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George Colony (CEO of Forrester) offers some interesting insight he gained during a private dinner with 15 Chief Information Officer’s during the recent Forrester IT Forum in a post titled “CIO’s to CEO’s: Stay out of Tech“.
During this meeting, Colony and his team asked the CIO’s the following question:
How do you raise the tech IQ of your CEO?
The response from the attendees were surprising. Colony reports that the majority of the CIO’s he spoke with agreed that CEO’s should ’stay ouf of tech’. Colony provides three key statements from the participants:
1) “The CEO should trust IT to get it right.”
2) “CEOs are about making the company successful — not on the minutiae of tech.”
3) “The CEO is about results, not tech.”
These are interesting statements…and if you’ve been a CIO or around CIO’s for any length of time, you might agree.
But, like Mr Colony, and with the utmost respect to these 15 CIO’s Mr Colony spoke with, I disagree. Brian Blanchard provided a great response to these statements while trying to answer “Should CEO’s stay out of IT?” Rather than argue what Brian has already done a wonderful job of arguing, I’ll let you jump over and read his response…but an
An interesting piece from Blanchard’s response:
In today’s market, business leaders, much like the consumers they serve, understand the benefits and the risks of technology. In the digital age, these stakeholders often have the technical IQ required to partner with the IT organization to affect true innovation and produce sustainable business value. However, this requires the CIO to evolve. The CIO must open their team to partnerships that generate success and results. These new opportunities and partnerships require CIOs to make a paradigm shift away from types of statements made in your meetings.
Agreed…this is exactly what Gene and I have been saying for years and formalized in our Cutter IT Journal paper titled ”The Futureproof CIO” (shameless plug).
Rethinking the Question
Rather than rehash what Brian has said in response to the CIO’s statements, Let’s take a second to recast the basic question “Should the CEO stay out of technology?”
Let’s think about how this question would sound if we changed ’technology’ with other areas of the organization.
- Finance: Should the CEO be involved in Finance?
- Sales: Should the CEO stay out of Sales?
- Operations: Should the CEO stay out of Operations?
If you’re anything like me, you’d answer a big fat NO to all three questions. The CEO should NOT stay out of any of these areas. So why should they stay out of IT/Technology? They shouldn’t.
Now…the CEO shouldn’t necessarily be involved in the day-to-day operations of any of these areas but she has to know what’s happening and understand the basics of each aspect of the business.
The role of the CEO, as Colony states, is:
Tech is changing your customers, and your customers will change your company. It’s a dynamic that CEOs must wade into up to their hips — it can’t be left to marketing or to IT/BT. Only the CEO has the wide view to make the connections between external tech change and the company, and the power to ensure that the company responds in a way that benefits its customers.
While I disagree with the idea that “only the CEO ha the wide view to make the connections…”, I do agree with the overall premise. The role of the CEO today is to combine all the strengths of the organization into a cohesive strategy to move the company forward.
If the CEO were to ’stay out of technology’, an extremely vital piece of the overall strategy would be missing. The role of the CIO today should be to open up the IT/ Technology world to the rest of the organization so that all aspects of technology can be used to grow the business.
Today’s business IS technology. Even if your organization makes paper, your business revolves around technology. You’ve got technology in the manufacturing area, technology in the IT space and technology in the marketing/sales area.
The CEO needs to be as knowledgeable and involved in technology as in any other area of the business.
-->Tagged as: business, CIO, IT, Leadership, management, Technology
I've followed Eric's blog for several years. He has some fantastic insights. One thing I would say in response to this post... If the CEO is having to get into the IT area, then he doesn't have a very good CIO, and he certainly doesn't have a CIO he can trust. So if you can't trust your CIO to handle your IT initiatives and projects, why not get a new CIO?
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