I've been working in the 'IT industry' for 25 years now (that's a scary thought in its own right!) and, as Martha Heller points out in her Computerworld article “How IT is Set up to Fail”, the same conversations go round and round: why doesn't IT deliver; why, in so many organisations, is IT seen as a barrier/difficult/a problem? Yet IT is part of everyday life in most organisations and for an increasing number of people outside of work as well - that's why there is so much focus on digital inclusion.
So why does the "CIO Paradox", the latest trendy term for this problem, persist? I don't believe the problem is due to CIOs intellect or business acumen, and I don't believe it’s just because CIO's aren't invited on to the board of organisations either! I think it’s because they are persistently expected to do the wrong job!
I think it comes down to one major factor: it’s not about technology it’s what we do with it. CIOs are expected to be able to revolutionise their organisations with IT while running day to day operations. Ground zero is that the IT an organisation has deployed works. IT has a history of failure here. If a production line failed as much as many IT systems do, and was so difficult to use, it would be ripped out and rebuilt. There's also a constant cacophony of change that most people outside of the IT world don't care about - most people I know were perfectly happy with Windows XP & Office 2003. IT is hardly likely to be invited to the senior table to discuss strategy if it hasn’t got the basics right.
However even when IT is delivering to a reasonable level operationally, the “what do we do with it?” question remains. And the problem is that we in the IT departments think we can answer that question! In Martha’s article she talks about overcoming the paradox by “moving beyond enablement” as a result of becoming a “competitive capabilities expert”. This is a grand idea, except it’s been around for as long as I have, if not longer, in one guise or another. It’s a tantalizing idea that would miraculously catapult CIOs into the inner circle of organisational executive management. Except for one small problem. CIOs and IT organisations are in the wrong place to succeed at it or even to get the buy-in to try to do it from the rest of the organisation.
Let me share a conversation I overheard on a train the other day to illustrate what I mean. Two people were sat behind me discussing a piece of work that was being undertaken by someone brought into their department specifically for the task. This person was, apparently, documenting the processes of the department with a view to identifying how technology could improve them. The conversation revolved around how the person doing the work had no understanding of their industry and the specific, detailed complications and issues surrounding their niche within it. These two people concluded that the exercise was inevitably going to be a waste of time as the person doing it was unlikely to come up with any practical insights into where improvements could be made.
Now, not withstanding the innate hostility that always accompanies a stranger turning up and telling you they could do your job better than you can, my experience tends to support their analysis. Don’t get me wrong, there are some very good business analysts out there in many organisations. People who can analyse a process, identify where IT can be deployed to increase efficiency/effectiveness, and drive a system specification that leads to a sound application. However, that isn’t being a “competitive capabilities expert”. In my experience, the real revolutions come from people who are so steeped in a sector niche that they intuitively understand where “the little things that make a big difference” are. Otherwise they are complete outsiders who are far enough removed to spot the wood from the trees and launch new organisations to exploit major technological/sociological discontinuities. For example spotting that the internet could catapult mail order into mainstream shopping (Amazon).
So I don’t think the CIO paradox is going to be solved anytime soon. The organisations that are going to exploit IT most effectively and strategically aren’t the ones who focus on finding a CIO who can turn the IT function into a collection of competitive capabilities experts. They are going to be the ones who can develop the IT savvy of people across their organisations so that they see how IT could impact what they do and then drive the projects that deliver those changes. Yes CIOs are set up to fail, but only if they persist in trying to do the wrong job!
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