Chief Information Officer (CIO) sans Chief Utilities Officer

A couple of weeks back I had joined a discussion with a few senior business strategy consultants. Our discussion veered in the direction of the role of CIO. I got a sense that several strategy consultants still think that the role of the CIO is to manage thousands of laptops and desktops spread across the enterprise. Nothing could be farther from truth.

If CIO's job were to be managing desktops, enterprises would have to hire a Chief Power Supply Officer and possibly a Chief Water Supply Officer too. Well, electricity and water are as ubiquitous across the modern enterprises as desktops.

It is surprising that even the best and brightest of strategy consultants from top firms think of a CIO as a Chief Utilities Officer. Agreed, that to a certain extent the fault lies with the CIOs that they have not been able to guarantee business applications availability, which will be at par with the availability of utilities. Why? The reasons are not far to seek. Many CIOs are so gullible that they are taken in by the hype created by technology vendors that technology renewal cycles of less than a year will give them "competitive advantage" or "reduce costs" and bring in operational efficiencies. Investment in people and processes lags investment in technology. Each technology vendor spends countless hours preparing models that show that their newest versions of technology will either require lower level of skills or lower number of people. More time is spent by the sales team on preparing these models and other marketing collateral than on fixing the technology bugs, which can always be fixed in the next technology refresh cycle. Strategy consultants and CIOs are impressed by these quantitative models and a new cycle of destabilization begins.

Businesses need CIOs not Chief Utilities Officers. If tens of thousands of desktops or laptops have to be managed, there are several desktop and laptop vendors to choose from. Dell, IBM, HP are just some of the big ones. They provide IT utility services. Similarly, same vendors or a different set of vendora can provide IT utility infrastructure services. In addition, there are co-location services, if you don't want to have a 100% outsourcing of data centers.

In addition, I believe there is some confusion about scalability. Let me use the same analogy. No one talks about how electricity supply will be scaled for millions of users. The issues of scalability of IT services has already been resolved in a proven manner. Though, rarely anyone stops CIOs from reinventing the wheel. No doubt that scalability is the most important part of the services but establishment of scalability of technology from a purely "technology" point of view is at least one level below the level of the CIO. Therefore, when strategy consultants say that issue of management of thousands of desktops is one of scalability, they are confusing business scalability with technology scalability.

In fact, my strategy consultant friends are going to be confused that now CIOs are going to compete with them. But that is correct, the right role of CIO is to coordinate aggressively with business partners to design and execute business strategy, establish a quantitative culture of facts-driven decision making by providing high-quality data and metrics for strategic decisions and make sure that the investment in people and processes does not lag behind investments in technology.