Commentary
Tomorrow's CIO: Process Before Technology
Which comes first: process improvement or technology implementation? If you answered the former, congratulations, you are well on your way to being Tomorrow's CIO. If you answered the latter, well, good luck with that patch-management project because that's what you're going to be doing for a long time to come.Which comes first: process improvement or technology implementation? If you answered the former, congratulations, you are well on your way to being Tomorrow's CIO. If you answered the latter, well, good luck with that patch-management project because that's what you're going to be doing for a long time to come.In researching our upcoming "Tomorrow's CIO" feature story and analytics report, one thing has become clear from the discussions I've had with CIOs and other technology and corporate execs: CIOs need to comprehend the business processes within their organizations, and figure out how to improve those processes, before they apply any new technology.
CIOs must specialize in "understanding what other units do," says Stephen Pickett, past president of the Society for Information Management and current chairman of the SIM Foundation. CIOs must make sure that their IT organizations aren't "just being a service provider to those entities but contributing to their success," says Pickett, who's also VP and CIO of Penske Corp.
More Global CIO Insights
White Papers
- The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet's Good Bones - by BlackBerry
- New Visual and Wizard-Driven Paradigms for Exploring Data and Developing Analytic Workflows
Reports
More >>Webcasts
- Maximize ROI with Database Consolidation onto Private Clouds
- Outsourcing Security: What Every Potential Cloud Security Customer Should Know
One of the things a CIO needs to know, Pickett says, is "how to fix a process that's broken." A good CIO, he says, can analyze an inefficient sales process, for instance, "and make suggestions to salespeople about how to fix it." And CIOs must do that analysis, and make those recommendations, "before they can apply technology to that process."
Ed Kamins exemplifies that process-oriented mentality and approach. He is the chief operational excellence officer for technology distributor Avnet, a position he says may well be the future of the CIO role. "I'm really the chief process officer," he says.
His position, which he took on four years ago when he was still Avnet's CIO, then moved to full time a year later, was the result of "the realization [that] if you automate a bad process, you get a faster bad process that digs a hole and wastes money faster," he says. It's a lesson well learned by forward-thinking CIOs looking to make a significant contribution to their organizations' competitiveness and business growth.
Kamins' best piece of advice for CIOs: "Before process automation, process improvement."
Easier said than done? You tell me. How involved are you in process improvement in your organizations?
Related Reading
| To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy. | |
|
|
T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting! |
Subscribe to RSSResource Links
This Week's Issue
Technology Whitepapers
- Mobile BI: Actionable Intelligence for the Agile Enterprise
- Creating the Enterprise-Class Tablet Environment - by Yankee Group
- How To Regain IT Control In An Increasingly Mobile World - by BlackBerry
- The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet's Good Bones - by BlackBerry
- New Visual and Wizard-Driven Paradigms for Exploring Data and Developing Analytic Workflows












