Did you know that the venerable Booz Allen & Hamilton has truncated its
name to "booz&co."? Not
only abandoning a name with tremendous recognition and brand equity but, in
a "what were they thinking!?" blunder,
shining a spotlight on the unfortunate bibulous associations of the name "Booz." Did
they engage a management consultant before pulling off this stunt? They’re
not talking.
But that’s not what today’s column is about.
It’s about their article, The
Practical Visionary, which covers one
of the great unsung heros of 21st Century business: The CIO. Although
I’ve written some about IT and its separated-at-birth sibling, Knowledge Management,
the importance of it cannot be overestimated and it’s worth recurring to some
of the key learnings we now have about IT and the CIO function in general.
Doubt
the importance of technology? Earlier this week I had the opportunity
to ask the Chairman of an AmLaw 30 firm what had surprised him most during
his 20 years of practicing and his answer was: Technology, and how it
had transformed the practice to an unrecognizable and unimaginable degree.
Shall we jump to the conclusion?
"The strategic CIO has never been more important to the future of the organization.
As operations and markets become more fragmented, there is an ever-greater
need for IT to bind together a company and augment its collective intellect
(to paraphrase computer interface pioneer Douglas Engelbart). IT can be used
to address problems of mounting complexity and to help an organization
move into new products, new processes, and new markets, at home and around
the world."
What precisely does this mean?
In May 2003, Harvard Business Review editor at large Nicholas Carr "ignited
a firestorm" with an article titled, "Why IT Doesn’t Matter." This
prompted a rejoinder in August
2003 , and led Carr to turn his article into the 2004 book, Does IT Matter?,
which, incidentally, was a core assignment to the class when I taught "Strategic
Technology & Innovation" at SUNY/Stony Brook’s executive MBA program for law
school leaders last year.
Carr’s argument is not precisely that IT doesn’t matter; it’s that IT has
become a commodity, available to all, and therefore incapable of providing
lasting, meaningful competitive advantage. “What makes a resource
truly strategic,” wrote Carr, “is not ubiquity but scarcity.” He employs the analogies of
the railroads and electricity as earlier technologies that seemed revolutionary
at the time but became utterly commonplace utilities.
Many have been the critiques of Carr’s argument, but two strike me as particular
bulls-eye strikes:
- Previous technological revolutions were rooted in the physical world. Trains
may have speeded up from 20 mph to 80 mph over 40 years, and the continent-wide
build-out of the track network may have been accomplished, but Moore’s Law
shows no sign of abating. Over a comparable 40 year period, the
computational power per $1.00 spent on IT has not quadrupled but has increased
by a factor of 10 to the 7th power, or 10-million times. Your
BlackBerry has more
processing power than the Apollo lunar landing craft (and your BlackBerry
will be obsolete in 18 months or less). - Far more important, but also stemming from the rootedness of prior revolutions
in the physical world: The only limits to the IT revolution are limits
of the human imagination. Which is to say, no limits at all. Who,
15 years ago, would have envisioned the Internet? And once the Internet
arrived, who could envision eBay, YouTube, Google, Facebook, wikis—or
for that matter and keeping it within the family, the global readership community
of "Adam
Smith, Esq."?
Swimming in the water of IT, as it were, we may become forgetful of how profoundly
it has changed our lives and our careers, but every once in awhile you realize
the power of its achievements so far. I experienced one of those micro-epiphanies
two weeks ago standing in the checkout line in a store on the Upper West Side
where I downloaded on my BlackBerry near real-time pictures being returned
by the Phoenix
Mars Lander of the Arctic Plain of Mars. Think of
the enormous chain of interlocking and coordinating IT assets, hardware and
software, involved in bringing me those 2" square images—and until
I took a moment to reflect on it, I took it utterly for granted, as unremarkable
as expecting my watch to actually keep time.
But back to CIO’s.
There’s a baseline requirement you need to meet, and after that there’s a
strategic opportunity. The baseline is the obvious: To keep the
proverbial trains running on time. Depending on the infrastructure you
have to work with, that may be a challenge requiring months or years to meet. The
story is recounted of Michael Gliedman arriving at the headquarters of the
NBA in 1999 as the brand-new CIO, finding a silo’d IT environment with "isolated
pockets everywhere." It took him 18 months to bring everything together
and ensuring the core technology requirements worked reliably and efficiently.
Only
then could he embark on his real job: Making a strategic difference to
the NBA. “There’s no way anybody in the business is going
to take you seriously if it’s taking your guys 20 minutes to answer the
help-desk phone,” he says. But now he:
"… is the model 21st-century CIO. These days he is training his focus
on the demand side of the IT business equation, where the needs of the business
are paramount, rather than spending most of his time on such typical supply-side
concerns as cutting IT costs — although these responsibilities are still
very important. He has become a serious contributor to the league’s business
results by harnessing powerful new technologies that make real-time information
attractive and accessible both internally and to the NBA’s constituents
and fans around the world. That’s why he — like any other truly
strategic CIO — needs to be among the inner circle of senior leadership."
Gliedman—and his fellow senior leaders of the NBA—now views his
job as deploying technologies that will support the League’s three key strategic
goals: Boosting international interest, building the female fan base,
and increasing the audience overall. As markets and operations become
more global and fragmented, the role of IT in binding a firm together has never
been more important. And in a way this is "back to the future:"
"In [supporting the strategic direction of their firms, CIO’s] will bring
back one of the almost-forgotten aspects of the personal computer revolution
of the 1980s: It made work more engaging by making people more powerful.
That shift turned out to have enormous strategic value. Word processors allowed
people to pull their thoughts together, revise, and bring in new ideas iteratively,
without having to retype each time. Electronic spreadsheets spawned thousands
of “what
if” scenarios
that made business options clearer and eliminated the need for painstaking
calculations conducted on paper by roomfuls of clerical staff. Databases
provided the means to store and analyze huge amounts of data, providing insight
into the supply chain, customers, and more at an unprecedented level of detail.
E-mail made it possible to connect with many more people quickly. And the
presentation program, though much derided, has been a vital tool for helping
people convene teams and organize ideas. The resulting boom in productivity
in the developed world has yet to slacken. Another result was an increase
in scope: Organizations could do much more, with much less, than they could
in the past. Without IT, as it soon came to be called, globalization would
not be possible."But by the mid-1990s, that sense of liberation had turned to a sense of
being shackled by the tools themselves. E-mail became a source of spam and
irrelevancies, and took more and more time to tend. Word-processing software
led to unnecessary revisions and overwritten documents. PowerPoint was actually
banned at some companies."
So today the goal is not to be guided by the vision of the desktop PC but
to embrace the range of Web 2.0 technologies—social networking software
in general, which enables people to collaborate at a distance. Because,
after all, what do lawyers do? They collaborate. And in today’s
economy, they are almost surely collaborating "at a distance"—in
space or in time or both.
Don’t underestimate the challenge:
"Given the degree to which IT has infiltrated every aspect of large enterprises,
strategic CIOs must be able to speak a wide variety of corporate languages — operations,
finance, manufacturing, marketing, sales — and to work with top executives,
including the CEO, COO, and CFO; the heads of procurement and HR; and the leaders
of individual business units. That demands an unusually broad set of business
and communication skills, a combination not often associated with “techies.”"
Gratefully, there are some guidelines:
- Start fast. Don’t be an "order taker," but give people tools you
know will help them without waiting for them to ask. - Be a capable executive in your own right. Easier said than done,
perhaps, but realize that decisiveness and effectiveness in project management
will go a long way towards earning your peers’ respect. Make sure your
staff understands your vision of what IT is all about. - Once you have management’s respect, don’t ask for permission. Move
forward freely on initiatives you’ve earned the right to handle. - Keep looking ahead. No one else in the firm is responsible for peering
out five or ten years to envision what new technology coming down the pike
might—when it "grows up"—fit into your firm’s strategic
direction.
What do I mean by "keep looking ahead," probably the most important part of
your job?
I mean this: Brainstorm out loud with your lawyers about what they could
use to do their work better. They don’t know what’s possible and you
don’t know what they need, but together, all of you can, if you’re candid and
imaginative, come up with applications that are truly useful.
One of my favorite examples is what I call "caller ID on steroids." Now,
caller ID is an antique and timeworn technology, and one well-understood by
the most Paleolithic among us. But imagine putting it to new and inventive
purposes. One firm I know of is working on a project that would do this:
- Instantly examine the "caller ID" info when a lawyer’s phone rings;
- Match it against the known phone numbers of the firm’s clients;
- If there’s a match, "grab" the lawyer’s computer screen to display not
just the name, title, and company of the person who’s calling, but also pull
up a list of most active matters for that client, responsible attorneys on
each matter, and Reuters newsfeeds about the company (all with hot clickable
links, of course).
Think there’s nothing new under the IT sun? Think again. It is
not, with apologies to Nicholas Carr, a commodity. It is limited only
by your imaginations.
And good luck, because the challenges of deploying IT to support and turbocharge
your firm’s strategic direction are only going to become more intense, and
accelerate. Just imagine what a BlackBerry from 2018 will be able to
do.
