Who is exactly Responsible for Overseeing the level of IT Risk in an Organization?

The CIO does not own the risk, but he/she can (and should ) certainly be tasked with assessing and monitoring the risk on an ongoing basis.

In the age of digitalization, opportunities and risks are co-existing; therefore, the optimal governance and risk management structure is more critical than ever, who is exactly responsible for overseeing the level of IT risk in an organization though?

• In most large organizations the development of the governance structure (policies, procedures etc.) for managing IT risk is carried out by the CIO and the implementation of such a structure is shared by the whole business. The oversight and management of IT risk sit with the Chief Information Office, this is one of those risk areas where the impact felt, and therefore the impetus to ensure control is in place. 

• Risk is the responsibility of the entire organization: Most larger organizations will have a department dedicated to the oversight and guidance of risk, and the ownership of the risk resides with both the system owners and the technology department, the entire organization needs to work towards not increasing the corporate risk (beyond the corporate risk threshold) through their actions, activities, and engagements. The responsibility lies with everyone in the organization, it is most critical aspect of the organization and hence bottom-up approach gives healthy environment as the actual responsibility is on the one who deals day to day, on the other side, it should be controlled and monitored by top-down approach as management are the face of the organization.

• Traditional governance models sit the oversight of activities with the Board: Operational management will often do the oversight and report up to the Board. For the majority of organizations, the accountability for the 'oversight' of risk is ultimately on each individual Director of the organization, but the operational aspects can be delegated. Of course, they will delegate, but they should take the key responsibility for ensuring that whoever is delegated has all the systems and controls, along with the necessary authority, required to manage the risk. The risk aspects include:

-        the risk appetite of the Board; 

-        the risk context of the organization; 

-        the IT risk context factors; 

-        existing delegations of risk management; 

-        the contractual problems often associated with outsourced IT components; 

-        the messy people politics. 

• There are two aspects to managing risk, assessing it and then evaluating it against acceptable levels (risk appetite.) In this case, there are multiple players. The CIO will generally drive a periodic risk assessment, usually with the help and input of multiple areas. But it is up to board or other governance bodies to determine if the risk level identified is acceptable. The CIO does not own the risk, but he/she can (and should ) certainly be tasked with assessing and monitoring the risk on an ongoing basis.

In some organizations, the overall risk appetite is usually a function within the finance area though with input from other department heads...but not always collaborative in nature...The oversight is affirmed through Audit and control review groups, but this is different based on the industry, country, and focus of the organizations.

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Is IT at Cross-Road?

The focus of the CIO’s role has changed from product-oriented to client-oriented.

IT organizations are facing significant transformation, perhaps crossroad is an appropriate word to articulate IT position since CIOs seem to fall into two camps. The first is the "utility" CIO who competently manages a complex technology infrastructure but is not on the "go-to" list for implementing the strategy. The latter is a "value" CIO who has delegated infrastructure management and well articulates how information and technology can accomplish the company's strategic and tactical objectives. So what is next for CIOs beyond the crossroads? How can CIOs enable high performing organizations, and in return, their organization's leverage high-performing CIOs?

1. IT is Business

 CIOs and other business executives have used the expression ‘IT and the business’ which implies that IT is not part of the business! This invisible divide needs to go away, and CIOs should market themselves and the traditional IT function as an integrated component of the company, and IT is an innovation engine for businesses:

• CIOs need to become business leaders within IT and seek ways to grow revenues, profitability and spur innovation. That's a completely different mindset than managing technology only. Leadership towards true value creation for any organization will come from the willingness of its leaders to knock down the barriers separating insulated IT teams and the revenue-generating business ownership teams. 

• CIOs must astutely focus on the core competencies and business strategy of their organization. Once their orientation shifts towards this plane, it is easier (although not easy) to then optimize their organizations to execute for long-term value creation. Intimacy with business challenges and the ability to address them by application of IT in a manner that offers a competitive advantage is key. One of the fundamental problems facing CIOs when dealing with their CXO counterparts is where their priorities lie, as these can at times be opposing requirements. Therefore, to become a trusted advisor, it is important that the CIO can be seen to "stand aside" from the operational issues and look at things from the top management perspective.

• The IT strategy should be part of the business strategy and approved by the business unit, not just IT. Additionally, clearly defining and communicating value is essential. Joint strategies should be developed in all areas of business (Run -Grow- Transform) across geographies, industry verticals, and laterals. In other words, the goals should be like the goals of the business executive and not limited to availability, cost and customer satisfaction levels.  

2. A Customer-Centric IT

Unless IT understands the needs of its internal and external customers, it will be unable and possibly unwilling to develop a system and process differentiation that leads to the kind of competitive advantage, that will propel the organization's growth and profitability. Any CIO that masters and successfully accomplish this transition for his/her firm can surely be respected as the true C-level business leader.

• CIOs need to strategically work with their clients: They could be other C-level executives, business line managers, general IT users or external customers, etc., to provide business solutions instead of products. This includes being business savvy, client service oriented and reputable as trusted advisers. This is measured by the value the CIO brings the solutions to their clients’ highest priority business problems. This also means the CIO needs to carefully listen and has to sell or resell the management on allocating funds for the solution project which was in the budget but has a tendency to be cut.  

• The focus of the CIO’s role has changed from product-oriented to client-oriented: It's not necessarily a "client vs. product" centricity issue, but more one (product) enabling the other (customer-centricity). The CIO is running IT as a software company, their SW applications are a key part of the core value chain of the business, and they manage applications as products: with incentives on how much revenue they generate, on customer satisfaction, on strong quality assurance, on market acceptance, etc. this could be a growing trend in all those markets where IT is becoming more and more as revenue generator. 

• The evolutionary path is to evolve from data to information to knowledge to intelligence: Often, IT tends to miss the "I" in the "CIO"'s title and tends to de-facto replace it with a "T" for technology. In the era of cloud, social, mobile and Big Data, CIOs have a unique position and opportunity to lead with information in the corporate ecosystem. “I” is the lifeblood of digital business and IT needs to focus on providing innovative customer solutions via capturing business insight and foresight. 

3. An “Internal Marketing” Approach

A CIO has to ensure IT operations run, projects are delivered and the company gets IT leadership while stakeholders feel supported, on top of that he/she must demonstrate the value, their organization adds, and IT has been portrayed as a value creator.

• CIOs should in effect plan and execute a real program of 'internal marketing': This does not mean looking for ways to 'spin' or puff up the position of IT within the enterprise; it DOES mean knowing who your clients are -- internal as well as external. It means knowing where they stand now, and what you must do to move them from where they are now to where you want them to be.

• A real 'marketing' approach permeates everything about the way the CIO leads in the business: It influences how you communicate about the operational crisis, it drives how you deliver services to your end-users, and it sets the agenda for every single communication action you take with everyone else in the 'C'-suite. All the tools of 'real' marketing should be in play -- a structured segmentation of your internal customers, a focus on key messages that need to be delivered, specific roles in the organization with responsibility for managing relationships with internal clients, a communications plan with actions/ channels/dates.  

• Every project should have its own ‘marketing plan’: The ultimate goal is to push the IT organization to be clear about its position via the company's core business strategy. Once that's clear, the CIO must re-enforce that position by demonstrating every day how IT contributes to it. Managing operations? If the quality of the operation is not aligned with the company's strategy, it needs to be fixed -- and the CIO needs to be talking about what it takes to move in the right direction. Delivering projects? Every project should have its own 'marketing plan' focused on exactly how the project adds value to the enterprise. Running an IT organization? You have to remember that your employees are in themselves a segment of your internal audience, with needs for specific kinds of information about how to achieve the company's goals. 

Indeed, IT is at the crossroad, either move up value chain & maturity level or get stuck as utility & cost center. IT needs to be ‘propositive,’ which is always giving ideas, leading ahead of the pack and breaking the status quo. Improving IT maturity is a huge and continuous task that definitely needs to be driven by the CIO. If the forward-looking organization is supporting the CIO in this endeavor then it is a huge boost, but the ball lies clearly with the CIO. 

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Enterprise Model & Modeling

The Business Model and Operating Model are at different ends of the ‘business strategy and business architecture’ development sequence.

Enterprise architect decides what concepts need to be captured in order to model a company. For example, the concepts of "process," "business unit," "strategy," "application,", etc. (meta-model) The model can be defined as a template associated with a specific subject or topic, industry, type of businesses, line of business external facing, business functions internal-facing like accounting and auditing or service delivery, etc.

• Meta-Model: It would be more effective to have a plan for what models you want to build and what you expect them to look like. That is what the meta-model provides. People who need to have any knowledge that a meta-model even exists are the senior leaders of the EA team. The point is the meta-model would tell what kinds of models and objects and relationships you need to include in your model of the company. In many cases, people rely solely on a modeling tool to define the meta-model for them and don't give it a lot of consideration. That doesn't mean the meta-model doesn't exist. 

• Business Model is a model of how the business ‘intends’ to create and deliver ‘customer value’. Central to a business model is the ‘value proposition’ which describes the ‘business value’ being offered. Organizations exist to enable one or more business models to function. A business model is a construct of value proposition, products and services, customer channels, partnerships, cost structure, revenue structure, and required capabilities.  

• Business Model vs. Operating Model: Fundamental differences – The Business Model is concerned with What, and the Operating Model with How. The Business Model and Operating Model are at different ends of the ‘business strategy and business architecture’ development sequence; business model creation is close to the start of the process, and operating model at the end of the process. The development sequence might be Value Proposition -> Business Model -> Business Strategy -> Business Architecture -> Operating Model …  

• EA Modeling vs. Process Modeling: 

(1) EA Modeling considers more dimensions than just Process Modeling. EA Modeling may consider the process dimension itself, but also technology, information, people, strategy and others, depending on the depth and breadth of EA you want to model. You must define beforehand a meta-architecture that defines how every one of these dimensions will interact and at what levels. For example, using EA you may know for a specific role, the technology he/she is using, the information he/she has access to, the process steps and the strategic KPIs associated. With a process model, you just have the information about the activity associated with a role.

(2) Business process modeling is about how workflows (activities are carried out) through the organization, the steps involved and who does what and how and what business logic/rules are used in the process. Whereas enterprise architecture models are about what the whole business landscape is, includes various aspects like Business strategy, overall governance, information system architecture, IT architecture, Governance, Capital investment planning and control etc... Now, most of EA strategies are derived from Organizational business strategy that will ensure comprehensive transformation with continuous improvement. EA modeling is usually done as part of a Strategic Planning project what systems are in place and how they interface and how they are used.

• EA (Enterprise Architecture) Model vs. BA (Business Architecture) Model:

The company model is implemented using instances of processes, business units, strategies, applications, etc, present in the EA model.

An Enterprise Architecture usually consists of: 

1)     A Business Architecture 

2)     A Data Architecture - used to support the business

3)     An Application Architecture - used to process the data 

4)     A Technology Architecture - used to deploy the applications. 

The Business Architecture part contains but is not limited to: 

1)     A Motivational model (why) 

2)     An Organizational structure model (who) 

3)     A Functional / Process model (how and when done -this is where the Business Process Modeling comes in) 

4)     A Domain model (the things such as tools, resources in the business)

5)     A Human Resource model 

6)     An external view 

7)     A geographical view (where) 

8)     A financial view 

9)     A legal view 

10) A security view

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IT vs. Marketing: Partnership or Competition?

More than conflict, collaboration and joint efforts become the order of the day.

Marketing is emerging as key drivers of IT spending in digital technologies. Is there conflict up ahead? What is your IT organization doing to keep from being marginalized on cutting edge marketing technology decisions and strategies? Is IT competing with marketing for technology talent? IT vs. Marketing: Partnership or Competition?

1.    Agility is the Key

Traditional IT values, such as standardization etc.., do not sit easily with the marketing requirement to be agile in order to leverage new initiatives. The trend of IT consumerization brings this to all enterprises, not just those with a strong marketing organization. 

• Agility Factor: It's the age-old story of to what extent IT has a deep understanding of business processes especially as they relate to marketing technology and even more, analytics. Some IT organizations are "dysfunctional" in that their traditional functions and roles don't map with many of the 21st centuries go-to-market realities. Virtually many CIOs have described their major weakness being "agility" as it pertains to cutting edge marketing technology.

•  Leverage IT in business strategy/process: Look at CxO in general; the business model for an organization is what drives the focus for each of these C-level positions. Whether the focus is finance or marketing or anything else, almost all business models today leverage information & technology in its business strategy/processes. In most cases, the CIO primary focus is to enable and support the C-level team strategy & goals while managing things like technical change, complexity, and compliance.

• CIO and CMO are “soul mates”: While companies do more than talk about business integration, there's the realization that fortunate companies have tech-savvy CMOs or marketing-savvy CIOs. And at the high-mature companies, CIO and CMO could be ‘soul mates’, it's hard to spot the strategic difference between the CMO and CIO, but each of them has his/her own T-shape focus.

2.    IT Attitude

If the Marketing team is going 'around' IT too often, ask yourself "why" and then go chat with the CMO and ask them why.

• Layout the process for communication and collecting ideas: Although IT needn’t control everything that is technology-related in order for it to be beneficial or well-managed, have a process for collecting ideas and starting relationships with vendors, and then be available when Marketing desires to move. If you don't connect regularly, Marketing will spin you out of control from a resource standpoint and if you don't help them understand what's already available and how you can respond, you'll end up with no architecture. Sustainability meets flexibility... have a process, work it, communicate, share... 

• IT has to be best positioned to satisfy the marketing need. Although marketing typically has the visibility and budget to play the independence card more often than ever. There are many factors, the most coming down to a strategic relationship with business peers, the quality of the corporate governance model, and IT agility, including the real or perceived IT skills required to support the likes of a progressive Marketing initiative. If it works, it’s great. If not, then do what's best for the organization while trying to stay involved and prepare for the next opportunity. 

• In-depth understand your executive peers. If CIOs are supposed to understand better than others about the dynamics of information technology, then they will likely be better off recognizing how dynamic and fluid roles can be given to how fast technology changes... and show leadership by being able to vary their relationships with other leaders. The high effective CIOs have the advantage of being on the cutting edge of technology as well as knowing in detail what the other ' C ' level duties and responsibilities are. 

3. Marketing Collaboration

Is marketing like the rabbit, while IT is like the tortoise? Does marketing types just see opportunity and new revenue but they tend to be oblivious to anything else? Marketing or IT, who will win the game finally?

• More than conflict, collaboration and joint efforts become the order of the day. Digital marketing needs to be owned by CMO but it cannot be run without the CIO.... For sure it is a AND, not EITHER/OR. As the customer, marketing should, in fact, control what it spends on the resource with IT providing advice, guidance and delivery. Given that marketing should have accountability for the cost/benefit of the asset, it should also have a fair amount of control. Ideally, the CIO is a partner to the CMO, helping to align cost-effective implementation options with the business strategy and governance. 

• Co-Solve the Information Jigsaw Puzzles: CMOs want facts and figures –they rarely want to know the provenance of data, lack of interest in whatsoever in the mechanics of data provision, the information life cycle from data storage, data integration to data security and governance. Therefore, the CMO may have the budget to purchase, or they may devolve the budget to the CIO who will know where best to spend it. As CIOs are in a unique position to oversee all information -Big Data, Small Data, customer data, operational data, hot data, archived data, through IT & marketing collaboration, the complete pieces of information puzzle can be solved to capture business insight and deliver high-performance result. 

Modern IT and Marketing are both competitors and partners, they should compete with speed, agility, and intelligence; but they are also complimentary business partners, to understand and manage data, capture customer insight, work collaboratively in driving business digitalization and shaping the customer-centric organization.

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Can Modeling Let the Complexity Shine through

“All models are wrong, some models are useful"   -George .E.P. Box

Model is by definition an approximation of reality - why would someone want to model reality in full detail and precision. A model is developed to help you with something - answer a question to some degree of precision that is useful or let the complexity shine through with a certain degree of insight. A model will never be perfect, but a model can still be useful if one knows what to use it for. So even highly chaotic systems can be modeled and should be modeled. Modeling serves many purposes beyond forecasting –not the least of which is to device adaptive strategies for highly chaotic environments.

Problems with Modeling: Most problems with models are that people make simplistic assumptions, sometimes fail to make these assumptions explicit or assume that future can be predicted by simply looking at past history. Users of the models don’t bother to look at assumptions, assume that they live in a linear world where everything is normally distributed and proceed to use a point prediction made by a model.

Many “soft factors” can be modeled and should be modeled to guide better decisions: When you choose not to model them, you are essentially saying that they have no impact – so it is still there in your model, but with a multiplier of 0. If soft factors are important to a problem, then a model should incorporate them – yes the results will not be very precise and you will not get a point prediction, but you are likely to have fewer errors than if you completely ignored those factors. There is a large body of work in system dynamics modeling and agent-based modeling where soft factors are routinely modeled and used for many applications. The problem with all the "soft" modeling is that when it comes to reality, and making real-time control decisions with optimization, not marketing or lab type estimates, one tends to want a "good estimate" or a more correct estimate", or a prediction that is "favorable most of the time", note that continuous reference to time, and the "fuzziness" in the colloquial sense. Eventually in the real world, if these predictions are not "safe" enough,  stuff blows up. So then you "constrain" or "limit" solutions with a safety net that is in many cases "intuitive" or "based on experience" to the point where the solution may become over-constrained or useless.

Forecast is Useful: You simply can’t model reality properly, too many permutations, unknowns, interactions, uncertainties, non-linearity, with "singularities" etc. It is true that you cannot make point predictions, but that is not the reason for doing forecasting. The point of forecasting (which implies a range of outcomes) is not to predict what precisely will happen, but to help you make decisions and take actions today. Point predictions are wrong, but forecasts can be useful. The principles to do modeling:

• Ignore soft factors in models at your own peril. 
• Job of models are not prediction or perfection; it is to guide actions today. 
• It is possible to model very complex system behavior via very simple components
• Understanding the limitations of each model you use is, therefore, the key. Using models without understanding their limitations exposes you to big surprises.

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Where are the Focal Point to Brand IT Effectively

IT brand identity should be supported by the message you create and distribute to your customers.

Most of IT organizations today are still being portrayed as the back-office cost center, to re-in-imagine IT, IT branding needs to be part of IT transformation effort, and IT branding strategy should be an integral part of IT strategy. Your brand identity will be the face you put on your IT organization and it flows from your brand strategy. IT brand identity should be supported by the message you create and distribute to your customers. After you have your IT brand strategy and your IT brand identity in place, you can actually market the IT brand inside the enterprise. There are three focal points in IT branding that needs to be focused on:

1  Self-Reflection

Take a critical look at IT, you need to be honest with yourself about assessing the strengths and weaknesses of IT organization. Then you should validate your observations by seeking input from your customers. The customer experience should reinforce the IT Branding efforts. If your branding efforts and the customer experience don’t match up, your branding efforts will be wasted.

• Customer satisfaction surveys: So you need to do frequent Customer Satisfaction Surveys on the IT services offerings and know your strengths and weakness from customer view. The survey results are also used (in part) to craft a vision/mission and values statement. In turn, these statements (were framed and displayed on the wall) and effectively communicated (on a global basis) using an assortment of avenues. In short, IT should be held accountable to the user community 

• Internal Surveys: Broadly craft an internal survey and provide it to all IT Services staff. Identify a list of core values that we all shared in common. It is okay to not sign the survey and remain anonymous, but encourage all staff to participate and provide input. 

• Information grid: Create a comprehensive list of the IT organization’s strengths, weaknesses, goals, and objectives based on self-evaluation and survey result. Map the information into an information grid. This grid will serve as the reality check for your IT brand strategy. Your goals and objectives will be your drivers. Your strengths and weaknesses will be your constraints So IT branding turns to be an element of IT organization’s Strategy. 

2. Communication with Stakeholders

Line up all the different communication channels through which you can deliver the key IT messages (one-on-one conversations, a newsletter, a boardroom presentation, a town hall meeting, hand-outs for a training session, etc.). IT needs to communicate with all different stakeholders, for each segment, make note of how they think and act today with regard to IT services, and how you want them to think and act tomorrow

• First, analyze your customer base, and identify the major ‘segments’ you serve. Consumers of your services – your ‘end users.’  

• Executives, the senior managers who sponsor the work you do, fund your projects and make decisions that affect your strategy  

• Employees, the people who make the operation work and who deliver your projects or transactional services  

• Key suppliers or external partners, especially upon how to build long-term partner relationships.   

Identify the key messages you want to convey to each of these different stakeholder groups. This is your brand – the team identity you want people to retain -- so it is urgent to know exactly what image you intend to convey. 

3. IT Branding Methodology & Mechanism

Step three essentially consists of combining what you learned in steps one and two to create a comprehensive list of the IT organization’s strengths, weaknesses, goals, and objectives. For successful IT branding, basically, you are asking yourself: What are we trying to accomplish? Are we on the right path? What do we aspire to achieve? Is “what we look” consistent with “who we are”? Create metrics for the delivery of these key messages, put them in the objectives of IT managers and start tracking them in the staff meetings.

• There should always have substance behind branding message: Some CIOs are looking at the idea of creating logos and slogans not only to convey who IT is and what it can offer but also to ensure that business clients won't forget it. The key is: Branding and internal marketing campaigns cannot be just puffery or publicity. If there’s no substance behind your key messages – if you cannot actually deliver the services you’re supposed to deliver – there’s no point in starting. Branding is also not something that takes time away from the fundamentals of operations, execution, and management. It is instead a methodology, a different way of looking at how you do these things.  

• Set up an IT Governance council structure. Set up sub-groups made up of users with an IT person chairing it. Have an Executive oversight team made up of IT leaders and the leaders of your company, set priorities, look at things like IT budget, maintenance costs, new software available., etc 

• Toning the structure of IT into a (flat) team-oriented organization to deliver the services mapping the branding message (1) Client Services, (2) Solutions Services, and (3) Operational Services, etc. Identify the brand with quality and accountability. And again, communicated this to the user community.  

• Multiple branding/communication channels, such as IT weekly/monthly newsletter; brown-bag lunch IT seminar, demo., etc. to talk about a new software project, or PC roll-out, or anything else that is important to the business users and IT, with Q&A.  

There are best practices and next practices to create and reinforce IT brand, to promote innovation and create new knowledge streams. The true value is created at the intersection of many disciplines. The business goal of IT branding is to have all (if possible) audiences at every level of enterprise weighed-in with delight. And don’t forget to train the IT staff, they are the brand ambassadors.

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Process Improvement vs. Process Innovation: Can you get both?

Improvement + eureka = innovation

BPM is at many organizations’ agenda these days, from sowing the innovation seeds to reaping the low hanging fruit; from process automation to optimization. However, there have been concerns that focus on business process management and process efficiencies may stifle innovation, is it true? Process improvement & process innovation, is it possible to increase both simultaneously?

• There has to be some degree of coexistence between innovation and incremental improvements. However, the business environment is the decisive factor. In a relatively stable environment, too much process innovation will unnecessarily overthrow established and efficient processes and lead to a "renewal trap". On the other hand, in a highly dynamic environment, too much focus on efficiency and continuous improvements leads to a "competency trap" and the organization lacks responsiveness to changes in the market. And how to manage process improvement and innovation would also depend on the type of industry and regulations etc.  

• Always embed process management before starting to implement the process innovation. The system of processes must always be stabilized before step changes are made. The results of changing a "chaotic" system are unpredictable and more importantly, you will not get engagement from the people who have to implement the processes. 

• The organizational culture encourages and defines the mix of process improvement and game-changing innovations. The leadership and culture are a huge part of BPM and basically decide the success or failure of BPM in an organization. While innovation and standardization can sometimes be at odds, if the leadership in a company is such that they are striving to create a culture that constantly looks for ways to improve, then small innovative ideas will be plentiful. The organizations that have an inherent culture of process improvement get BPM right and it becomes a way of life there. On the other hand, some companies did one project in BPM and that was it. There was no further adoption, . for them, BPM was just a new application development platform. 

• Improvement + eureka = innovation: The mindsets and skill sets required are different.
  Improvement is achieved by in-the-box thinking, innovation is the result of out-of-the-box (or more precisely shaping the new box) thinking. To put in other words, to think innovation you may have to rise up to the top level or even at the business strategy level to make a difference. The improvements in the process, which are often times small changes to lower levels of the process, will improve the process without disrupting it. The two are related and co-exist when innovation is present. 

• There must be some governance to manage process changes whether they are incremental changes or a significant shift. That governance can define what the ‘stable state’ is; then you can either take the next step towards improvement or decide that you have reached the plateau and need to think out-of-the-box. The process of process management is quite different from the process of process innovation. 

Process improvement should happen at the business’s daily life, while innovations are those aha moments if the organization has a diverse mindset, inclusive leadership team and culture of innovation, with well-set governance discipline,  it may increase both, process improvement and process innovation simultaneously.

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Seven IT Leadership Principles

Lead, don't just manage!

1. Lead, don't just manage! Management is about execution while leadership is about change, specifically influencing others to change. Leading through influence is critical. 
   
   
2. First People – Then Process – Then Technology in that order. Develop and nurture a high-performing IT team.. Strive to be leaner and more business-focused. 
   
   
3. Create a vision for how IT will build or support company success: If IT function does not go beyond mere order-taking, it's not adding value. High mature IT will drive business growth.

4. Listen, listen, listen and listen some more. IT folks need to listen more. IT is first and foremost about serving the customer. Develop an IT culture of customer service. Communicate IT performance in business-relevant language. IT resources have to be focused on providing excellent customer services and customer expectations need to be clearly understood and monitored regularly. 
   
   
5. Never stop managing IT risks. Foster a governance process to ensure key stakeholders have input into planning, allocation, and commitment of resources. CIOs must understand the fundamentals of the environment and engage key decision makers and stakeholders on their terms. 
   
   
6. Educate, integrate and engage the business on what the IT team is and will be doing: Never abdicate your responsibility for your company’s technology - it's amazing how many business folks don't have a clue about IT.

7. Measure IT in business terms: "Do not just measure the cost of IT but all the return that it provides." Companies that invest heavily in IT should be careful at analyzing the costs associated with this investment as the savings are often buried within the operational side of the business.

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CIO as Strategist: Practice Capability-Based Strategy

The capability-based strategy is to well bridge ‘as-is’ and "to-be" state.

CIO as IT leader needs to spend significant time in strategic planning, IT strategy is an integral element of corporate strategy, but how to make a sustainable and implemental strategy is more science than art, it takes clear business vision and solid business/IT capabilities as well. Is it time to practice capability-based strategy? 

Capability maturity is a differentiator: A business capability is a specific ordering of Processes, People, Resources, Information, and Technology aimed at creating a defined business outcome; capabilities are often developed reactively to competitive threats, strategic opportunities, and environmental changes, so all businesses have certain capabilities, what matters is maturity, the high-mature set of business capabilities can make organizations more adaptable and agile, to fulfill their strategy.

Create the mapping between capability and strategy: CIOs and executive teams must have a clear understanding of the link between IT capabilities and business strategies, in order to capture the potential value of their IT investments. Prepare strategic plan points the company in a direction where it can maximize its market position and reap as many benefits as possible. This direction must allow for economic, market or customer change and let business adapt swiftly. EA can be taken as a mapping tool in providing the visibility and defining the roadmap for strategic alignment. EA is also a discipline that helps organizations define and deliver IT capabilities aligned with their strategic objectives. It is a process of progressively elaborating a set of capabilities through conceptual, logical and physical states, informing decision-making at multiple levels, and helping to maximize the business value of IT.

The capability-based strategy is to well bridge ‘as-is’ and "to-be" state: It's about breaking down the business capability blocks, there are skills (ability), knowledge (internal/external), policies/routines, business processes, any type of tangible/intangible resources, culture and forms of communications. The capability-based strategy is not only leading to a destination but also cultivating and optimizing the set of mature enterprise capabilities on the way proactively. A good strategic planning helps organizations extract the maximum value from their portfolio of IT capabilities by their ability to inform decision-making at multiple levels, and to drive strategic alignment and optimization.

Modular business capabilities enable agile & flexible strategic planning and execution:  Alternatives and adaptation are the keywords to survival. You know where you come from but you may never sure where you’ll arrive precisely, so be well prepared for surprises! Most of the enterprise capabilities need to be woven cross-functionally, it takes cohesive collaboration for business as a whole, and thus, making capability-based strategy should also take a collective effort, to break through the silo thinking.

Use the capability-based plan to drive budgets and prioritization: It helps those stakeholders to articulate what they need in their natural language (and not be hung up about methodologies). This will get reluctant stakeholders to want to contribute in the next iteration, and gives IT enough time to develop good strategies to deliver them.

As capability is an acquired and organized "ability" within a company and takes hard work to put in place, it can therefore not be transferred because of the degree of organizational learning and organization that goes with it, so the capability-based strategy should be practical to implement, also unique to keep competitive, it’s the good approach in strategic planning.

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CIO as Chief Interface Officer: How to Delight Customers

CIO as a Chief Interface Officer means to create passionate customers, also engage productive workforces through intuitive user experience and seamless processes.

CIOs are getting involved in building products for external/internal customers, but unfortunately, creating great user experiences continues to be a struggle. “UX — short for User Experience — refers to the experience a given user has when using a piece of software or technology, rather than the purely technical capacities of that device.” As customers' loyalty depends in large part on how they feel about your digital product or channel. CIO as ‘Chief Interface Officer,” what’s your strategy and tactics in building up superior development teams, so you can deliver the innovative apps, to delight customer via an intuitive interface and optimal processes? 

1.    Understanding is a Lot of Listening 

 Understanding is a lot of listening, being able to see beyond a paradigm in which a person or process is stuck ... seeing the 'what's possible' based upon an understanding of people, their work, their context and options variables (technical, financial, schedule, political ...). The best thing is to understand...

• User feedback: How is the end user going to use your solution? Does the new solution help the user to do the things better than the current solution or the user all together has to change the way he/she performs his/her tasks by using this new system? 

•  Design review: Is the new solution providing new features but is involving more complexity? Or the new solution is improving the efficiency of old solution without adding complexity? Is it the teamwork to design the great UI based on well-defined principles or do you have to count on the individual talented UI designers to convey the art? There are techniques that anyone can study but actually using them on a real project is still a challenge for many people. 

2.    The Characteristics of Well-Designed UX 

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication; elegant simplicity in the UI is hard to design. The well-designed UX has the following characteristics:

• Less is More: A strategically oriented UX designer is a complex problem-solver who can blend business objectives, technology capabilities and a rich understanding of users into innovative and compelling digital products and services. The user should never, ever have to stop to think about how to do something. It must be natural and intuitive.

• Consistency: A major part of creating a UX that is natural and intuitive is to make common system controls consistent throughout the operation. Good UI starts by first finding the simple underlying patterns that make up the work to be done in an application. The user interface (UI) is the overall design that shows how the different parts of a system work and how they fit together cohesively. If you don’t have a UI that people understand and like you are setting the project up for failure.

• Intuition + Evidence-Based design: the best way for IT/technology to help win customers’ heart is to make most of IT/technology "invisible" to the customer. In other words, hide the complexity of IT/technology infrastructure & operations. What is left visible to the customer should be simple, intuitive, secure, reliable and predictable (websites, mobile solutions etc.)? This requires a cross-functional customer-centric paradigm for managing and operating IT/technology.

3.  UX is BPM Entity

There are two different entities in any classical BPM implementation - User Interface and Process Redesign. One way to bridge the gap is to involve customers at the core of any redesigned process. The more the ease a user feels being a part of the process the lesser the gap between the two.

• Maintain a focus on the design from the user’s perspective. Whether business process or user interfaces... what is important is improving the user experience. Process design and interface design integrate at the user... Simplify the user experience; add flexibility and the designs will align innovatively. The innovative designs involve radically different ways of rethinking their processes. 

• A better-interconnected user interface. The true BPM solution is where the process layer changes as per the needs of the organizations. The user interface remains transparent to the changes in the process layer. It's also important to give the user the ability to interact with the process wherever they are. 

• Re-interface: Create new interfaces between the application and the user to allow the user to take advantage of the application features while operating in a cloud environment. This is often done through the use of web services. To develop your application with the cloud in mind. And most probably you will want that application to interface with the user through a variety of form factors, put effort to integrate processes with multiple smart devices, to make technical capacities more powerful but less expensive. 

• From IT perspective: What is a particularly interesting adjunct to UX brainstorming is how the line between software and hardware is disappearing and how good UI must consider both. While this sounds simple, it is not when you start considering all of the elements involved...everything from the microprocessor to the supporting code to the way the end-user interacts with the device (touch, voice, keypad, ?). There are also the elements of skills to consider. Hardware types generally do not think the same as software types who generally do not think the same as analysts....add in the complexities of open source code, and life becomes exciting. 

CIO as a Chief Interface Officer, his/her IT team can create passionate customers, also engage productive workforces through intuitive user experience and seamless processes.

Read More about magic "I" in CIOs:
CIO as Chief Interaction Officer

CIO as Chief Inspiration Officer

CIO as Chief Improvement Officer

CIO as Chief Improvement Officer II

CIO as Chief Improvement Officer III

CIO as Chief Insight Officer

CIO as Chief Influence Officer

CIO as Chief Innovation Officer

CIO as Chief Intrapreneur Officer

CIO as Chief Integration Officer

CIO as Chief Intelligence Officer

CIO as Chief Information Officer

CIO as Chief Investigation Officer

CIO as Chief Investment Officer

CIO as Chief Interpretation Officer

CIO as Chief Inclusiveness Officer

CIO as Chief Interface Officer

CIO as Change Agent

CIO as Governance Champion

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