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The Proliferating Hats of the CIO

Unified Communications, the cloud, consumerization, and so many other factors are changing the role of the CIO. The CIO was created about 30 years ago as a CEO direct report, as a result of the increasing costs, complexities, and opportunities associated with information technology. Over the decades the CIO's role has shifted in response to both an organization’s specific requirements and the technology objectives (or trends) of the period.

The CIO is generally chartered to align, manage, and contain the organization's information technology (IT). The CIO always wore different hats, some hats more than others depending on the current needs and priorities of an organization. For example, during the '90s, many CIOs focused on cost containment and elimination of surprises (both financial and technical). Around 2000, the role expanded beyond the corporate walls as organizations discovered the Internet. The CIO became focused on email, e-business, the web, security, cross-corporate data exchanges (customers, partners, suppliers), and the ensuing best practices and policies these changes required. During the past decade, VoIP brought telephony and real time communications into the fold. Even more recently, CIOs find themselves dealing with social networks, the cloud, collaboration, and consumerization.

But the position is really less about technology itself and more about how it applies to an organization’s needs. For decades, in their effort to control costs, CIOs developed a reputation for "No!" Variation increased complexity and support costs, so the typical response to new technologies and ideas was no. No to Macs, no to non-standard software, no to remote or home equipment and access, etc. Enter the cloud. Line of business managers, armed with only a credit card, could suddenly implement "pilot" IT projects (as a service) on their own. Look ma, no IT (consent). The cloud also brought with it a new transparency in pricing.

Adding insult to injury, the past recession forced general budget cuts. Everyone has to do more with less. Thanks to mobile networks, smartphones, and broadband networks--more became possible for users to do while mobile. Users started to demand, even insist on, more freedom from IT policies and technologies. Employees and departments are implementing various consumer services such as iPhones, Skype, even CRMs like SalesForce.com on their own accord--effectively smuggled into the enterprise.

The result is that the current role of the CIO is far broader than before. Introducing the CIIIIIO. In HBR, R. Wang identifies four personas--or interpretations of what the I in CIO represents: Chief Infrastructure/Integration/Innovation/Intelligence Officer. I added "Investment" to the list. The following is a look at how these roles specifically relate to the communications aspect of the role.

Chief Infrastructure Officer
Real time communications, on-premise or hosted, requires a reasonable amount of infrastructure such as power over Ethernet (POE), routers, switches, often wireless. Even off-site infrastructure is relevant in the forms of APIs and scalability. Communications infrastructure decisions have strategic ramifications.

* A strategy around virtualization impacts more than hardware costs, but scalability and disaster recovery planning too. In the past year, real-time communication solutions entered the virtualization world, offering organizations the path to a single comprehensive approach for voice and data capacity and recovery. * Remote work requires a solution for mobile voice technology as well as workflow processes that are optimized for a distributed workforce. This includes technologies such as e-forms and collaboration tools (audio and video conferencing, presence, desktop sharing, etc.).

* A fairly significant opportunity and trend is to displace branch office phone systems with survivable gateways that enable organizational feature consistency and the centralization of communications resources and administration.

* An increase in mobility applications and devices puts more emphasis on a quality wireless infrastructure.

Chief Integration Officer
First there was voice, then came voice applications--Interactive voice response systems, call recording, speech recognition, etc. But now, rather than make more voice applications, the tools exist to integrate other applications with communications.

* Voice technologies such as VxML, DTMF, and SS7 are esoteric and typically limited to a small set of telephony engineers.

* Most UC solutions today offer a variety of APIs and SDKs that use mainstream programming techniques to integrate voice and communications in general into business processes.

* It means instead of alarms or error codes, a call can be generated or a text can be sent. Integrating across systems means customers can be notified of specific milestones or thresholds such as shipping status or low inventory.

* Business case examples are extensive with impressive ROIs. Organizations can respond faster and smarter with communications enabled business processes (CEBP) that marry once separate domains of workflow and communications.

* Off-the-shelf solutions are still rare due to differences in requirements, systems used, and tools, but the hooks, APIs, and SDKs are getting richer.

* Interfaces between legacy systems and more modern cloud and mobile solutions.

Chief Innovation Officer
IT may like to think it is innovative, but realistically that bar is pretty high and hard to meet these days. The CIO's performance is historically evaluated with operational, project oriented, and financial metrics--not innovation. However, alternatives to IT, via various cloud services, introduce an element of competition: on price, service, and innovation. Organizations want IT to deliver centralized support, security, and retention/recovery practices, but don't want to compromise on innovation. That means the CIO now has to keep up with the new services and ideas of the Internet at large as well as the requirements and drivers of various parts of the business. This requires a high degree of flexibility and responsiveness.

* Mobility is "in" and the infrastructure to support mobility without compromising support or security can be challenging--FMC, hot-desking, collaboration tools. etc.

* With innovation comes responsibility and subsequently new policies; dress codes for home based workers using video, data ownership on personal devices, etc.

* BYO-Device can lower costs and increase satisfaction but requires a reasonable amount of infrastructure to ensure data protection and control.

* IT organizations tend to be vertical--in-depth knowledge from databases to devices, but innovation requires horizontal know-how to identify technology opportunities in various lines of business.

Chief Intelligence Officer
The CIO needs to harness IT to identify valuable analytic information.

* Who is visiting the website? which pages? when? what relevant demographic information provides details about prospects, customers, and marketing campaigns?

* Take the notion of data mining internal databases to external data sources.

* What are people saying about company products, brands, and/or the company itself--particularly on social media.

* Can social media identify prospects?

* Who "Likes" what? Is the "Like" button on the right content?

* Is an internal intranet effective to manage and distribute communications? Internal social tools? Wikis? Blogs?

Chief Investment Officer
The cloud represents new technical capabilities as well as new financial realities. Most cloud services tout CAPEX savings as a benefit, but capex vs. expense decisions are complex, potentially impacting taxes, bonuses, and even the company stock price.

* Microsoft, Adobe, and others are rapidly moving toward subscription based models.

* Hosted services including UC, CRM and other monthly service plans are generally recognized as expense dollars--thus cannot be (easily) capitalized.

* Tax incentives such as The Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 (H.R. 4853) offer tax relief through accelerated depreciation on capital purchases (as an incentive to buy capital equipment) which are more difficult to apply to service models.

Summary
That is a lot of hats. Perhaps too many for one person, but the option of delegation does exist. The key point is to be sure that the roles are all covered. The CIO role is less and less about technology, and arguably never was. It's about people, and how organizations get work done--effectively and productively.

The technology pace has never been faster. The iPad is only about a year old, yet tablet computing has become a top priority. Social networks are displacing email as a means of communication. IT, and specifically the CIO, must continually adapt as the technical expectations and capabilities shift. The opportunities to leverage IT to drive organizational transformation have never been greater.