The Way of the Digital Leader

What Makes a Digital Leader Great? For many years now it has been clear that other C Suite and senior managers have been increasingly impatient with the efforts of the Information Function to deliver innovation. At the same time it is vitally important to deliver existing services robustly and drive down costs as globalisation and digital delivery increase competition and customer expectations.

In parallel there has been long been a strong movement to "Manage IT as a Business-within-a-Business" or what I call "The Business of IT" (TBIT). Recently this has morphed into a trend for describing the CIO's role as being the CEO of IT. This is important as one of the key roles of a CEO is to think and act in the 3 functional dimensions of his organisation: Control the Business, Do the Business and Support the Business. This is key to building an integrated senior management team which acts coherently with the same unity of purpose. Failure to achieve cohesion will undermine the success of any investment in IT systems, as the business will fail to exploit the potential value.

At the same time there are initiatives such the TBM Council's work on developing "Technology Business Management". This focuses on the conversations that the Information Function must have with other parts of its Business. Key to this is agreeing upon and demonstrating value and cost with transparency.

However for TBIT to be successful, the "Right Value" needs to be identified. Whilst the CIO cannot do this on his/her own, the CIO needs to be stongly plugged into the Business and its Market. Understanding of how the Business Operates, its strengths and weaknesses and the issues that it faces is a start. Understanding the trends within the market place and positioning of key competitors is another milestone. But overall, there needs to be understanding of the customer's needs, desires, frustrations and experience, as well as anticipation of how they may change. Lastly, there needs to be empathy which identifies who else deals with your customers, in a non competitive but complementary manner, and how they could collaborate with you to deliver more.

One more plank is widening the sources of innovation to exploit capability and knowledge that existing partners can bring to the Business and networking with other sources of ideas, e.g. former colleagues from the Business, analysts and academic thinkers.

If I put this together, the answer to the question may include a leader who:

- has good social skills (or at least works on them) and networks with key internal and external stakeholders,

- looks outward and understands the "big rules of the market place",

- builds an effective team which can deliver and gets on well with each other,

- works well with the rest of the C Suite and their teams,

- is lucky enough to work in a business with a healthy collaborative culture.

So just as digital enterprises are moving to understand each customer's individual needs better and make customer interaction more human, the digital leader needs to focus on empathy for success.

 

Are You Ready for Digital Disaster?

We all know that we should have a Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Plan. Yet most of us have worked in businesses where this is a convenient afterthought. Even when businesses have them, active testing of them is often patchy at best. Many businesses aspire to do this at least once a year, fail to meet this target and even if they do, they then brush a lot of things under the carpet.

For many years the key concern has been a major fire, followed by lesser concerns about flooding, terrorist attacks and other major natural disasters. Statistics suggest, that in the UK the typical rate of major fires is around once per hundred years of a data centre's operations. This is actually a very high high rate. Although in actual practice the more frequent major incidents which disrupt operations tend to be caused by more mundane things such as loss of power from the grid, major network switch failures within the the data centre or loss of telecommunications coming into a data centre.

Many businesses have been content to make minimal investment in preparations and accept the risk. They have mostly got away with this despite urban myths about the high percentage of businesses, suffering major incidents, which go out of business. Though if you personally have ever lived through such an incident, you would not want to do so again.

This complacency is looking increasingly out of place as enterprises go digital. For one thing, operations become impossible to deliver with failure, for another the increasing frequency of "Cyber Attacks" means that the old cosy assumptions are no longer valid and not only may operations be disrupted but valuable information or IPR stolen and an enterprise's reputation destroyed along with customer confidence.

The increasing pace of change inherent with modern digital business, based on Agile and DevOps styles of continuous change, also mean that an annual test is laughable as recovery plans will never be up to date if annual refresh thinking continues to dominate. This will also exacerbated by use of multiple SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services. As although each one used may increase the theoretical resilience of the enterprise's systems, it also complicates the inter-dependencies between them.

Business and IT Management Teams need to actively engage in preparing for major disasters and incidents. This means several things need to be addressed:

- capturing all changes to the systems and process lanscape, especially adoption of SaaS services, so that current architecture is documented, understood, risk assessed and continuously revised in recovery plans;
- regular incremental testing of recovery plans to address changes to the systems landscape;
- conduct of scenario "war games" to evaluate responses to different types of threat, taking into account that under Murphy's Law key people may be unavailable when a major incident occurs;
- regular review of major 3rd party services that the enterprise relies upon for the suitability their response capabilities and likely behaviours;
- media training of all senior executives and managers who may be called upon to represent the enterprise in the event of an incident, taking into account that some of them may have been incapacitated by the incident or away from the business.

Not many of us work in enterprises where all this happens, but most of us need this now.

Death of the CIO

Over the last thirty years I have read the orbituaries of many IT professions.

I cannot count the number of times that I have read of the death of the programmer as some new type of tool was supposed to make everything so easy that programmers would soon die out. 4GLs (or Fourth Generation Languages were supposed to do it in the early eighties, Workflow in the nineties and more recently rules engines). Each time the promoted nemesis has turned out to be more difficult to use than its promoters sales pitches would have you believe. Each time some other technological progression or change has introduced new complexities which need detailed technical knowledge. Always there have been things that these tools can not do, requiring specialist programmers to address short commings.

Likewise, the analyst was supposed to be killed by RAD and then Agile developers, yet we need them even more than ever.

Architect, too have been in the line of fire. At the end of the nineties, as the first internet boom took hold, we were told that there was no time for strategy and we were advised to stop worrying about architecture. Then in the late noughties the current fad for enterprise architecture took off again. So it was not a surprise that I was invited to a debate about "Whether Agile is killing the Architect" a few months ago. Everything is cyclic and Agile only really works well when the overall architecture is pre-planned, unless of course the solution is so trivial that it does not matter.

So it is no surprise then that we often see pundits trying to stir the pot with assertions that the CIO will die out. The most recent justification being that Chief Marketting Officers have stolen the "Chief Digital Officer" crown.

Interestingly enough, a recent global survey run jointly by a well know recruitment agency in partnership with a big 4 consultancy, showed that there is a resurgence of CIO roles here with an increasing proportion of them taking on the role of Chief Digital Officer.

This is unsurprising really, given the range of skills needed to be an effective CIO. They are quite different to those required to be a Chief Marketing Officer and what we are really witnessing is the end of another fad, as the CIO's role adjusts to deal with the new opportunities and challenges involved to shifting to a digital business agenda.

Does Anyone Remember the I in IT?

I entered IT in the era of proprietary methodologies and the ascendancy of "Information Engineering". Since then much has changed and everything has become "Digital". Yet increasingly, I have noticed that people who have entered in the last 10 year don't appear to understand data or information.

The IT profession has been caught between Object Oriented thinking, COTS dogma and the assumption that everything is now available "as a Service". Whilst at the same times our colleagues in other disciplines just ask for more innovation, business insight and new capability, whilst we are struggling to keep the lights on with operational services and legacy infrastructures.

In the last 6 months I have been to events where the discussions have revealed the dangers of this lack of focus on information. At one event, everyone confessed that they had lost control of customer data. Most organisations do not have a single source of the truth for customer data that they can trust. In many cases, customer data is littered across many systems, is incomplete, untimely, incoherent, duplicated with inconsistencies or just plain wrong.

At another event it was made clear that Digital Businesses regard customer data and data about their preferences, behaviour, buying patterns etc. as their most valuable Intellectual Property Right. At the same time legislation in multiple jurisdictions is making it essential that organisations control, protect and manage their customer data.

When you look at core capabilities for Digital businesses it is also clear that getting to grips with customer identity management is also essential. In fact, this is just one dimension of engagement. Truly digital businesses manage all their stakeholder interactions, internal and external, with customers, partners, regulators, employees and prospective talent digitally. Then there are the challenges of integration and obtaining insight from Business Intelligence and Big Data.

If you put this altogether, Information has to be back on the menu for IT attention. The model however has to be changed. Just as with Finance, budgets are devolved within a governance framework to other functions, certain information management tasks need to be devolved from IT to the people who gain the most benefit from the information.