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The Wiley CIO series provides information, tools, and insights to IT executives and managers. The products in this series cover a wide range of topics that supply strategic and implementation guidance on the latest technology trends, leadership, and emerging best practices.
Titles in the Wiley CIO series include:
The Agile Architecture Revolution: How Cloud Computing, REST‐Based SOA, and Mobile Computing Are Changing Enterprise IT by Jason Bloomberg
Big Data, Big Analytics: Emerging Business Intelligence and Analytic Trends for Today's Businesses by Michael Minelli, Michele Chambers, and Ambiga Dhiraj
The Chief Information Officer's Body of Knowledge: People, Process, and Technology by Dean Lane
CIO Best Practices: Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology (Second Edition) by Joe Stenzel, Randy Betancourt, Gary Cokins, Alyssa Farrell, Bill Flemming, Michael H. Hugos, Jonathan Hujsak, and Karl Schubert
The CIO Playbook: Strategies and Best Practices for IT Leaders to Deliver Value by Nicholas R. Colisto
Enterprise Performance Management Done Right: An Operating System for Your Organization by Ron Dimon
Executive's Guide to Virtual Worlds: How Avatars Are Transforming Your Business and Your Brand by Lonnie Benson
IT Leadership Manual: Roadmap to Becoming a Trusted Business Partner by Alan R. Guibord
Managing Electronic Records: Methods, Best Practices, and Technologies by Robert F. Smallwood
On Top of the Cloud: How CIOs Leverage New Technologies to Drive Change and Build Value Across the Enterprise by Hunter Muller
Straight to the Top: CIO Leadership in a Mobile, Social, and Cloud‐based World (Second Edition) by Gregory S. Smith
Strategic IT: Best Practices for Managers and Executives by Arthur M. Langer and Lyle Yorks
Transforming IT Culture: How to Use Social Intelligence, Human Factors, and Collaboration to Create an IT Department That Outperforms by Frank Wander
Unleashing the Power of IT: Bringing People, Business, and Technology Together by Dan Roberts
The U.S. Technology Skills Gap: What Every Technology Executive Must Know to Save America's Future by Gary J. Beach
SECOND EDITION
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I want to thank and acknowledge all of my students at Columbia University for their dedication and inspiration to continue to explore the complexities of the role of the CIO and other technology leaders in a digital‐driven world.
— Arthur Langer
To my granddaughters Maya, Zoe, Maisy, Lia, and Ella Josephine, and my grandson Ian. You are all a wonderful part of my life.
— Lyle Yorks
After a 44‐year career at IBM, as I stated in the first edition, I have experienced many changes in the IT industry and seen how firms struggle to understand the value of IT in general. With over one hundred years of accumulated personal board experience, those controversies are still discussed at board meetings today. The debates over the role of the CIO continue, including issues of where they should report, their specific responsibilities, and whether they can contribute strategically to the business. Most important is the forecast of the CIOs of the future: What will be their titles and responsibilities?
Strategic IT, 2nd Edition, by Drs. Langer and Yorks, deals with the issues that every CIO faces. This second edition addresses three major and critical developments since the first edition, specifically, digital disruption, cyber security, and analytics. Independent of geography, size, business, or purpose, the constant, critical question facing each and every technology leader in the 21st century is: Are you a cost or are you an investment? That is, are you part of the business tactics or part of its strategy? Langer and Yorks have written the complete CIO survival handbook for thriving in the fast‐paced and rapidly changing world. Langer and Yorks remind us that change is the norm for technology leaders and that time to change is not an ally; rather, speed and demand typically dictate the environment CIOs call home with regard to their scope of responsibilities.
Drs. Langer and Yorks use the rich research and practice they have obtained as faculty at Columbia University where they hold workshops on technology leadership and teach in the Executive Masters of Science program in Technology Management. Therefore, much of their experience with CIOs and other technology leaders and students back up their theories and coursework. Their real‐world examples bring life to the A‐Z framework of success. Indeed, I have experienced the excitement of participants at their lectures.
Based on my experience, Langer and Yorks touch on the critical issues facing all CIOs today. While CIOs must be experts in technology, have organizational skills, contribute to the bottom line, and have executive presence, the more vital skill today is their need to be enablers of innovation and change agents in their firms. Furthermore, they must keep their organizations safe from cyber threats. Whether we speak about a large or small enterprise, a for‐profit or not‐for‐profit organization, the CIO's success is all about understanding change. The only way to help transform organizations is by having a very agile and focused IT strategy. As a director on a number boards, I understand the complexity of dealing with the multiple perspectives on how to use information technology. I hear all of the different opinions about the value of big data, mobile applications, mobile devices, cyber security, and cloud computing, just to name a few. What is most challenging is that all these new technologies develop and change in the wink of an eye. Yet little if any of these new technologies were discussed, let alone needed, five years ago. And what will be needed five years from now is truly a mystery to most enterprise leaders today.
For all these reasons and many more, the authors' definition of the successful technology leader in Strategic IT is “spot on” and a must‐read for CIOs that are planning how they will emerge as leaders in a digital‐based society. So much of an organization's success depends on whether the CIO and the leadership team work closely together and have a shared vision of the business. Strategic IT will give CIOs more than a fighting chance to make a difference in their organizations—a difference that most of them want to accomplish with the tools they need to survive and thrive in today's fast‐paced world.
Nicholas Donofrio
IBM Fellow Emeritus & EVP Innovation and Technology (Ret.)
NMD Consulting, LLC
Executive in Residence, Columbia University Center for Technology Management
Four broad themes provide the structure for this book:
This book grows out of the work we have done with the CIO Institute conducted at Columbia University and the Executive Master of Science in Technology Management program at Columbia University, along with several projects working with the technology management staff within corporations with the focus of developing their staffs to the strategic realities described earlier. Part of this work has experimented with educational and mentoring strategies with successful CIOs to foster strategic mindsets and the capability of meeting the challenges of navigating into senior executive roles.
Specifically, this book provides a comparative analysis of case studies of organizations with CIOs widely regarded as being at the forefront of addressing the challenge of strategically positioning technology within the business models of their organizations. These CIOs are recognized as having successfully made the transition into the C‐suite and having earned their “seat at the table” through integrating technology as a business driver.
Each case study involves interviews with the CIOs, their colleagues in the C‐suite, and chief executive officer (CEO), along with archival documents to describe both the personal and organizational transitions that have occurred. The cases involve Procter & Gamble, Covance, Cushman & Wakefield, Merck, and Prudential, among others. Cross‐case analysis reveals the essential and unique themes of strategically positioning technology in the organization along with developmental practices for high‐potential technology managers.
The remaining chapters of this book develop the remedies as we see them based on best practices from our cases, the integration of theories in the areas of learning and development and how they relate to the successful growth of the CIO position. Here is a brief summary of each chapter.
Chapter 1 addresses why CIOs need to make technology an important part of business strategy, and why few of them understand how to accomplish it. In general, we show that most CIOs have a lack of knowledge about how technology and business strategy can and should be linked to form common business objectives. The chapter provides the results of a research study of how chief executives link the role of technology with business strategy. The study captures information relating to how chief executives perceive the role of information technology (IT), how they manage it and use it strategically, and the way they measure IT performance and activities.
This chapter defines how organizations need to respond to the challenges posed by technology. We present technology as a “dynamic variable” that is capable of affecting organizations in a unique way. We specifically emphasize technology's unpredictability and its capacity to accelerate change—ultimately concluding that technology, as an independent variable, has a dynamic effect on organizational development. This chapter also introduces the theory of driver and supporter and responsive organizational dynamism (ROD), defined as a disposition in organizational behavior that can respond to the demands of technology as a dynamic variable. We establish two core components of ROD: Strategic integration and cultural assimilation. The chapter also provides a perspective of the technology life cycle so that readers can see how ROD is applied on an IT project basis, defining the driver and supporter functions of IT and how it contributes to managing technology life cycles.
Chapter 3 provides a framework for engaging in strategic advocacy, linking strategic learning practices such as analog reasoning and scenario thinking with political savvy influencing practices in organizations. Distinctions between technological, adaptive, and generative challenges that confront the IT executive are presented along with the implications for effectively building productive relationships with senior executives. Specific practices are provided along with examples from both our research and working with a range of IT executives. How the IT executives' mindset impacts the effectiveness of how they utilize these practices is also developed.
In Chapter 4, we provide five case studies of companies that, as a result of the strategically focused business mindset of the CIO, have made the journey transitioning from a service to driver positioning of technology. These cases, among other data sources, have provided the basis for the points made in previous chapters and the more detailed analysis that follows. Emphasis is placed on how the CIO has enabled or is enabling this ongoing transition. Drawn to provide variance in terms of industry and/or markets, the cases are BP, Covance, Cushman & Wakefield, Merck, Procter & Gamble, and Prudential, along with a summary that frames the following chapters.
Chapter 5 provides evidence of why certain CIOs have attained success as strategic drivers of their businesses. This evidence is presented from the case studies and integrates our findings based on our theories of why certain CIOs are more successful than others. These theories have led us to understand the patterns that suggest why these CIOs have been successful in introducing an IT strategy and how they build credibility among C‐level peers in their organizations.
This chapter seeks to define best practices to implement and sustain strategic advocacy and success at the CIO level. The chapter sets forth a model that creates separate, yet linked best practices and maturity “arcs” that can be used to assess stages of the learning development of the chief IT executive, the CEO, and the middle management in an organization. We discuss the concept of “common threads,” where each best practice arc links through common objectives and outcomes that contribute to overall performance in the CIO suite.
In Chapter 7, we provide a framework for the development of high‐potential IT talent. The importance of both formal and informal experiential learning of working across a business is emphasized along with development of both strategic learning and influential practices. Specific exercises are provided for fostering these practices. Effective mentoring practices are also presented, again based on experience.
This chapter explores the effects of the digital global economy on the ways in which organizations need to respond to the consumerization of products and services. From this perspective, digital transformation involves a type of social reengineering that affects the ways in which organizations communicate internally and how they consider restructuring departments. Digital transformation also affects the risks that organizations must take in what has become an accelerated changing consumer market.
This chapter focuses on Gen Y employees who are known as “digital natives.” Gen Y employees possess the attributes to assist companies to transform their workforce to meet the accelerated change in the competitive landscape. Most executives across industries recognize that digital technologies are the most powerful variable to maintaining and expanding company markets. Gen Y employees provide a natural fit for dealing with emerging digital technologies; however, success with integrating Gen Y employees is contingent upon Baby Boomer and Gen X management to adapt new leadership philosophies and procedures suited to meet the expectations and needs of these new workers. Ignoring the unique needs of Gen Y employees will likely result in an incongruent organization that suffers high turnover of young employees who will ultimately seek a more entrepreneurial environment.
The growing challenges of protecting companies from outside attacks have established the need to create a “cyber security” culture. This chapter addresses the ways in which information technology organizations must further integrate with business operations so that their firms are better equipped to protect against outside threats. Since the general consensus is that no system can be 100% protected and that most system compromises occur as a result of internal exposures, information technology leaders must educate employees on best practices to limit cyber attacks. Furthermore, while prevention is the objective, organizations must be internally prepared to deal with attacks and thus have processes in place should a system be penetrated by a third‐party agent.
This chapter explores the future requirements for CIOs, particularly placing an importance on business knowledge and how technology provides competitive advantage and operational efficiencies. We see the role of the CIO becoming more of a chief of operations or chief being functionally responsible for contracts, equipment management, general automation, and outsourcing while having a central role in conversations about strategically leveraging emerging new technologies.
Chapter 12 summarizes the primary implications of the book for the IT field and the implications for other executives in terms of building strategically productive relationship with IT.
There are many colleagues and corporate executives who have provided significant support during the development of this second edition.
We owe much to our colleagues at Columbia University, Teachers College, namely Professor Victoria Marsick and Professor Emeritus Lee Knefelkamp for their ongoing mentorship on adult learning and developmental theories. We appreciate the support of Aarti Subramanian, our graduate assistant, for her participation in the research process, including transcribing interviews, and to Jody Barto, another graduate assistant, who helped with finalizing some of the exhibits. Nicholas Donofrio, emeritus (retired) executive vice president of innovation and technology at IBM, also provided valuable direction on the complex issues surrounding the emerging role of CIOs, especially how they operate with boards of directors.
We appreciate the corporate CIOs who agreed to participate in the studies that allowed us to apply our theories to actual organizational practices (in alphabetical order): Steve Bandrowczak from Xerox; Craig Cuyar from Omnicom; Dana Deasy now CIO of the Department of Defense; Barbara Koster from Prudential Financial; Filippo Passerini, now retired from Procter & Gamble; and Chris Scalet, retired from Merck. All of these executives contributed enormous information on how corporate CIOs can integrate technology into business strategy.
And, of course, we are indebted to our wonderful students at Columbia University. They continue to be at the core of our inspiration and love for writing, teaching, and scholarly research.