Transforming CIOs from Benevolent Dictators to Product Managers

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As part of my analysis of “The Coming Crisis of IT Management”, I’ve been writing about the end of the IT monopoly in the enterprise. As I pointed out in “The Implications of Michael Dell’s Vision for the New Role of the CIO”, a smart CIO is going to accept this fact and learn to live with it.  Unquestionably, the end of that monopoly will require a structural change. IT will no longer be a “benevolent dictator,” but will have to accept more leadership and input from the business leadership, from the rank and file, and from outside the company. CIOs will also have to lead in new ways.

What does this mean? It doesn’t mean that IT won’t be responsible for security, reliability, performance, compliance, and disaster recovery. There will still be a central core of enterprise systems maintained by IT staff, but there will also be users who will be presenting their own solutions to IT and asking them for help in adopting them for the workplace. Already employees increasingly bring their own devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to work, and use them for work. They expect IT support them right off the bat. (See “‘I Want My iPad’: Avoiding IT Consumerization Pitfalls”)http://www.fakeoakleysunglassesonsale.com/

It is not that IT will have to say yes to everything end-users want to do. It is that IT will just not be asked. VPs and department heads will use what they can get their hands on to do their jobs.

This reality raises a difficult policy question that I discussed last week with Lew Moorman, The President-Cloud and Chief Strategy Officer of Rackspace. The problem is that when end-users are using whatever solutions they choose without IT approval, the risk of leakage of important information and the opportunity for other security and compliance failures goes way up. My solution to this problem is to have a policy that requires anyone using a technology for business purposes to notify IT. IT can then use APIs and other means to monitor usage and make sure that risks are identified and addressed. Nobody wants the core strategy deck on a public folder on Dropbox or credit card numbers in a Google Spreadsheet that is widely shared by accident.http://www.fakeoakleysunglassesonsale.com/

Moorman said that I was living in a dream if I thought this policy would work. He asserted that people would just ignore the policy and do what they wanted to anyway. I disagree. Modern network monitoring and mobile application management software can tell a lot about what is happening. Unreported use could be found without much trouble and eventually the policy would be accepted and work.

If a solution is successful, end-users will tire of managing technology and will want IT to make everything is safe and sound. At this point, the end-users will ask IT for help, and that’s the point that the technology will become part of the official supported IT portfolio. The best model for such a portfolio are the “app stores” popularized by Apple and Google’s Android. (See “Busting the IT monopoly with App stores”.)

One key implication of a consumerized, empowered workforce is that IT leadership in the 21st century will mean playing the role of a product manager for employees, and an innovation advocate in the boardroom. The CIO needs to be thinking opportunistically about creating a coherent portfolio of solutions, and from whence the solutions can be found or assembled.

One of the largest vendors in enterprise IT’s current product portfolio is Dell Inc. Dell is looking to assist the end of this benevolent dictatorship and help IT become a better product manager. Paul D’Arcy, Executive Director of Public and Large Enterprise Marketing at Dell, believes there is a certain set of skills that will be needed in order to make the pro-consumerization, post-dictatorial IT world work.http://www.fakeoakleysunglassesonsale.com/

“Some of the most important skills of the new CIO will be, the ability to communicate and evangelize to the business, making IT part of the strategic agenda for the organization, linking it to talent management, as well as becoming an advocate for the future in the way a business is run, which is the seat at the table CIOs should have,” D’Arcy says. “But the CIO still needs to be able to control the risks, control costs in this environment, and be able to balance the different tradeoffs to make it successful and to make employees happy.”

“This approach has been attempted before, through the use of stipends. With a stipend, employees can buy whatever they need to accomplish their objectives. But the programs have struggled in the past as organizations haven’t figured out how to successfully support these programs. Not only do we find that employees are not able to choose the technology they need on their own (often going for small and mobile as opposed to versatile) but it’s nearly impossible for IT to provide great end user support to a population with an infinite combination of devices. “As a result, the experience usually caused poor remarks on both the enduser and IT support team,” D’Arcy continues.

This point brings up another issue that is not often addressed in discussions of consumerization. End-users will sometimes make mistakes and choose technology that may be expensive or hard to monitor and manage. This is why the discussion that takes place when someone wants to add a technology to the central app store is crucial. It is at this point that IT can insist on a solution that can be managed. Sometimes the discussions will go well and a substitute may be accepted. Other times, perhaps end-users will refuse and just live without official IT support.
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