Role Of The Chief Information Officer Information Technology Essay
The role of the CIO evolves with, some of the hardware skills, more of the technical skills, being amplified with some of the software skills that are typically been characterized across the rest of the things like leadership, human capital management, strategy and innovation, becoming more and more key aspects in the role of the CIO. The CIO should be a cost cutter, innovator, visionary, at the same time they have to know about technology, business, and customers. CIOs today should be concerned of understanding the business, what are the business drivers, what is a strategy of their organization. Understanding the technology and when to move on from the technology, plays a vital role, and able to understand when it is going to be return investment and release in business value.
Expectations on CIOs today have really grown from managing core technology to enable in the corporate vision, to really delivering business value for their companies when looked over past years on the companies from slow growth to high growth and CIOs in general that work for the companies growing slowly focus much more on core technology than the CIOs of high growth technologies, who are really focused on enabling the corporate vision. CIO has to see them as moving up in the companies, peer pressure is probably higher here. On global level it seems to be perception by CIOs that if they do acquire and develop some of the software skills they do have both aspirations and opportunities to advance much further within their respective enterprises.
The Role of Chief Information Officer:
Ford Calhoun the former CIO for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Pharmaceuticals (2001-2007), earned himself a reputation as a cost cutter and de-layered ITs organizational structure, modernized development and support processes, thrown out very same applications and focused the complete IT organization on a common support for doing business. In this way, over the period of several years, Calhoun and his workgroup cut down the expenditure of IT by hundreds of millions of dollars, also installing new strategic actions in infrastructure service, Web Enablement, ERP and associating tools. The profits that GSK has achieved through difficulty decrease can be found in many technology organizations. While some difficulty is expected, much of it is self-created and a result is overturned. He also implemented a number of IT projects in order to improve IT payback and cut costs further. Many of these failed, as they did not take into concern long term requirements of the organization. Calhoun even launched many outsourcing projects distributing vast amounts of work to foreign centres in India this come about a drop in the quality of service provided and a quantity of key downfalls in GSKs IT development programme.
For the most part of the information technology organizations in our day are under stress to provide bigger values with smaller budgets. To convene this test, CIOs and other older IT gurus are able to use complication reduction as a key strategy to cost reduction and build an organization that can better control technology, as derived from the experience of Ford Calhoun as former CIO of GSK. For years and far too many organizations, CIOs in general are focused on cost cutting and results were measured in the terms of stable production services and system availability but, the reality is today these things are simply the price for getting into the game they offer no competitive advantage or no differentiation they only add a point where the demands being placed on the CIOs are going to change dramatically. CIOs asked to do more, to deliver more and to take a more active role in the strategic business management of the enterprises.
CIOs and the senior manager’s team can accept complication as an expected outcome of life in today’s global, technology-driven company. Unchecked complications will in the long run obstruct an organization, make it complicated to get things done, increase in costs and limit growth.
Influencing the role of CIO:
CIOs must be aware of the fixed processes, abilities and business approaches that are matchless, to begin the process of moving the organization’s vision of IT from that of a closely upright function that can also be distinguished from corner to corner of the operating companies. The challenge of continuing the cooperation and performance of IT organizations that are strongly lined up with their business units while taking benefit of the control beyond belief they had at the organization level. Listening is one of the primary skills. Having a lot of experience doesn’t mean that they have all the answers, also they do need to set up the probability by looking at their past successes, it is also important to listen as working with the businesses and with the present IT group. CIOs need to understand what stakeholders and customers are saying about existing technology, the issues and about the opportunities. Then they can have their own strategy, move the business further and set up the possibility and the possibility of their plan with the business. Implementing is harder than planning. First, trace out what requirements, and then can go for doing things that can be performed fast that will have the greatest outcome. CIOs should concentrate on the value plan of their business and need look at Rate of Interest before they pay out huge amounts on IT investment. The other important is, CIOs should confirm that they have the processes in position to measure the investment’s success; ‘these facts are supported by Bill Krivoshik’ 2009.
Getting the answers for, How to get the cost savings expected? How to get the incremental revenue as planned? How to improve the service to the customers as promised? There is a large need for a new focus on the basics of running a successful IT company. CIOs need to understand technology, which gives them competitive advantage. They are locked in the name of IT guides in the organization. It is in relation to driving IT like a business. There are discussions going on for a long time about CIOs whether they should be technical experts or senior managers. It appears that CIO should be a senior manager with a firm technology foundation and this is supported by ‘Bill Krivoshik 2009’. A CIO who has firm understanding of the technology where abouts, but not able to manage his expertise efficiently, then the CEO’s are limited to their priorities only up to “cutting down the cost of the project” there’s a severe imbalance. Similarly, CEO’s are concerned to increase revenue, increase market share and release new offerings, nothing to do with the CIO’s technology skills to achieve these objectives. Only the CIO’s management and leadership skills built on a base of strong technology skills which helps in growth of the top line. This analysis shows that the CIOs need to understand IT, he or she should be a tech-savvy and acquaint how to control IT to meet business requirements. Today’s CIO needs to be a technology leader, manager and innovator.
Bringing IT Revolution in the Organization:
There are many positive aspects in IT revolution; CIOs are fundamentally changing the lot about the way technology profits the business. But at the same time there are negative aspects in the IT development; CIOs are trying to disturb others business while they’re trying to do business. CIOs involving in a multiyear transformation program require keeping a few things in mind. In IT, people often discuss about reusing things that are used somewhere else. It doesn’t help for the major transformation of IT. Every organization has its own area, structure and scale, and unique culture. Each organization has different objectives and different issues. Also there are no distinct solutions for successful transformation. To conclude what will work, a CIO has to do little groundwork: understand the organization; understand the current and forthcoming situations of the organization; and, most significant, understand the compatibility of the challenge, from the business region and from the IT region. CIOs also need to understand the do’s and don’ts of the business, their IT organizations and, may be the difficult to measure, themselves. Then, CIOs need to build credibility over the workgroup that these actions are only to help the organization to reach its objectives. They have to be frank, cool and open. Mistake CIOs make in these actions is transforming the communications, process request overview, and cooperation and information tools successively. It is better for a CIO to move forward on all of these vital areas with understanding and enabling the organizations to understand competence faster.
Helping the Organization to Learn About Technology:
Avaya CIO Lorie Buckingham joined Avaya in January 2007 with a directive to initiate a world wide IT transformation, as a CIO having passion for technology and strategy for integrating innovative communication technologies, working with the executives and understanding the strategy, to enable that internally which of course doing with Avaya as base, working on the Voice Enable Business Processes and to know how people are able to perform their business, as CIO Lorie plays a strategic role, to demonstrate Avaya, to work with the customers and to develop future products. Over 90% of the fortune five hundreds are customers of Avaya, they are global. Notion of Unified Communication services is a very important factor in boosting productivity beyond email and slow snail mails.
Role of Lorie as CIO in product development act of Avaya Unified Communication. After having the converge network of voice and data you can just build of with that, one of the things of unified communication is how they optimize with the individual does. Things they making in Avaya, to make that happen and put that together either broadly for all of Avaya or sometimes capability of putting things together and see how they work, people have multiple devices and start working on. To find a person through one number with no matter of the device they are using. But this feature is not industrial yet, when someone walk into office with his cell phone it automatically switches over to his converge network so he optimize the cause and person don’t have to worry about it. The person can use any device they want and were jus trying to take that to the edge in Avaya and person doesn’t have to work about it.
CIO Lorie going to optimize IT in their own base, IT infrastructure at Avaya, improve the service to take out the cause and optimizing wide area network or telecom, to consolidate the data centres globally, Avaya is going on their servers, go proliferation of servers to standardization, consolidation and virtualization, take latest technologies and take down cause to improve the performance of the organization. Putting new systems for Avaya, new frontiers, Avaya is transforming from a hardware company to a software company, delivering software products online. everything is different about the operating models and creating all new solution sets for them. Avaya both on existing environment and some of the new solutions put in, looking everywhere as they are going to accelerate business processes, leverage unified communication more. Objective is Avaya will be so pervasive and advanced, main objective of the CIO Lorie is that for any customer, Avaya can be incredible show case, CIO using IT to get competitive advantage with competitors like Cisco, Avaya having a huge voice background and on the next piece CIO is very focused on after ‘Avaya Unified Communication’ is ‘Communication Enabled Business Process’, it checks through some of the products in the inventory, and sees which products are low in inventory and whom is on call now to fix the order for more products automatically, if global it checks what time it is and Automatically calls the person whom ever they are and where ever they are and tells them inventory is low, through communication one can conference people to order, decide and go, accelerates the organization without making the people work harder.
Avaya is currently finishing up building its infrastructure more compliant. CIO’s focus for 2010 is simplification and productivity, along with what the CIO call “common enabling”-developing Web 2.0 and highly developed voice capabilities. They had put a firm focus on helping the workgroup support combine via Avaya Aura and the full Unified Communication set to meet their customers’ requirements. This team up efficiencies is about everyone’s understanding- employees, stake holders, customers, etc. Almost everything takes six months or less, from invoking a new competence to getting a new item for consumption out to the business. Without working on 18-month cycles, forcing themselves to be creative in how to plan and implement various stages. Always adapting and always helping the business.
CIO INSIGHTS
Powerful Role of IBMs New CIO:
Veteran senior manager Pat Toole was recently titled corporate CIO at the organization and given much deep responsibilities than his seniors before in the post, which now manage a far more converge IT operation. Toole, who joined IBM in 1984 and most recently, was general manager of IBM’s intellectual property unit, takes
Over an IT operation that has previously concentrated the number of data centers from 155 to 5, and the application group from 15.000 to 4,500 – so far. The immense combined attempt includes a change to focused IT management, a shift accomplished this year by leaving CIO Mark Hennessy, who now leads strategy for IBM’s sales operation. IBM’s corporate CIO had formerly focused on strategy and authority while working with the CIOs in the company’s business groups. In the new deal, Toole is in charge for IBM’s overall IT strategy and operations, which means he holds the lot from IBM’s up-and-coming strategy for cloud computing to international crises and ordinary daily operations. Toole said the deep bond will facilitate large-scale IT transformation, such as current project to restore IBM’s SAP application infrastructure to go with worldwide processes. “At one time, SAP was optimized on a narrow level,” Focusing of IT operations may be the wave of the future. In an IBM survey of 2,500 CIOs worldwide, three fourths of the respondents said that they “look forward to having a powerfully focused infrastructure in five years.” Focusing on IT also helps CIOs centralize on actions that encourage modernization and use information for viable benefit, IBM said. In the survey, 83% of the CIOs quoted business intelligence and analytics as the top area to focus on to improve competitiveness.
Information and knowledge management of CIOs:
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At GlassCo, the CIO assumed that an IT competency in information and knowledge management was vital to the company’s capacity to be innovative. They use knowledge management software for distribute various results. This has developed larger “awareness” within the company as a total. There is a knowledge management group, who are data gurus in different fields. They are well-known with the business, so they have an initiative of what the diverse processes need. They have right to use different files and the data such that they can do situational planning. This activity goes a long way in shaping dissimilar product and process innovations.
While GlassCo CIO applied knowledge management in the improvement stages of innovation, HealthCo’s application affected further to the execution stage. One of the inhabitants interviewed define the company’s purpose of knowledge management as a web based system, Net Learning. Moreover they have a structure called Info-forms, where they place questions on a specific subject and their in-house specialists in the field offer answers, which are then placed in an open domain, for everyone to have access to. At EduCo, the deficiency of knowledge management ability was challenging. One of the CIO, accepted as one of the majority creative innovators in the company, notify that, even though innovation could take place without a knowledge management competency, the effectiveness of the process for increasing and carry out innovations was adjusted due to the lack of organizational memory. They have just had a malfunction on a new invention. Learning from the previous experiences, doing it differently the next time, someone comes up with an initiative of innovation, and start all over again and probable to make the same mistakes. No one of the model companies turn up to use their information and knowledge management IT skills during the introduction stage of innovation. The beginning activities adjoining those innovations studied appeared to be launch by innovators who carry on their own understanding of business requirements and opportunities.