The Most Important Job of the CIO

I was having a discussion today with a colleague about the role of a business unit CIO and told him quite definitively:

The Most Important Job of the CIO is to Negotiate with the Business

and to be successful, the CIO should aim to spend 50-75% of his or her time working directly with the Business at all levels of the organization.

My rationale is quite simple. I've never been in a business that has the resources to do everything that it wants to do. On top of what the Business wants to do, there are a good number of things that a Business needs to do whether that's patching a system, addressing a costly operational issue, or complying with a legal requirement. Now the CIO is usually not be the person directly responsible for setting strategy or for prioritizing investments, but a CIO can make sure these steps are followed and can provide critical data around these processes. They can pose complex questions that span the activities and responsibilities of multiple teams. They can propose simple solutions to challenge leaders when the ideal solution has complexity. They can make sure leaders develop and utilize metrics to justify their approaches.

Most important, they need to insure that the business' desire to take on too much doesn't trickle down to the teams taking on these projects. Overloading teams with too many projects or projects with ill defined goals or requirements is a good recipe for poor execution. That's why this is a negotiation - a negotiation for what makes strategic sense but also what can be realistically accomplished.

Of course, once the CIO can effectively negotiate with Business Leaders, the dialogue will often transform from one of negotiation to one of collaboration. But that is the subject of another post.

Don't Negotiate without Credibility

But here's the gotcha. Only a credible CIO that has a good track record of execution and delivery can truly negotiate. Business leaders simply won't waste their time negotiating when a CIO can't deliver. Why bother? Worse, a business leader is likely to work around the CIO if delivery is a recurring issue.

Next post: On building credibility
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What is Really Meant by Failing Early, Failing Often, and Failing Cheap?

What do we mean about failing early, failing fast, failing often, or failing cheap? Why is "failing" a good, positive outcome for some features, agile projects or agile delivery? Why is it needed for innovation?

Failure was once an absolute outcome. You either succeeded or failed in your business, your project or your investment. Once something was marked as a failure, it was almost beyond hope to fix it without a major "turn around" or dramatic rescue.

Failing early, fast, often, and cheap gives business and IT leaders many advantages:

  • It basically implies that you've defined indicators for success or failure ideally as key performance metrics. That definition creates an alignment of goals, transparency, and process to discuss improvements.
  • Failing early implies that you're taking some (appropriate) risks up front and can adjust your course while your business or project is in early stages.
  • Failing fast implies that you're making small, tactical changes with easy mechanisms for measuring that you're tactics are meeting strategic expectations.
  • Fail often is an attribute of agile and iterative delivery. If you deliver often you can accept some failures because you have a mechanism to recover, respond, and adjust faster. (Corollary: Deliver often should also encourage success often!)
  • Failing cheap is exactly how it sounds - but it encourages the leadership team to find inexpensive investments and expressions to validate a hypothesis.
  • Talking about failure openly allows teams to think offensively rather than defensively. It helps to avoid a "fear of failure" organizational culture.
By failing early, fast, and cheap, there is a mechanism to avoid absolute failure.

I like the open acceptance of failure as a mechanism to encourage smart risk taking, however, I do wish there was a better form of expressing this mindset. When I hear leaders encouraging teams to fail early, fast or cheap, I often wonder if they deliver the message correctly. Do team members understand the message as I describe above, or do they hear something entirely different? Maybe they hear, "give this your best shot, but don't worry, we won't penalize you if it doesn't work out because failure is ok". Or maybe they hear "it's ok to make errors as long as you fail early, fast and cheap". Also, even if you fail early, the right decision may be to pivot rather than abandon the current strategy (see Pivot, don't jump to a new vision and When your first product isn't selling).

Should we change lingo? I doubt it because the concept is easy to understand as long as leaders take the time to explain what they really mean by failing fast, early, and cheap.
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What Could Save Media Businesses

So what will save the media industry? John Byrne's assessment of the issues are dead on

1) Print advertising will never come back. There are just too many options for advertisers today and too much pressure on rates. Sadly, success in print will be measured in single-digit declines, forever. 2) Online advertising will never offset those declines nor save print. There’s far too much competition online and far too much available inventory; and 3) Users will not pay for content, unless they’re convinced it has immediate and tangible value.
I do see a couple of plausible game changers in the not so distant future

  • Tablet PC's - I do most of my reading on my Blackberry like many other commuters. It's good enough for me, and I actually can find and read more relevant content than I could with any newspaper or magazine. But while a mobile device works well for many users, it doesn't work well for advertisers yet. A Tablet PC could change this if it provides adequate fidelity for rich advertisements, a good user experience, a decent price, long battery life, etc.
  • Shared Search Revenue - I agree with TechCrunch's assessment that 5 clicks free
    won't provide significant revenue to Publishers that participate. It could be a game changer if publishers form networks and force users to pay for clicks to participating sites, but this has risks of alienating users. What Google and Microsoft/Bing are showing is that they are willing to negotiate with Publishers and possibly share search revenue with them. What happens if Google shares X% of search revenue to Publishers that show up in the top Y search results? It probably won't generate significant revenue for Publishers, but it would give another source other than advertising or subscription.
  • Pay for context, not content - Would I pay $3 to download a digital magazine at the airport? Should newspapers charge to access its news and analysis from 6-10am, then make it free afterward? Would I drop cable tv (and its fat costs) in lieu for an online video and news subscription?
So while the media business is falling off a cliff, there still may be a future.
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About Isaac Sacolick

Isaac Sacolick is President of StarCIO, a technology leadership company that guides organizations on building digital transformation core competencies. He is the author of Digital Trailblazer and the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital and speaks about agile planning, devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO, a digital transformation influencer, and has over 900 articles published at InfoWorld, CIO.com, his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation, and other sites. You can find him sharing new insights @NYIke on Twitter, his Driving Digital Standup YouTube channel, or during the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.