I’ve been following the CIO 100 awards for several years—they’re just out—and I’ve never seen so many law firms represented as this year. To wit:
What are the "CIO 100?" They are the most innovative and effective CIO’s, who have had the greatest positive impact on their organizations. According to the press release:
“The 2007 CIO 100 award recipients serve as industry role models for business and IT excellence,†said Abbie Lundberg, editor in chief of CIO magazine. “This year’s winners demonstrate extraordinary results in a variety of important areas, including business transformation, collaboration, customer innovation and top line contributions.â€
I cite this rather remarkable showing by law firm CIO’s—snagging 5 of the 100 slots, while law firms represent nowhere near 5% of GDP—for two reasons: First, it’s a truism to say that ours is a knowledge business, but even truisms are occasionally correct. If we’re a knowledge business, we are therefore, in the 21st Century, an IT business.
Second, we too little appreciate how extraordinarily hard it is for IT to have a meaningful—and creative, differentiating —impact on how we get our jobs done. Inventing new technological tools—word processing, BlackBerry’s—is actually the easy part. Figuring out how to use them to transform the way we accomplish what we need to do is the hard part.
Lest you doubt the time-lag between technological invention and its having an actual impact on productivity, consider the following lesson from this week’s "Undercover Economist" column from The Financial Times (a must-read, by the way). The columnist is Tim Harford, author of the eponymous book, The Undercover Economist, who deserves the success that Freakonomics has scored, and then some.
"Electric light bulbs were available by 1879, and there were generating stations in New York and London by 1881. Yet a thoughtful observer in 1900 would have found little evidence that the â€electricity revolution†was making business more efficient.
"Steam-powered manufacturing had linked an entire production line to a single huge steam engine. As a result, factories were stacked on many floors around the central engine, with drive belts all running at the same speed. The flow of work around the factory was governed by the need to put certain machines close to the steam engine, rather than the logic of moving the product from one machine to the next. When electric dynamos were first introduced, the steam engine would be ripped out and the dynamo would replace it. Productivity barely improved.
"Eventually, businesses figured out that factories could be completely redesigned on a single floor; production lines were arranged to enable the smooth flow of materials around the factory. Most importantly, each worker could have his or her own little electric motor, starting it or stopping it at will. The improvements weren’t just architectural but social: once the technology allowed workers to make more decisions, they needed more training and different contracts to encourage them to take responsibility."
The lessons are two-fold, I think.
First, getting IT right is a lot harder than it looks. Have vision, but also have patience.
Second, understand that it’s not only, or even primarily, about IT. It’s about culture, and transforming the way we work. All IT can do is open the door. But if we can’t see our way past the massive steam engine model, we’re wasting our time to replace it with an electric dynamo.
"Think different?" Indeed. At least five of our CIO brethren seem to be doing just that.
