January 18, 2006, 11:16 AM — Most mid- to large-size companies have a CIO, but very few have a CIO. Let me explain.
We know the CIO as the Chief Information Officer. He or she owns the corporation's IT operation, infrastructure, budget, staff, mission, and the gaggle of headaches that comes along with it. In the heyday of the IBM mainframe systems running COBOL code on OS/MVS or VSE, we knew this person as the MIS Director.
But times change. CIO over the last five years gradually has taken on a new meaning: Chief Innovation Officer.
This new CIO is fundamentally different from the typical C-level manager. The key is that the Innovation Officer works not "in" the business, but rather "on" the business. The difference is enormous.
Working "in" your business puts you in the trenches, dealing with today's fires and preventing tomorrow's. It may be going on sales calls to help close a deal. It's often watching the budget and striving to get the most out of each dollar that goes out the door. It's keeping the gears well-greased and the trains running on time.
But what it is not, is developing a vision for what the business should look like five or 10 years into the future, how the business must evolve and re-invent itself, or predicting what current offerings are likely to become irrelevant years hence. Enter the Chief Innovation Officer.
In a forum to discuss health on America's growing obesity plague, the Chief Innovation Officer of a major soft-drink manufacturer acknowledged that his corporation had a responsibility not just to its consumers but to society at large. The corporation recognized that as it grew, it needed to become a leader and recognize its "responsibility to raise awareness and respond to the key issues of obesity and health that are facing our consumers, and in a very real sense affecting the health of nations." Pretty heady stuff for a purveyor of caramel-colored candy sugar water.
To grow, this company adopted radical thinking that seems in direct opposition to its historic line of business.
Consider another example, one within our industry. I've written about them before, but printer maker Lexmark is carving out new business opportunities by showing its customers that they can print less and save money. The idea would seem to be heresy for a printer maker, in direct opposition to its own reason for being in business in the first place. But by developing products and server-based applications that support scan-to-email, electronic document management, and dozens of other image-based (meaning "paperless") vertical-market applications, the company is finding new opportunities.
It's no different at the solutions integrator level. Those that clung primarily to hardware sales saw their margins and opportunities shrink. Today, few of them exist. Likewise, those that chose to stick with the network operating system they knew and for which they were certified, were rendered irrelevant as other platforms, notably Windows NT, Windows Server, Sun Solaris, and HP-UX became dominant.
We've seen this again in the last few years as Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AIX, and other platforms receded from the spotlight as Linux and open-source moved matured from mere experiment to a solution upon which entire businesses now run.
There's more. Forget everything you know about Microsoft Office. Everything about it is changing, from file formats to user interface, to methods for building custom applications. Proprietary file formats are out and XML is in.
Just six or seven years ago, who would have guessed that corporations would allocate huge portions of their IT budget to security in the form of enterprise antivirus, anti-spyware, perimeter intrusion prevention, and tools to prevent threats from inside the firewall.
The same is true for telephony. Ten years ago, the very idea of the IT director owning the telephone system would have elicited laughs. Today, enterprise VoIP is merely one more application sending packets across the network, albeit with its own quality of service and security needs.
The point is that these all represent innovations that force integrators to change, to evolve, to metamorphose into a provider of not merely today's solutions, but tomorrow's. If you're not thinking about what current offerings of yours should eventually go away and when, and what over-the-rainbow services and technologies to ramp up, then you are still working "in" your business, not "on" it.
Look at it this way: Companies that give their customers only what they currently are asking for are not preparing for the future. Now may be the right time to consider filling the role of CIO --- Chief Innovation Officer.
