CIO’s need to change the culture

As CIO’s we many of us have been focused on getting ourselves embedded or fused with the business. Business Relationship Managers have helped a lot. We need to go beyond that now. We have to empower our business partners to be successful with us and not in spite of us. We are leaders of a new technology culture. We are now business technologist. We are now business strategists. We need to be seen as business people not IT geeks. Now that is great but not easy. But it is the challenge. We can do it. We need to change the culture and that is our culture, not the business culture.

We are leading a transformation of our traditional IT culture. It nothing less than the old IT’s future. Change or become irrelevant. Seriously. That is the choice I think.

So what do we do about things like technology providers, security, compliance, and risk. Will the business allow us to ignore this? Certainly not at the corporate level. The Audit Committee and Board will replace us if we do. It seems that as we continue to enable technology in the business unit itself, we are responsible for collaborating with the business to embed oversight of providers, security, compliance, and risk through our ability to influence the business, not control the business. We need to learn new skills to do that. And, we can.

There is the traditional IT stack for infrastructure and enterprise applications. The new business technology is focused on being agile. Business is moving fast and agile technology supports that. Traditional IT practices don’t. The new business employees are used to being able to get technology on their own. Gmail, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Skype all can be used by the new employee with traditional IT. These are all user solutions not corporate IT solutions but they work very well. We must be open about their use and support them. Employees don’t need us to use them.

That’s my take, what’s yours?