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October 20, 2005

Information as Product -- or, the buck stops here

"When information is free, only bums will have information." - M. Ryder, 1998

Ephraim Schwartz, editor at large at InfoWorld, shot out a cautionary this week about the impending extinction of CIOs.

The trajectory he drew is pretty straightforward: CFOs have personal accountability sign-off for the "version of the truth" sold to stockholders and checked by the government, the auditors, and the law -- so the CFOs are grabbing the reins of information management.

At first blush these reins are the decision-making authority about the actual "systems" used to manage the information. But here's a quick thought: since the systems are composed at least of the tools plus the processes, are the CFOs taking decisions about the processes away from CIOs, or just decisions about the tools?

Thanks to the rapid evolution of business process management (BPM), it looks like that question is actually worth asking. Because of BPM, we know the following: on the one hand, a faulty process might be running on perfectly capable tools; on the other, even mediocre tools might be properly enforcing a good process. Who is responsible for what?

That kind of difference lets us know that there is a real distinction between what the CFO really needs to worry about (the information management process) as opposed to what else there is to worry about (the technology management process). It's just too hard to believe that CFOs want anything to do with the technical architecture other than to enjoy good cost/quality ratios from it.

Says Schwartz, "As far as I can tell, in the future IT landscape, the CTO, rather than the CIO, will report directly to the CFO." This is consistent with the idea that the CFO has either absorbed or dissolved the "CIO" job, leaving a different technology guy still in place. But not all information management is about the CFO's reporting. A lot of bits and bytes whip around just to make sure that other things get done, like mail delivery or content backups or customer verifications. The question still begging: is there a chief process guy?

It's fun to torture the holy trinity of people/process/technology for many reasons, but one of them has always been the apparent arbitrariness of not having the CTO accompanied by chiefs of people and chiefs of process. Strategically managing the capacity for targeted production quality would be the mission-in-common for these chiefs -- and yes, it's not whether they exist by other names but whether they are given that mission. But managing the actual performance of the production mechanism is still a different issue.

In terms of production, information is a product, and it seems that Schwartz foresees the CFO stepping into the role of senior-most product manager to minimize anxiety about the "performance" of information management.

If that's becoming true, there are two ways to consider this further. One, why shouldn't the CIO position simply evolve into that "product manager" role? And two, should there also be other product managers, aside from the CFO, who are responsible for the other ways that information must service the company?

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Stop the Presses. Elliot King is the editor-in-Chief of BPM Strategies (the members-only publication of the BPM Institute / BPMinstitute.org) and chair of the Dept. of Comunication at Loyola College in Maryland.

His article, "Process Management Approach Leads to Competitive Government" discusses how the Florida Dept of Revenue did not wait for performance management standards to be legislated.

The DOR is building balanced scorecards for each of its core processes. Florida DOR has identified 70 core processes. Dale Weeks is the chief business process and leadership officer at the Florida DOR.

Let the games begin.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at October 20, 2005 12:40 PM

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