoo.com