A new cut for the CIO

(August 22, 2005 - Business Line)

Subroto Bagchi
Co-founder & COO, MindTree

Push senior IT people to attend divisional sales conferences, HR meets and customer calls.’ ‘Go upstream and serve the customer’s customer.’ Beware of the ‘biggest career killer of the 21st century.’ – Some gyan for today’s CIO and her team.

Those were easier times when a CIO (chief information officer) and her team were thanked if infrastructure was in place, the desktops worked and the network hummed 24/7.
It was sufficient for the CIO team to be available to decipher the occasional geek-speak, or hand-hold during a switchover to a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) package adoption.
Not any more. Going forward, I clearly hear user organisations clamour for a complete makeover, no – transformation - of the CIO organisation.
There are nine key imperatives one needs to apply while making the transformation.

Embed yourself

This is the best lesson (and perhaps the only good one) to take away from the war in Iraq. This was the first major war in which a large-scale deployment of television correspondents was undertaken. Embedded journalists reported events as they saw them, getting and conveying a perspective that was real-time and as close to the truth as may be possible in an ‘emergent situation’.

The global workplace, though not as unforgiving as the theatre of war, has many similarities. Yet the most interesting thing about many staff functions in the corporate world is that they operate at a distance from where the bullets are flying or the competition is planting land mines.

There is inevitable latency in the process of communication that not only dilutes but also often distorts facts. This hampers the creation of a shared vision of the organisation and interferes with business priorities.

The best means of progressing is to push senior IT people to attend divisional sales conference, HR meets and customer calls.

If senior IT folks are not travelling 25 per cent of their time and are not measuring ‘face time’ with paying customers and suppliers, there is a problem. Their careers run the risk of lagging behind even as the organisation begins to be left behind.

Disintermediate

Disintermediation is one of the biggest contributions that technology has made to the world. You can skip the teller to withdraw cash from a bank. You can skip the middleman to trade directly in stocks .You can reach out to the latest sellers of houses being listed in your area by befriending the keyboard. You can shop online for anything - from a pet to a research report- simply by going to Google.

The key question is, when is it next that someone will by-pass you to get things done? The jobs at greatest risk are those that have high intermediation and low value-add between two nodes that need to speak to each other or collaborate with each other to get something done.
Knowledge and skills have been great defences against the possibilities of disintermediation for some time. That line of defence is crumbling as more things get reduced to binary expression and lend themselves to be transported over a 100Mbps Ethernet cable - no, a wireless link. If intermediation is a real risk, how does one add value?

By doing more tangible things with one’s own two hands.

The further away you get from paying customers, the greater are the chances that you are falling prey to’ intermediation’. It is the biggest career killer of the21st century.

Get upstream in value involvement

Gone are the days when one could create value in isolation. Customers do not want solutions anymore. They want involvement in co-architecting solutions.

Think of the customer as the supplier. Treat them as such and you get more accountability and ownership of the process and the outcome. No one likes a black-box approach to problem-solving. This is made apparent when you think about visiting your doctor.

You want to collaborate in the diagnosis process. You want to know the reasons why the doctor thinks the way she does. You want to know the treatment alternatives. You want to make a choice and choose the consequences of the treatment, and of course, you want to be fully aware of the duration of treatment, contra-indications and costs.

The question is, when did you treat your customers as well as your favourite doctor treats you?

The other key aspect of value involvement is value creation. How do you create valve? Today, if you create value by looking at issues that are ‘here and now,’ expect no brownie points. True value is created by going upstream.

If you are dealing with stated expectations, go upstream to find ‘unstated expectations’. If you are serving a customer, go upstream and serve the customer’s customer. If you are serving a supplier today, go serve the supplier’s supplier.

Know your facts

For a long time, IT organisations have lived in the shadow of the lamp, while they have lit up the organisation with dashboards and metrics. This is not to say that they do not have metrics, but the metrics have not changed for far too long.

I am told that Mark Hurd, the new CEO at HP, recently brought to light the fact that at HP, for far too long, people have been used to measuring IT spending as a percentage of sales. There is nothing wrong with that – except that in a company that is experiencing year-on-year sales growth, contentment about the same level of IT spending as a percentage of sales can be very misleading about the true value IT is mining.

So what should the organisation be measuring and getting better at? IT spending per person. How does HP compare itself with its competitors? We are told that the number is nearly double of that of Dell and NCR.

This is a great example of IT organizations not knowing the facts. While knowing the facts is critical, it is also important to know that sometimes, facts can also be the enemy of truth.

Again, the best ways to unearth facts is to question facts, question the way we seek facts and finally, to get out in the field 25 per cent of your time.