How Tomorrow's CIO Can Buck The Trend Of Waning Influence

TECH IS WHO YOU ARE
Innovation is fifth on the list of important attributes for future CIOs. Given how relentlessly innovation is mentioned in connection with the CIO and IT, it's surprising it isn't at the top.

It's high on Marta Foster's list. As the VP of IT at Procter & Gamble responsible for application development, she and CIO Passerini determined three areas IT could help with business innovation: more personalized and effective communication and collaboration among employees, more predictive and real-time business analytics, and reducing new product time to market.

Foster's teams are at different stages on those fronts. In collaboration, P&G's one of the largest users of Cisco's sophisticated--and very expensive--videoconferencing technology. In predictive analytics, "we're just beginning to think what a solution in that area would look like," she says. Members of Foster's team are talking with people in financial services to tap their expertise in building sophisticated simulations. For speed to market, Foster just implemented an approach that puts a small IT group square in the middle of an improvement project. Turns out, one of the longest lead times for a new product is the back-and-forth between P&G's package designers and the outside companies that create the actual new packages and materials. P&G has 350 of those designers, and the IT team uses workflow tools to manage the exchange needed to get the various iterations approved. It's a good example of "compressing time to market, directly in the middle of our stream," she says.

On the list of future opportunities for CIOs, there's another insight into what corporate managers want from technology leaders--and that CIOs might be missing. The second item on the corporate managers' list is "use customer/business data to drive sales growth," and the third item is "use customer/business data to influence new product development." CIOs have the chance to leverage their stewardship of a key organizational asset, data, to contribute to their companies' bottom lines. Even better, they're seen as the expert capable of doing it. "Data integration, interoperability, and real-time access to these data stores is driving new businesses and new industry practices," says UPMC's Drawbaugh.

UPMC is working on interoperability among the 12 to 15 electronic health record applications it uses, in particular "semantic interoperability," so a medication can be recognized even if it's referred to four different ways in four different applications. The IT team might push that agenda, but it also should recognize that this interoperability requires "an expertise above and beyond what a technologist has." But the business benefit can be measured in improved quality of care. "If you have the intelligence to act on this data, you differentiate your products and services from your competitors'," Drawbaugh says.

All this talk about innovation, business process, and operations raises a risk: that CIOs downplay the importance of technology expertise.

Surprisingly, only half of the CIOs in our survey identified "technical breadth and depth" as a key CIO attribute, while two-thirds of corporate managers think it's important.

FedEx's Carter considers "investigating new technologies" an integral part of his job, and he takes the broad view of what's included. He researches life sciences and biotech in part because the industry will likely need "very reliable, monitored" logistics, but also for how that technology might be applied to his business. FedEx is working on a project, code-named Smart Package, that involves the use of sensor technology tied to GPS, temperature, vibration, and light.

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CIOs must walk this line. They need to be the ultimate go-to authority for all things technology, yet they must translate that to business relevance. Rather than tap dance around the fact that enterprise IT can be costly, complex, and time consuming, they need to take that head on and explain why it's worth the pain. Executives outside IT want to believe a CIO can mix data, process knowledge, and vision for the future, and lead companies to higher profits. Many doubt that they have one. The opportunity's there to set the record straight.

Photograph by Jupiterimages