Make Room for a New Title on the CIO’s Business Card: Chief Productivity Officer

By Dave Wright, chief strategy officer, ServiceNow

Thirty years ago, BusinessWeek magazine announced the creation of a new senior executive leadership position: the CIO. The role and responsibilities of overseeing the IT infrastructure had become so important that companies started promoting their Directors of Data Processing to the C-Suite.

In 2016, those responsibilities will undergo the most significant transformation in the last three decades.

Enterprises are setting aside their long-held reservations about cloud computing, particularly the misperception of a lack of security. Simultaneously, in addition to Big Data hunting, they will also prioritize the collection of Small Data. The CIO will oversee the convergence of these two trends and lead the enterprise-wide migration to the cloud. This evolution from being a keeper of IT infrastructure to overseeing services company-wide may even compel CIOs to shift their role to Chief Productivity Officer.

Chief Productivity Officer – or CPO – is a working title. I realize it may be too close to the name of a beloved Star Wars character for some to take it seriously. Perhaps another title such as “Vice President of Global Business Services” or “Shared Services Leader” might be more palatable? What’s important is realizing that there is this awakening to thinking about tapping technology to drive a new level of corporate productivity.

Companies need to free employees from time-wasting tasks to focus on strategic drivers across all business units such as HR, finance, facilities and legal. The efficient delivery of services needs to become an enterprise discipline. For this reason, organizations may see the need to create the CPO position to oversee the services. In fact, the CIO may report to this new position. That’s not a threat to the CIO’s job. In fact, it’s a change CIOs should embrace. It shows a companies appreciation of how the CIO has mastered the delivery of service within IT, and can now take that expertise and extend it across the whole company

This is analogous to the recent creation of the role of Chief Digital Officer, who oversees a company’s transition from a traditional “analog” business to a digital one. The key difference between the Chief Digital Officer and the CPO is that companies are hiring new people to fill the newly created role of Chief Digital Officer. I believe the CPO and CIO are one in the same.

The evolution of the CIO’s role has tracked to the history of enterprise computing. Computing was initially limited to being a back-office tool for automating accounting and other financial processes, overseen by a Director of Data Processing. As computers became more capable of handling tasks across other departments, the title changed to Director of Management Information Systems. By the mid-1980’s, the position demanded the authority of a C-Suite executive, as a BusinessWeek magazine headline proclaimed in 1986, “Management’s Newest Star: Meet the Chief Information Officer.” (Source: IBM). When the first public cloud services, like eBay and Yahoo! Mail, went live in the mid- to late-1990s, the idea seemed revolutionary: move the applications and systems out of the data center and turn them over to the cloud services providers.

Fast forward to today and the CIO has a very different mission from the role of the CIO focusing only on maintaining the IT infrastructure and operations. With the advent of cloud computing, the IT department is devoting less time and resources to making upgrades to systems and applications, patching servers, and other tasks. The IT team can—and must- emerge from their windowless data centers to become more relevant to the broader business. They can provide the various business units with the cloud applications they need to be more productive. And as such, they will improve business processes and help all employees be more productive. IT can have a broad and very visible impact on an organization’s ability to meet its business goals. Now the CIO provides services that transform how work gets done across all parts of the organization, not just in IT.

Rush to the cloud

2016 will mark the start of the land rush of enterprise workloads moving into the cloud, due in large part to the fact providers can demonstrate they are able to address concerns over data security and privacy. CIOs want to put information in the cloud, but they also want to keep the keys to that data. In fact, many CIOs see cloud as intrinsic to their security strategy. Just take a look at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as an example. 2016 will see significant progress in the development and availability of new technologies and techniques to address at-rest encryption and creating data accessibility assignments.

IDC even goes as far as to predict that by 2020, we will stop referring to clouds as public and private and ultimately stop using the word “cloud” altogether. We will simply refer to it as “computing” because we will think of the cloud as the standard way of doing business and providing IT support (source: IDC).

Sweat the small stuff

Along with their responsibilities to ensuring information security and mitigating risk, CIOs are examining the ever-expanding universe of Big Data for the enterprise. While collecting and analyzing Big Data remains a priority, organizations can gain additional benefits faster by leveraging the Small Data right in front of them. Small data, or the data of their operations, provides managers with insights into what projects consume the majority of their teams’ time and efforts, and where productivity levels can be improved.

The old adage, “You can’t improve what you can’t measure,” rings true. The key is to capture the work in a record-keeping system with performance analytics to see what’s going on, and determine what needs to be done. For instance, how quickly does our IT or facilities team respond to incidents? What type of work does Human Resources focus its team on? Is that what they should be doing? If they want to change it then is it getting better or worse over time? What are the trends in the service that a business unit provides? Transparency empowers managers to do their jobs. IT can provide the technologies and services to make this happen – not just in IT, but in all other service-oriented departments – and if a department does not provide a service then you can question why it exists!

With the insight of Small Data, IT can lead the creation and rollout of automated system or online portals for employees to do everything from submit IT service desk requests to select healthcare benefits. This is why the CIO is the logical person to assume the role of CPO.

With the maturation of cloud computing services and applications – be they public, private or a hybrid model – the CIO’s role is undergoing a significant and necessary evolution from an overseer of the IT infrastructure.

As CIOs see their role shifting, they will find themselves the chief driver of productivity to HR, finance, legal and more. They’ll likely trumpet the ROI of company-wide initiatives in quarterly earnings analyst calls and in annual reports for shareholders. Their services will become so critical to how business gets done that it will forever change the role and responsibilities of the CIO.

Dave Wright is Chief Strategy Officer at ServiceNow, and serves as the company’s evangelist for how to improve workplace productivity. He enables ServiceNow customers to eliminate their reliance on email, spreadsheets and other manual processes so their employees can work smarter, not harder.

Over the course of his more than 25-year career, Wright has worked with thousands of organizations to implement technologies that can create efficiencies, streamline business processes and reduce costs. He also saw how those same technologies can become a roadblock to growth, and cites email as a primary culprit for what he calls the “Productivity Paradox.”  Wright joined ServiceNow because of the unique opportunity the enterprise cloud company offers to spur organizational productivity.

Prior to joining ServiceNow in December 2011, Wright spent more than six years with VMware, Inc. as vice president of Technical Services for EMEA. From 2003 to 2005, Wright headed up the technical division for Northern and Southern Europe at Mercury Interactive. Prior to that he spent six years at Peregrine Systems, Inc., where he held a variety of senior technical and marketing positions. Wright also worked for Boole & Babbage, Inc. and Candle Services (later acquired by IBM).