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September 21, 2007

CIO 2.0 part Two

When Gartner Group published its Resource Synchronization Chart at ITXpo 2000 seven years ago, it identified a 4-level maturity model that identified the highest level of maturity -- System Synchronization -- in terms of a "business unit's view of IT Value" in association with "IT Asset Management" and "Operations Management".

Seven years later, it may be the case that only some large interesting companies, not the numerous smaller or just plain boring ones, are going to be recognized as having reached system synchronization.

What is the BU's view of IT value at this synchronization level? "Facilitate Business Value Creation". When we look at what "value" has to mean, it almost always means "a distinction with a difference", as opposed to the popularly known opposite, a distinction without a difference. A proper understanding of this will mean not just glamourizing year-over-year growth, but equally well recognizing companies that successfully maintain themselves where others can't even play.

Value comes in the difference that a distinction makes, while the distinction itself comes from actions taken. Actions are the source of alternatives, contrasts, innovations, or namely all the things generally associated with well-executed strategies that provide a competitive (survival) advantage in a business ecosystem. Action is essentially labor, and technology is essentially labor enhancement. So the question of aligning technology and business has never been complicated, not for the Pony Express and not for Amazon.com, but also not for dentists and not for a pro baseball club.

Politics and economics in implementation are where most of the complication typically arises, but with companies that mainly play in markets actually created by superior labor capabilities, a refreshing absence of confusion about IT can exist. The real challenge is for those companies to know that they are doing the right work -- literally, to know that they are making the right difference.

Except in some Darwinian sense, it does not logically follow that our CIO 2.0 is supposed to know what the right difference is. If that were the case, we wouldn't need chief marketing officers. But where does "the right difference" come from, anyway? From the perspective of someone who both cares about the distinction made by the labor and who can reward well enough. What is more sensible, then, is that all executives who can articulate how labor and opportunity are related to serve the interest of a market should be responsible for organizing the enterprise appropriately. The responsibility is what makes them executives or chiefs. There is no demonstrated reason why CIO 1.0 couldn't be qualified to do that. But there has always been plenty of evidence as to why CIO 1.0 has not been allowed to do that, if not at the hiring gate, then afterwards. The question is, why is that going to change now?

Meanwhile, we just can't know how many great "marketers" have been undermined by inadequate labor. As for convergence, well, rebranding good ideas is important because it gets fresh audiences paying attention. But the biggest problem to solve in the business-IT relationship is not going to go away until organizations learn to prefer "resource" accounting over "property" accounting. And what is a resource? An asset with a job to do. Guess what happens when bad assignments are made.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at September 21, 2007 6:23 AM

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