The Essential CIO and Decision Management
May 19, 2011 No CommentsSOURCE: James Taylor
IBM recently surveyed CIOs as part of their ongoing CxO research. This was the second time they did this – 2009 was the first. They just released the results of their analysis of the 3,000 interviews they conducted in 71 countries. The results are summarized in the body of the post along with some Decision Management advice related to it.
CEOs have said their focus for the next 5 years are Getting closer to the customer, People skills, and Insight and intelligence. Meanwhile their CIOs focus on Insight and Intelligence, Client intimacy, and People skills (it’s a pity CIOs don’t think they can help with “getting closer to the customer” as I believe the effective use of analytics can do just that). CIOs see their most important “vision” elements as Business Intelligence and Analytics (stayed top from 2009 study), Mobility (up somewhat), Virtualization (down somewhat), Cloud (way up), Business Progress Management (down slightly) and Risk Management and compliance (down quite a bit).
IBM identified 4 categories of CIO Mandates and strongly recommends that organizations work across business and IT organizational boundaries to decide what the right CIO mandate is for their organization. This might change over time but each kind of Mandate has best practices that can only really be applied if everyone is explicit about it. IBM also asked questions to determine which IT organizations “outperformed” their peers so that they could contrast outperformers with others. The four CIO Mandates are:
- Leverage – streamline operations and improve effectiveness
- Expand – refine business processes and enhance collaboration
- Transform – change industry value chain through improved relationships
- Pioneer – radically innovate products, markets, business models