The final installment in our series of three articles on IS governance. These articles are written through iQo's collaboration with Isabelle SIPMATransition Manager. The new approach to IS governance is leading us to reinvent the role of the CIO... and in this final episode, we take a look at the CIO of the future.
A rationale of shared responsibility with the professions
A "co-lead" approach to constantly adjust needs and solutions
As we have seen in previous episodes, agility applied to ever wider perimeters presupposes seamless cooperation between the business and IT departments. Increasingly, IT has to become embedded in the business to enable rapid adjustments.
The IT department must therefore facilitate this integration, by preparing technological resources to "melt into the business" and make common cause. It's no longer a question of who owns the staff or the budgets allocated to IS management and development. Multi-disciplinary teams need to be formed, led by a Product Owner from the business and a Scrum Master from the IT department.
Responsibility for deliverables is shared, through a constant confrontation between needs on the one hand, and technical solutions and constraints on the other. Gone are the days of the customer/supplier relationship between the business and IT departments! It's all about making decisions together, without looking for the person or entity responsible for the error in the event of a problem. Everyone needs to learn to speak each other's language, which means developing the technical skills of the business and the business skills of the IT people.
For the CIO, this means devoting time to dialogue with the business,organizing regular communication and creating a climate of trust. The story begins at COMEX, where the CIO must play a mediating role between business and technology.
An IT department as guardian and architect of transformation
How can we ensure overall consistency in IS management and transformation, especially in companies with a wide variety of business lines? The IT Department has an essential role to play here in getting the COMEX and management to work together on an overall perspective of the issues at stake. To do this, it must invest in two key functions:
- Enterprise Architecture which must move from a position of censor to one of global design and supply of components and services;
- Portfolio Management which must become "Lean" by structuring the continuous improvement of business value chains.
The IT department must steer the trajectory to ensure strategic alignment
These two functions are linked by common representations of the targets to be reached in the form of value chains, themselves broken down into business processes. Value chains are established by product or service, but also by customer to qualify the key elements of the relational model.
After the product and the customer, the employee experience is the third dimension to be qualified. The vision of the employee's role is no longer that of a performer of pre-formatted and repetitive tasks, but that of a player co-responsible for the quality of the product or service: he or she needs flexible tools enabling him or her to carry out diagnoses, access data simply, and make operational decisions.
Representing the target IS and its intermediate stable states is therefore a formidable tool for giving meaning, sharing common objectives and steering the trajectory. This can be facilitated by the use of "digital twin" technologies. "digital twins" type technologies. It also helps organize work by facilitating the determination of the value units that will make up each team's deliverables. Combined with a management system that emphasizes the measurement of results and continuous improvement, it is a powerful communication tool between senior management, business units and the IT department, guaranteeing the strategic alignment and relevance of the transformation.
Technology must continue to be well managed
Clear technological choices in line with team skills
It's difficult for the CIO to position himself as the architect of corporate transformation, without a solid technical foundation. The CIO is a manager before being a technologist, yet he or she must be committed to developing a base of technical skills that guarantees the reliability of the IS, and enables it to evolve rapidly. These skills can be internal or external, and must be organized around clear technological choices.
Constantly adjusting skills is a major challenge for CIOs, who must create the conditions for ongoing training of technical teams. From now on, the CIO must be a "CIO-HRD", enabling the company to access scarce, strategic resources.
Setting up development platforms for modularity and reusability
Faced with the scale of the investments required in their information systems, companies are developing strategies that combine "MAKE" (the term "Make or Buy" refers to the choice between doing it yourself or buying off-the-shelf software) for strategic functions (often digital and customer relations), and "BUY" for all functions that offer little differentiation, or for which a more advanced partner can be identified.
Today, there is a renewed interest in in-house development, as a means of differentiation and flexibility. But what we call "development" takes many different forms, and increasingly consists of assembling pieces of code made available on platforms. The arrival on the market of AI tools such as Chat GPT also opens up the possibility of entrusting robots with some of the coding work. Citizen Development" promotes "low code, no code" practices, which can lead to end-users taking charge of certain developments. In order to control their technical base, CIOs must therefore organize access to development platforms that not only provide a framework for access to development tools, but also enable them to move towards greater efficiency through easier reuse and assembly.
Maximum automation of technical gestures for greater efficiency
A quality technological foundation also means improving IS management processes:
- Automate tests so that they can be run frequently ;
- Automate software installation processes in development, test and production environments.
Without this, the benefits of agility in design and development cannot be realized by businesses that can't get software into production quickly.
It's all about doing more with less, and therefore also providing services that work with optimized maintenance costs. The software must be of high quality, with few incidents (incidents are expensive!), reliable and secure, and simple to use to limit assistance and support costs. The CIO must therefore assert himself as an efficient manager, by developing measurement tools to identify performance levers. A high level of automation and fine-tuned management of IT processes are therefore key elements in the technological foundation to be provided by tomorrow's CIO.
Asserted leadership in the innovation/data-IA/sobriety triptych
A CIO capable of opening up new business perspectives
The IT Department must work to build an effective technological foundation, and position itself resolutely within a logic of co-construction with the business lines, which presupposes "letting go" of the idea of full responsibility for the entire IS. The CIO must open up new horizons by giving people a glimpse of what emerging technologies will make possible: innovation at the service of the business is at the heart of the CIO's mission.
Among today's most transformative topics, that of the future of work future of work must mobilize the IT Department, which showed during the COVID crisis just how resilient technology can be.. The IT Department is in a position to take the lead in this area when it has been able to go beyond the purely technical, through experimentation and analysis of employee expectations, and by broadening the scope of the cooperative practices it has been able to develop. The future of work will involve technology, but it also raises the question of the meaning of work and the functioning of the workgroup: the CIO, because of his key role in the overall transformation of the company, is in a position to propose a vision and an execution plan on this subject, in coordination with the HR Director and by leading COMEX work, by putting the employee experience at the center.
Creating value through data and AI
AI is taking center stage in today's technology news following the unbridled deployment of Chat-GPT : Gartner echoes it in its 10 technology trends for 2023.
AI will revolutionize the world of work by massively replacing human labor in certain activities, but AI will require robot design and supervision capabilities. Training and operating AI will also require large volumes of data, which will need to be collected, refined and even "debiased".
The IT department cannot stand aside from this evolution, which is linked to the question of the future of work, and requires the mobilization of technologies and data. Not only will we have to provide access to new tools, but also manage trust in algorithms, and the associated risk and security. We still have a long way to go in terms of the explicability of models and the traceability of both input and output data.
Developing energy-efficient, environmentally-friendly IT systems
According to IDC, IT spending is set to increase by 4.2% in 2023, and spending on digital transformation by 15.9% (Europe). Today, therefore, digital technology remains the driving force behind IT spending, and puts a strain on the IT department, which must massively improve its processes.
These developments are accompanied by a demand for sobriety, imposed by economic constraints, but also by pressure on energy resources. Still according to IDC, the budget allocated to sustainable development is set to increase by 23.8% between now and 2026 in Europe. It is therefore becoming essential to equip ourselves with technologies that consume less energy and are more respectful of the environment, especially in the IT-intensive services sector.
So, should tomorrow's CIO be prepared to go "green"? There is strong pressure on the market for young talent, who prefer companies with proactive policies on this subject. Hardware and software suppliers are coming into line, offering solutions that consume less energy. Recycling of IT equipment is on the increase. The first step for the IT Department is certainly to put in place the measurement tools, through a carbon balance sheet, and to take account of carbon impact in decision-making. On this subject too, collaboration with the business units is the only way to find solutions adapted to the issues at stake, and to address the question of usage.
Tomorrow's ISD will be sustainable or it won't be!
Further information
Towards agile IS governance (Episode 2 / 3)
This series of three articles on IS governance aims to underline the importance of technology and data governance at its best.
Towards agile IS governance (Episode 1 / 3)
This series of three articles on IS governance aims to underline the importance of technology and data governance at its best.
Top 10 priorities for post-Covid CIOs
At the start of 2020, the health crisis presented CIOs with a huge challenge: how to implement teleworking on a massive scale for employees whose
