Agile CIOs

The ever changing role of the CIO is often subject to much debate. Opnionons vary from the challenge of "why do we need a CIO?" to "CIOs should be driving our innovation and vision".

 A recent article by McKinsey - How to Become an Agile CIO - is a typical example. The authors,  Santiago Comella-Dorda, Quentin Jadoul and Swati Lohiya, set out 3 main aspects of An Agile CIO's role:

• Architect / Technology Visionary

• Driver of Knowledge and Talent

• Problem Solver

Whilst they are obviously part of the role, I think that they do miss the point in a number of areas. The first is that the CIO should be taking the llead in helping build a positive business culture which avoids blame, encourages collaboration and focusses risk appetite around continuous innovation. This requires a good focus on the soft aspects of Employee Engagement, as well as some on providing supporting tools.

The second is on uniting the Senior Management Team and their teams in building common understanding of each other's problems and shared opportunities, as the basic pre-requisite for developing an Integrated Product Team approach, in which each IPT addresses the requirements, design and enhancement of End-to-End product processes (whether there are internal or customer facing products).

The third issue is being the corporate consience on balanced performance and investment; Businesses which operate as teams tend to be the best at developing and exploiting digital business models and sustaining a Digital As Usual ethos. This does require balanced investment and commitment of resources so that the orgnisation can not only address new business opportunities, but also improve exisiting products, maintain capability and protect itself (and its customers).

Digital Experience (DX) And the Re-invention of Marketing

The Post War World of the '50s and '60s saw a massive explosion in marketing as companies tried to force feed Baby Boomers mass produced electro mechanical goods, encased in plastic. They did this by trying to create desire and brainwash people into needing their brands. This was the last hurrah for the Henry ford approach, "they can have any colour they like, so long as it is black" and the Taylorist School of management which focused on productivity and costs, whilst paying lip service to quality.

It took the massive economic melt down of the late seventies and early eighties for the Quality led management, pioneered largely by Japanese companies to gain acceptance in Europe and America, which at the same time was accompanied by the angst of Punk, as Generation X turned on mass consumerism and the break down of "A Job for Life". Customer Care, based on the concept of listening to and delighting customers, came to the forefront. New technologies like CADCAM and philosophies like Flexible Manufacturing made it possible to design, prototype and evolve products to meet customer needs and gradually Design Thinking came into being.

At the same time, the '80s saw the birth of the PC and take up of lower cost client server technology, which usurped proprietary mainframes whilst Rapid Application Development (the forerunner to Agile) sparked the first steps to evolving the Digital Ecosystem that we see today. This has pushed marketing evolution to the extent that the modern marketing function is digitally obsessed with Customer Behaviour Data, Customer Experience and Agile Marketing. So much so, that most digital conversations inevitable involve talking about Customer Experience and the Customer Journey.

So it was great to see Nimbus Ninety publish "The CX Manifesto" which sets out over 30 recommendations under the 5 headings of Personalisation, Experimentation, Trust, Data and Loyalty in its latest  quarterly publication of the Chief Disruptor magazine. This is well worth a read as it has been compiled by practitioners from London's vibrant digital scene over the first 6 months of 2018 and is based on sound experience.

The Renaissance of the City State - Digitally of Course

This week is London Tech Week, a series of co-ordinated and themed events aimed at promoting London's place in the Digital World. So the week was kicked off with a talk by Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London) at the Francis Crick Institute (Crick was one of the pioneers in DNA research) where he spoke about London's "leading position in AI"; apparently London has 745 AI focused companies, which is more than twice the number in Paris and Berlin combined. He also spoke about his ambitions for London to become the world's leading smart city, which will obviously be a challenge given the competition from Bangalore, Singapore, China in general and quite a few American cities even before some unexpected contenders such as Moscow are taken into account.

Yesterday TechXLR8 kicked off as one of the major combined exhibition and conference events, combining a huge number of themes: IoT, VR/AR, Cloud, DevOps, a platform for small start ups (known as project Kairos) as well as pretty much smart everything or SmartX. TechXLT8's theme this year is "changemakers" across technology, business and society and the opening talks were quite focused on the national and smart city impacts coming.

So Greg Williams (Editor-in-Chief of Wired) mentioned that 13 of Europe's 47 or so Unicorns (digital companies worth more than $1Bn) are based in Britain. Gavin Patterson (the outgoing CEO of BT) emphasised how BT is preparing to invest in the next new wave of connectivity infrastructure such as FTTP, 5G and quantum key networks with pilots for 5G and quantum key networks having just been announced. This investment is aimed at keeping Britain as the "leading digitally enabled nation" in the world.

Juliet Bauer, Chief Digital Officer for NHS England, discussed the recently published Digital Roadmap for the NHS and how this should drive a revolution in the way in which citizens access and receive treatment from the NHS as well as a shift towards greater prevention of health problems before they become serious.

Paul Copping, Chief Innovation Officer for Greenwich, discussed some of the challenges for cities moving to a Smart City model and the architectural issues around defining what a "City Digital Platform" really looks like and some of the questions around the blurring of lines between local city  authority provided services and private digital service providers, especially with respect to access methods. He also discussed issues of future integration and interoperability between adjacent metropolitan areas and how to marry architecture with public procurement processes. Though what he did not mention was the need to deliver iteratively in small chunks and experiment to continuously fine tune solutions before investing too much or how to abstract changing technical standards within service wrappers to deal with obsolescence across the long time frames needed to implement anything at this scale.

Colin Rhys, VP Virgin Hyperloop for Middle East & Asia, spoke about how Hyperloop could make commuting distances such as London to Edinburgh on a daily basis quite feasible, extending the footprint of cities outwards. His tag line "live in the forest, work in the city" offers the prospect that digital enablement plus fast transport means that the "virtual city" of the future will spread far beyond the natural physical boundaries of a cities geography and extend almost like a virtual state into the rest of the country or continent in which it is located. This has implications far beyond the traditional turf wars between metropolitan and rural councils over "who owns whom" for the purpose of local taxation and implies that all these councils need to collaborate more effectively for collective good. This means that we need to rethink socially our ideas about cities and rural communities and address a whole host of issues around community identity, legal frameworks, representation, pooing of investment and resources, as well as how to deliver the grand scheme that a Smart City is base upon.

The Chief Data Officer

Many organisations are experimenting with the concept of a Chief Data Officer. Although according to Raconteur most are struggling with the concept as well as making headway with the concept of managing data for value.

It seems that there are a number of problems:

• Business Understanding of the Role and Data Issues;
• Resourcing, Funding and Provisioning Data Initiatives;
• Current Starting Points for many Businesses with Poor Data Quality;
• Focusing too much on compliance and not enough on Value.

Personally, I would suggest that there is a value staircase for Data Management starting with Compliance and Protection on the Bottom Rung and then progressing through Quality, Integration, Sourcing (external data feeds), Insight & Intelligence to Adaptive Control (involving use of machine learning, experimentation and up to the minute data feeds to optimise control).

It is difficult howver to obtain value if a business tries to progressively work its way upwards through this staircase if it attempts to do everything in the first one before attempting the next step. The scope is too wide. Instead busnesses need to prioritise a business problem or opportunity and address a vertical slice down this value staircase to deliver value quickly. Progression can be achieved by addressing the next opportunities and reviewing what is needed in each step to improve overall capability as each increment is implemented.

However, probably the biggest issue is the role. What is the difference between a CIO, a Chief Digital Officer, a CTO, a CSO, a Principal Data Archiect and a Chief Data Officer? These all overlap and are often confused in scope. Many businesses are handing the Chief Digital Officer role back to the CIO, so it may be time to do the same with the Chief Digital Officer, because if they are separated the CIO's role is hollowed out to just look at the plumbing and not the value to the business.

It is also important to delegate data quality and integrity to business managers responsible for exploiting data in their day-to-day operations. IT may provide the policy framework, tools and measurement framework for managing data quality, but line management needs to take responsibility and include data quality in their personal objectives, just like they do with budgets. Otherwise value will never be achieved.

IoT Adoption Drag

IoT Makes Slow Progress

Despite all the hype and general acceptance of its possibilities, IoT is making slow inroads into enterprises and can still be regarded as being in the early period of adoption in many businesses.

I have talked about CxO behaviour and culture in previous blogs as well as security and other issues, so what is holding IoT back?

Business Leader Perspective on IoT Adoption

A recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit (sponsored by IBM and ARM) involving over 800 executives around the world looked into the issue. This suggested that fewer than 10% had extensive IoT implementations, although many had dipped their toes in the water.

More positively, around 25% stated that IoT adoption was sparking innovation within their organisations with 22% indicating that IoT offered new opportunities, 20% saying it was changing business models and 16% believing that it was enabling entry into new markets and initiatives. So the overall picture is quite positive about its transformational potential.

Only 15% believed that IoT would significantly reduce costs, suggesting that IoT adoption is more about re-imagining their businesses than old fashioned cost cutting.

Interestingly enough, few executives saw technical issues as blockers to adoption. The key constraints cited were the Size of Investment needed (29%), Security and Privacy concerns  (26%) and lack of CxO Knowledge and Commitment (23%). 

This points to a smoking gun around Cost and Executive Behaviour / Team Buy In.

IT Leader Perspectives

Interestingly enough the British Computer Society's (BCS's) survey on Digital Leadership shows some mismatches.

Over the last 4 years the principle concern of IT Leaders in the Digital Space has been Security (averaging 60% of responses, plus or minus 2% over this period). The second most important concern has been Cloud (at 50%). In the last 2 years, Governance has moved into third place at 35% followed by Agile and Big Data at around 25-30% each. IoT was only cited by respondents as a major interest by 18%. Although Cloud, Agile and to some extent Big Data are involved in IoT adoption.

This suggests 2 things. Business Executives are over confident about implementation issues and that IT Leaders have a mismatch in alignment and understanding with business aspirations.

IoT Success Factors

So it appears that CxOs need to get together and agree a common vision and set of priorities. IT Leaders need to build IoT into their plans and there is a need for education and collaboration to get a coherent approach in place.

Are You as a CxO The Real Culprit?

Digital Impacts on Business

In a recent article in the Sloan Management Review, it was mentioned that 87% of executives think that Digital will affect their market place. Yet out of the 75% who thought that their enterprises are adequately prepared, only around 10% saw it as a potential threat to their business.

This is only one symptom of the many aspects of CxO behaviour which are affecting the success of organisations which want to adopt a digital business model. Overall, there is often a lack of realisation that the CxOs themselves are inadvertently sabotaging their organisations' efforts.

Executive Behaviour Can be a Problem

In many cases, in the same manner that many executives don't understand what it means to be a project sponsor, CxOs have failed to actually engage with the issue. They don't seem to think that they should spend the time to get involved in deep market analysis and identify real game changing opportunities. They just want to automate yesterday with some sexier technology.

Additionally, they don't get the need for acting as a joined up team or building a positive culture which supports experimentation and innovation. In fact, many executive teams don't seem to understand that innovation means doing something that no one else has done before, so there are bound to be a few issues along the way as a product team discovers what works and what does not.

David Snowdon provided a great framework with the Cynefin model to explain what is involved with emerging practice and chaotic conditions.

This is why the DAF (Digital Adoption Framework) places significant emphasis on cultural change as promoted in The Way of DAU. Culture is a known inhibitor to strategy implementation, as witnessed by the well known quote that Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast. Culture change starts with the C-Suite and ripples down. So any CxO looking for digital success, should be asking whether he or she needs to reach out work with C-suite peers to build a better team. Otherwise, failure beckons.

Executives Need To Learn How to Promote Innovation

On another tack however, a research based article on innovation and executive behaviour published in the Harvard Business Review, outlines some personal behaviour characteristics of entrepreneurial CEOs and other top executives: 

• associating, 
• questioning, 
• observing, 
• experimenting, 
• networking.

Their observation was that CEOs in successfully innovative companies take more ownership of innovation, look outwards and provide leadership to the innovation process and get personally involved.

Digital's Impact on the C-Suite

One of the interesting things about Digital Adoption and Transformation is the way in which it is impacting roles in the C-suite.

In some early adopters, the default leader for digital transformation was the CMO, as digital marketing initiatives picked up and marketing ran away with the ball.

In second wave adoption there has been a bit of a split between whether a specially appointed person, the Chief Digital Officer, should manage the business's strategic response and run all things digital. In others they have handed this to the CIO. Though occasionally the CEO has decided that this is too important and grabbed the reins him/her-self. The longer term trend does appear to gradually hand this back to IT and CIO (as discussed in previous posts).

However, there is a growing realisation, as discussed in a recent Forbes article, and in my book that culture is crucial to success. Culture needs to be aligned to a number of positives:

• Collaborative working across functional siloes
• Product and value focus
• Opex Thinking
• Tolerance of Experimentation and alignment of Risk Appetite with Value and Learning from Failure/Experience
• Customer Focus

Apparently, this is now leading to the situation where enterprises are beginning to appoint Chief Culture Officers.

Additionally, some are also appointing Chief Customer Experience Officers to reinforce the idea that the key value proposition of Digital is Excellent Customer Experience. Although in design led organisations this may be Chief Design Officers who are also interested in the customer engagement by design thinking.

One of the questions that we have to ask is how will this mature? at the end of the 19th Century as electricity started to be adopted, some organisations flirted briefly with Chief Electricity Officer roles, but they did not last long.

Will Chief Culture Officers be subsumed into Chief HR Office roles and will this change the face of HR for the better? will customer experience revert to the Chief Marketing Officer, or will CIOs hybridise and pick up aspects of these roles as part of the CDO element of their job as they delegate more technical aspects to CTOs. Or will CTOs have to become more human?

Whatever happens, CxOs will all have to rethink what their core attributes and operating models should be. Digital required disciplined team play, as well as skills and flair.

Singapore's Digital Transformation

Asia is known for the appetite of its businesses for innovation and within Asia, Singapore is often seen as the leading city for innovation and innovative thought. So it's interesting to see the results of surveys published in the "The Business Times".

In 2016, 49% of business leaders were said to be in denial of the need to for Digital Transformation. Yet by 2017, in another survey, only 16% of organisations said they had done nothing about digital transformation. Interestingly enough 50% were actively progressing a digital strategy and about a third had a strategy, but had not really got going on delivering it yet.

This is reinforced by claims in a ZDNet article  that over a quarter of businesses see Digital Transformation as essential to survival. The Singapore Business Federation has expressed concern that a significant proportion of businesses have not made a start on any form of business transformation and within this section two thirds demonstrate lower than average profitability.

However the latter survey was not without its apparent contradictions. three quarters of the survey respondents thought that new data insights would lead to new revenue streams, yet their highest priorities were customer engagement, optimising operations and empowering employees. Transforming products and enabling new business models trailed in at 4th in terms of priorities.

When it came to enabling technologies, Big Data (for Insight) was not mentioned. IoT was the leading technology, followed by AI, then wearable technology, and VR, followed up by quantum computing. Again this does not appear that consistent with enabling the stated priorities.

So whilst the enthusiasm is there and appears very strong, the clarity of thought appears to be not quite crystalised. Perhaps this is a symptom of rapid change in attitude.

Interstingly enough, the top 3 roles associated with leading digital transformations in the 2017 survey were CDO, CIO then CEO. CMOs appear to be out of the running there.

Digital Engagement Surveys

At this time of year, Nimbus 90 performs a survey into technology trends and issues concerned with adoption. This is based on the opinions of 100s of senior IT professionals working in the UK and is part of their symbiotic business model, research funded by suppliers and supplemented by knowledge sharing networking events.

I have just been looking at last years survey report which was interesting in how positive it was. There was a strong focus on re-inventing business models, with a high emphasis on customer experience and expectations.

The thing which really struck me was how few organisations saw a digital model as a cost cutting exercise. Although the number looking to improve operational efficiency slightly out stripped those looking to launch new products.

Key benefits anticipated included innovation, agility, customer engagement and better decision making. Though, quite sanguinely, expectations around customer loyalty were quite muted. Perhaps this was early recognition of the greater volatility of customer loyalty within the digital world when compared with traditional ways of doing business.

The one thing which did not come out was much use of AI or Machine learning. This has been a bit of a theme this year. So it will be interesting to see what comes out.

Also, sponsorship of Digital Programmes appears to be all over the place at the moment with CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CMOs and CDOs all in on the act. Although surprisingly few COOs appear to be involved. Some of this is obviously diue to different corporate structures and sizes. but again it would be interesting to see what happens.

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.