Historically, a lot of the value of technology was in automation. There was a pretty good alignment between the systems investments and the functional authority. It was a matter of automating existing business processes. What’s happened over the last 10 to 15 years is that we have offshoring, outsourcing, and value-chain relationships that get more and more complex, and we’re actually trying to use IT to enable processes that don’t exist.
Now, all of a sudden, the CIO, who was clearly enfranchised to deal with technical matters, isn’t clearly enfranchised to deal with the other issues. And often the rest of the management team lacks clarity on the objectives we’re trying to accomplish. So it’s important to build consensus among the management team. In an ideal world, the CIO might be the facilitator of that consensus, but those aren’t necessarily the traits for which CIOs have been selected over the last 20 years. I think there’s a potential mismatch that’s both an opportunity and a danger as companies count on IT-enabled initiatives to provide more of their competitive advantage.
Source: Optimize Magazine
Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Organizational Behavior
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