There is no T in CIO
- Details
- Category: Information
- Created on 06 December 2010
- Written by Administrator
Information Technology - what does it do? What do people who work in IT do, and what do they think they do?
I'm a Chartered Information Technology Professional. I've been working with computers for three decades. I know what I do, but I increasingly have the perception that many in IT, perhaps even the IT industry as a whole, have lost their way.
Recently on LinkedIn, in the Chief Information Officer (CIO) Network forum, someone posed the question "Are there any certifications that you think a CIO needs?". The CIO Network includes over 20,000 CIOs. IT Directors & other corporate IT leaders. With such a body of expertise and experience there have been many responses, over a hundred and still rising. The huge majority have focused on technical computing qualifications; data security, IT service management and others relating to the secure and resilient operation of a corporate IT function.
Which begs the question - "What do these CIOs do?". I guess they run IT Departments. They seem to measure themselves in how well they administer the machinery of corporate IT.
So what? What about the product?
We use Information Technology to cultivate data and harvest Information. The purpose of IT in business is to provide one of the three vital currencies of enterprise - Information (the other two being Talent and Finance).
I used to be a CIO. Officially I was called an "IT Director" but I understood my job to be that of delivering the information that the business needed. Forecasting what information we would need, identifying the data necessary to generate that information, working out how to grow data, putting in place processing and systems to enable our people to capture data, work with it and turn it into information. Valuable information: who are our (best) sales prospects, who owes us money, what more do our customers want to buy from us, how can we create offerings that give more value to our customers, how can we better inform our employees to better serve our customers, which of our products / services are most / least profitable? Boring stuff like that - Information.
Yes, I used to play with computers. The Technology in IT is an essential toolkit for the CIO to create systems and processes that deliver and help people work with information, but the technology is not the end-game. Technology is merely the building material from which we construct the architect's vision. The CIO should be an architect, envisioning and designing the information that the enterprise needs in order to profit, and although knowledge of his construction materials helps, he does not need a certificate in bricklaying.
There are too many so-called Chief Information Officers and other IT leaders who think their job is about technology; I think it's time to take the technology out of IT. The product of IT is I. Certainly there is no T in CIO.
