Delivering the Difference: The 2009 CIO Agenda

Mark McDonald offered quite a performance for his talk. The subject was quite "high-level" and would be better addressed to our CIOs than to my humble self... However, it gives a lot to think about.

To begin with, Mark suggested there are 2 different reactions to the current economic conditions: either litteraly "hold your breath" or equip to find new opportunities (which implies leveraging IT to make a difference). Of course, the whole session tried to prove the latter is best.

Gartner thinks the future of IT is about to see a major structural change, because of 3 factors:

• Implementation costs are going down;
• There is more and more choice (think of your business going to their IT department, or the cloud, or an ASP...);
• Most of the work of automating processes with IT is done: we can now go to the next challenge.

And then, a "different" IT emerges because of additional factors:

• The coming of the digital natives in the workforce;
• The need for environmental consciousness;
• The impact of the globalization.
  

The business is counting on IT to make a difference. And to achieve this objective, IT has to provide "distinctive" solutions, which will be the ones delivering value (where the business value is greater than the technology issues and costs). The difference is measured through the 3 "V": valuable, visible and valid (it must deliver its value).

Mark has an interesting model about standard vs. custom solutions. Not everything has to be "custom" (or "distinctive") but he thinks that when a CIO tells him he has a strategic project consisting in upgrading the finance module in the ERP, there is something terribly wrong...

There are some examples:

• The Guardian (UK) is on track to achieve its goal to reduce its "run" costs from 60 to 40% of its budget, in favor of the "grow" and "transform" initiatives.
• BNSF Railroad (a rail transport business in the USA) has entirely transformed its financial system to align and focus on its products, eliminating 30 systems in the process.

The presentation ends with the 6 "C" of required focus on the part of the CIO:

• Cash
• Customers
• Cost (and the improvement of the business processes)
• Capacity (ability to scale)
• Capability (ability to innovate)
• Control (which requires transparency)
  

That'll be all for today. Tomorrow, we should have something more substantial to talk about. You're welcome to ask questions while the talks are fresh in my mind (to add a comment, you should only require an OpenID account)...