InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

August 28, 2000

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Business/IT:
A Trip To The Cafeteria, Part 3

Management teams need to work more closely together

By Bob Evans

h so now chief technology officers have been officially dubbed as corporate America's new rock stars and you as CEO have taken to wearing a tad more black these days just to show you're not exactly a Muzak wannabe and then that survey from InformationWeek came out saying CTOs for the first time make more money than CIOs and so you've offered to buy lunch for your CIO and CTO to make sure all is good and peaceful and calm but you think they've been a little balky and you finally had to make this a command performance because the CIO cancelled the first lunch at the last second because of a "critical server issue" and then the CTO said the earliest she could make a lunch with you and the CIO was in two weeks and he won't eat Mexican food her favorite but she won't do sushi which is his so the three of you amble down to the corporate heartland's feeding trough and as you're heading to the always-wonderful cafeteria you're trying to decide whether to open the discussion by rapping their two oversized heads together and ordering them to be nice to each other or whether it should be a lighthearted conversation at which some mutual approaches could be struck but then you have a mental flash saying that maybe it's your head and not theirs that needs to be rattled because in the past six months the new architecture's been analyzed selected and installed and the new Web apps are rolling out a few weeks ahead of schedule and the extranet is generating more new ideas for how to deal with suppliers than you'd ever imagined and then you get an image of the food server you saw the other day who was not-too-neatly sampling the sliced pepper-encrusted chicken destined for the wraps but you force yourself to get back on the subject and the CTO falls in beside you and tells you the wireless strategy is down to two vendors but the one with the amazingly cool new plans that everybody's in love with just had a huge round of financing fall through and this isn't public knowledge but she used to work with the lead banker on the deal and he says it's going to be very dicey about whether this company can ever deliver on all of its potential and then the CIO arrives and reaches right past you and with a giant grin shakes the CTO's hand and says that the new SAN installation has been performing brilliantly since the IT group incorporated some suggestions from the CTO and he insists that he pay for lunch and you wonder if you've missed something and then they start talking about the Customer Council Roundtable they've jointly convened and ask what you intend to say to that group in your opening remarks and as you try to decide whether to get the Chicken "Gordon" Blue or the Penny Pasta a la "Victor" you realize there's one more piece so you ask how the Supplier Council is coming in the wake of your decision to be a co-founder of an industry exchange and they both kind of look away and pretend they're interested in the picked-over fruit salad and the CTO says that your decision to announce the plans for that exchange with your technology vendor partners joining you on stage but not any of your supplier partners was probably a miscalculation and the CIO says the suppliers have spent an average of $7 million each over the past three years making infrastructure and other investments to be part of your extranet and now they feel kinda hosed (which inspires you to get the penne) and don't you understand what we've been trying to tell you for the past year that it's NOT all about the technology but instead it's about the business and the relationships and customers and new opportunities and you've got to stop trotting in these fancy-ass consultants who dazzle you with drawings of The Web in the Year 2010 and who waltz out the door with a big fat check but without having given you any idea whatsoever of how you can use that nonsense to create value for shareholders and customers and employees and that's why we need to work more closely together as a management team so we don't go down these blind alleys where you as CEO are muddying the waters by foisting technology for the sake of technology on the whole company and telling people we're going to become dot-com when what we really need to be is a wildly opportunistic and totally customer-focused organization that moves at the speed of relentless innovation. And don't forget to eat all your vegetables.

BOB EVANS
Editor-in-Chief
bevans@cmp.com

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