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How CIOs Drive Change Using Visibility Pressure

Use Visibility to Motivate Business Execs to Do the Right Thing

By Bobby Cameron

August 29, 2006 — CSO —

Because they work with all of a firm’s business units, corporate CIOs frequently see opportunities to innovate, improve process efficiencies and cut technology costs. But IT governance structures and stovepipe business unit incentives frequently frustrate their efforts.

Visibility provides the best tool for motivating business execs to do the right thing, such as investing in cross-unit processes, eliminating redundancies or adopting standards. By regularly tracking and reporting investments and operations information, CIOs can create a baseline for justifying changes. Then, by working closely with the business execs to develop a plan, they can translate this visibility into business value.

Few CIOs have difficulty identifying opportunities to save the firm money—or to increase the top line—through IT investments from across the company. Their endless list contains items like:

• Investing in end-to-end business processes that span organizations. The traditional IT focus on functional solutions that address the needs of a single stovepipe business unit is all but dead. We surveyed a group of firms in 2005, and for 60 percent of them, more than two-thirds of IT’s investments span internal organizations. Most of these IT shops are taking a business process approach to address enterprise-wide activities like fulfillment, customer service and order processing.

• Adopting standard technologies and practices across the enterprise. Standards are good, but the recurring problem for most CIOs is that there are so many different standards for a single technology. As the technology stack matures, it no longer makes sense for each business group to have its own PC configuration, middleware stack or data center—or its own way to run a help desk and drive change management.

IT Governance Models Frustrate Cross-Unit Initiatives

Even a well-designed business case for addressing a problem that spans organizations can fail to be funded because of political and structural challenges on the business side. Most business unit execs have the interests of the corporation in mind, but when they need to move quickly or are under the stress of meeting performance objectives, they tend to follow the path of least resistance and act according to the rules laid out for them. This is particularly true when:

• No senior exec owns a business process across organizations. The CIO has many chances to identify cross-unit opportunities, because lots of business activities span multiple business units in a firm. But finding someone responsible for those end-to-end processes is another matter. Even in SAP shops that at implementation time created process-based centers of excellence to define common activity flows across the enterprise, few have empowered an ongoing decision-making body or individual to continue to drive cross-unit decisions. And when they do, many firms assign this political hot potato to midlevel execs who have only limited power in the corner office.