Introduction
For the past two generations of human civilization, we have been told that we live in an “Information Age.” And for at least one generation, we have been told that our business organizations, our government agencies, and our day-to-day social lives depend more and more critically on computer technology. We no longer express any surprise about how rapidly technology is changing and evolving because it's something we all experience: every one of us has his or her own “war story” about how primitive things were—even a short five years ago.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the office of the Chief Information Officer of today's organizations. Ironically, that title did not even exist when I finished college and entered the workforce back in the Paleolithic Age of the 1960s. But those were the days when companies thought they were in the “widget” business—whether the widgets were automobiles or toasters or some other tangible product. Today, even the most Luddite executives realize that information technology (IT) is what connects their organizations and its products/services to the marketplace and the customers and their assortment of laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Equally important, IT is the “electricity” (or, as U.S. federal government CIO Vivek Kundra puts it, the “digital oil”) that keeps their “factory” running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Consequently, CIOs are becoming an increasingly critical executive in both private-sector and public-sector organizations. As I confirmed in the interviews presented in this book, they almost all have a title of “Vice President” or better; many of them report directly to the CEO or COO of the organization; and some are members of the board of directors of their organization. At the same time, they are often difficult to identify and sometimes extremely difficult to track down and contact. Of course, it's not so easy to pick up the phone and make a direct call to the CEO of a large organization, either; but I was surprised to see how many companies had no public information about the identity, or even the existence, of their Chief Information Officer.
Indeed, I was surprised by how many CIOs were uninterested in talking to me about their opinions of how IT was being used to make their organizations more productive, more competitive, more efficient. After all, “information” is the middle initial of their abbreviated title; and, as one CIO put it, a more appropriate title might even be “Chief Communication Officer.”
After several such unsuccessful efforts to contact CIOs within various Wall Street banks and financial services organizations, it finally dawned on me: in some of these organizations, strategic use of IT really is considered a competitive advantage. If these firms really do believe that to be the case, why on earth would they want to share that competitive advantage with anyone else? Why would they want to discuss it? Why would they even want to acknowledge its existence? It would almost be like the CIA or the National Security Agency opening all their secret files for public review and discussion.
At the same time, the secretive “closed” approach towards IT that these organizations exhibit reminds me of “closed” countries now experiencing turmoil on the world scene where attempts to shut down the Internet essentially shut down the country's economy. Wall Street firms are not the CIA, and in the long run, I believe their attempts to seal themselves off from the increasingly interconnected, Internet-enabled world will prove to be a failed strategy.
Meanwhile, some organizations are clearly proud of what they've done, and what they plan to do in the future, with information technology. They're not going to share their “secret sauce” proprietary algorithms (for example, Google didn't offer to share its page-ranking algorithm with me any more than Coca-Cola would have shared the detailed recipe for its soft drink) and they're not going to deposit all of their software in an open-source code repository. But they realize that their employees—who often number in the tens of thousands, sometimes even the hundreds of thousands—represent a society of their own, and that it's a positive thing to encourage their employees to interact with customers, suppliers, vendors, and business partners in the outside world.
Equally important, most of the companies I spoke with have finally accepted the wisdom of The Clue Train Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual [Perseus Publishing, 2001], which comprises 95 theses describing what the authors (Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger) felt was the new “reality” of the networked marketplace. A decade ago it sounded quite radical to suggest that “Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall,” (thesis number 62), or that “Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing at them,” (thesis number 2). But today, more and more companies realize that the best way to confront these theses (which have turned out to be realities, not abstract theories) is to be honest and open, and to be pervasively and intimately involved in the activities of their markets and their customers. As Messrs. Levine et al prophesied, this cannot be done by having “flacks and hucksters” talk at the marketplace, but by having everyone, from the clerk to the executive, talk with the marketplace—via Twitter, Facebook, smartphone, blogs, wikis, and whatever new forms of interaction may come along in the next few years.
Clearly, all of this involves the IT department within an organization, and thus requires the vision, strategy, and leadership of the CIO and his or her team. But it doesn't tell us what the CIO does on a day-to-day basis. As I learned from my interviews, those duties usually break down into three major categories, the first of which can be described metaphorically as “keeping the lights on.” I must confess that I didn't give this area much thought when I began the CIOs at Work project because I started my own IT career in the 1960s, when most organizations operated fairly straightforward mainframe computers in locked, air-conditioned, heavily secured data centers. As we moved into the 1980s and 1990s, of course, companies began acquiring thousands of desktop and laptop computers, and their solitary mainframe centers evolved into increasingly scaled-down, distributed, interconnected computers in every country, every manufacturing center, every sales office, and every nook and cranny of the organization. But my understanding was more intellectual than visceral. It didn't really make an impact on me.
Today, it's common to see CIOs overseeing an IT infrastructure that includes tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of computers and servers and computerized gadgets—as well as thousands of applications and mind-boggling amounts of data. Bits and pieces of this infrastructure can, and do, break down from time to time; but as a whole, it's “mission critical” in the sense that if you turn off the computers (or, equivalently, turn off the network that connects them), you might as well turn off the electricity and send everyone home. It would be a sublime understatement to say it's a non-trivial task to keep all of this running smoothly; and what surprised me, consistently, was how calm and matter-of-fact today's CIOs are about this part of their job.
Perhaps because of my own career in the field, my “gut instinct” was that CIOs would be spending the majority of their time working with their peers and counterparts in the various business units of the organization, looking for ways to make the business more efficient, more productive, and more competitive. Part of that, of course, includes making the IT department itself more efficient, productive, and competitive by accomplishing more work with fewer people, and by carrying out system development projects in a fashion that's consistently on-time, under-budget, and free of the software bugs that drive everyone crazy. And because computer hardware is still an expensive part of the IT budget, CIOs are looking more and more closely at the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing—indeed, those technologies are a “done deal” in the majority of organizations that I interviewed.
But simply making existing business processes more productive and efficient is apparently not as exciting as it once was. After all, business organizations have been using computers, for almost 50 years now, to make the number-crunching, paper-pushing, mundane operational activities of the organization less time-consuming and expensive. There is always more that can be done, of course, but the main emphasis today seems to be shifting the IT emphasis from inside the organization to outside the organization—to connect the organization's employees, processes, and data more intimately to the consumers, suppliers, partners, and other organizations with which the business interacts.
Of course, improvements in these areas are not being carried out by the CIOs on their own, nor are they being carried out by brilliant IT technicians working on behalf of passive, technology-illiterate business people. More and more often today, the people in the business units are almost as computer-savvy as the people in the IT organization. They, too, are part of the “digital nation” that has been using computers since birth. Indeed, many of them learned to program when they were children, just as our IT wizards did, but then they decided to focus their energies on marketing, or manufacturing, or finance, or genetic engineering.
As a result, the most exciting part of the CIO work that I saw during my interviews involved true partnership efforts between IT professionals and business-unit professionals—as well as external customers, suppliers, and business partners in many cases—to find completely new things for the business, which simply did not exist before. New markets, new customers, new ways of interacting with existing customers, new products, new features for existing products … the possibilities seem endless. And, of course, when these partnership efforts do conceive of new things to build, make, or do, everyone wants the IT department to carry it out as quickly as humanly possible. If there was ever any doubt in my mind that the “agile” approach to systems development would be widely adopted, it was certainly dispelled after the first one or two interviews that I carried out. The “waterfall” development approach may not have disappeared entirely, but it has certainly moved into the distant background.
Throughout my interviews, I asked CIOs what excited them most about new technologies and new developments they anticipated in the next few years—and I then turned the question around and asked them what their biggest concerns were, what kept them awake at night. Many of the answers were predictable: everyone agreed that we have only begun to see the impact of “mobility” as we continue building smarter and smarter handheld devices, at prices that can be afforded by people all over the planet. And everyone is concerned about security, ranging from terrorist attacks to traditional cyber-security to “inside-job” attacks. Almost all of the CIOs are already adopting the technology of virtualization, and most of them agree that “cloud computing” is a tidal wave that may or may not be sufficiently “bulletproof” (in terms of security, privacy, and reliability) to use for mission-critical applications, but which will eventually be a pervasive, if not “universal,” technology.
Some of the CIOs' responses surprised me, though they often reflected trends that are visible all around me, and which I should have noticed a long time ago. Shortly after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, for example, I remember hearing my New York City friends and colleagues reacting angrily to policy statements from their employers that business-supplied cellphones and BlackBerries should only be used for business purposes and not for personal use. “If there's another attack,” one friend said to me, “my first priority is not my company, but finding out whether my family is safe. If my company is going to insist on these ridiculous rules, then I'm going to need a second cellphone for my own personal use.”
At the time, I remember thinking that this was an extreme but perfectly understandable response, and that it was a response to a localized phenomenon, not an indicator of a general trend. But that was ten years ago and now it is a general trend—not so much because of crises and terrorist attacks (though Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, the tsunami in Japan, and dozens of other events have certainly reinforced the trend), but simply because people know they have more powerful technology available to them at home, and at affordable prices, than they have in their workplace.
That being the case, I was fascinated to hear how the CIOs of major companies are reacting to the trend. After all, a corporate ultimatum of “Thou shalt not use consumer devices!” is not likely to succeed. So what do the CIOs say to the employees who bring smartphones into the office, who have two BlackBerries (to ensure that the corporate security people don't spy on their personal e-mail messages), and who have far more powerful desktop PCs at home than the ancient clunkers they use in the office?
Equally important, how are the technology vendors reacting to this trend? As several CIOs lamented to me, they used to expect the vendors to come to them first, because technology was sold en masse to large companies, which then allowed some of that technology to “trickle down” to the worker bees at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. Now, many of the vendors (think Google, Apple, Microsoft, and several others) are approaching the consumer market first … and then waiting to see if a grassroots revolution causes the technology to trickle up to the top of the corporate hierarchy.
In addition to hearing their reactions to current trends, I was also interested in the advice that CIOs had to offer about education (is a computer-science degree better than a broad, liberal-arts degree?), project/work assignments, reactions to the corporate environment, mentors, and the skills needed to move up the career ladder to a CIO position. Here again, some of the responses and comments were predictable, while others definitely were not. If you've been dreaming of being a CIO someday but lamented the fact that you don't have a master's degree in software engineering from MIT or Carnegie-Mellon, you may be surprised at what the CIOs have to say in this area. Similarly, if you thought that your master's degree in computer science from Cal Tech or Stanford would guarantee you such a job in the future, you may also be surprised.
My final question to the CIOs was: what's next? The answers were correlated fairly closely to their ages: those who were approaching retirement typically viewed the CIO position as the culmination of their career and looked forward to a semi-retirement role as a consultant, professor, or board member. Those in the middle of their career were generally enthusiastic about their current position, and had mixed reactions to the idea that they might someday be promoted to an even higher position, such as CEO. And those who were relative youngsters, still in their twenties or early thirties, generally relished what they were doing and looked forward to the expansion of challenging assignments as they work to make their organization all that much more productive, efficient, and competitive.
All of this was quite thought-provoking to say the least—especially for someone like me, who has already spent 45 years in the IT industry. My only regret is that I didn't conduct these interviews right after I graduated from college—it might have sent my career off on an entirely different direction! And I think the same possibility exists for today's readers of this book, whether they are in their twenties, thirties, forties, or older. The sixteen CIOs interviewed in this book represent hundreds of years of experience. Read what they have to say and benefit from their experience!
New York, NY
Ed Yourdon
June, 2011