I’m a big fan of the three basic CIO roles, as laid out by the Executive Council of CIO magazine; Function Head, Transformation Leader, and Business Strategist.
Function Head – Operational excellence (keeping the lights on)
Transformation Leader – Business and process transformation (being a change agent)
Business Strategist – Enterprise strategy, innovation, and differentiation (developing strategy, not just reacting to it)
One of the largest challenges that exist for CIO’s as they play the role of Transformational Leader is in getting multiple people to change the way they work when they may not want to. Perhaps it is the acceptance of these challenges that defines a CIO. What I mean is, let’s say there are two projects on the table. One is the upgrade of Exchange to the latest version and the other is procuring a document management system aimed at filing and retrieving project-related emails. The new version of Exchange will make things “easier” for the server manager and the new Outlook Web Access (OWA) will impress the users. The document management system is pretty easy to set up but getting the entire company, spread over many offices and service groups, to use it is a different story. So, which is the better project - A lower total cost of ownership and Web 2.0-based OWA or a process that could help mitigate the risks, rework, and write-offs associated with missing or unshared client emails?
At a recent conference, I was speaking about change management and said one of the key differences between an IT Director and CIO was deployment versus adoption - An IT Director considers a project successful when it has been successfully deployed. A CIO considers a project successful when it has been successfully adopted. This might be a generalization, but it also could help define if an IT Director, who accepts the “adoption” challenge, is actually taking on a CIO role or if a CIO, who shies away from such projects, is acting more like an IT Director.
Which project did we select? Well, to be honest, both. Our server manager is taking steps to upgrade Exchange. We are trying to consolidate and cluster servers as well as give the users a better OWA experience. That said my role with the Exchange upgrade is to understand the project and its positive effect on the company, trust-but-verify the projects expectations, and monitor the progress.
The vast majority of my time will go into doing the same steps as above for the document management application, but to also work closely with the entire company in order to get a reasonable adoption of the software. To change the culture so a year from now we will have happier clients, less write-offs, and the current employees will be telling the new hires, “Well, that’s just how we file email here.”