What makes for good IT leadership? It's a bit like asking what's
the meaning of life. The simple answers never satisfy, and the
complex ones are, well, often too complex and personal to apply
generally. But there are elements of collaboration, open thinking,
technical understanding, and lots of personal energy and drive that
seem to be a part of a successful CIO's makeup. It's more than just
good ideas; it's the ability to sell them to C-level colleagues,
along with having their trust that you'll deliver.
This point was re-emphasized to me as I listened to three CIOs talk
at last week's
InformationWeek 500 conference about how
they'd applied their craft to improve products and drive new
revenue for their companies. One of them, the IT chief for a large
cruise ship company, discussed extensive IT innovations that made
the experience on his company's largest ship, which holds some
6,000 passengers, a good one. Another runs IT for clothing retailer
whose primary customers are teenage girls. The third's company is a
B-to-B distributor of goods ranging from office to janitorial
supplies.
One presentation was about cool ways to make a monstrous ship more
serviceable, the next was about marketing to teen girls where they
live (on Facebook), and the third looked at providing all the
online services needed by small businesses to compete against the
likes of OfficeMax and Staples. I tried to find some commonality in
these three IT leaders' successes. It wasn't as simple as listening
to customers. I doubt a 50-year-old CIO could really listen to a
15-year-old girl and discern what he should do for the business.
Nor would the SMBs being eaten alive by the OfficeMaxes of the
world have known that they needed their distributor to provide a
full-on SaaS-based Web offering so their services would compete
with the big guys.
Nor was it as simple as listening to internal business partners. No
one outside of IT would have thought to rent iPhones to cruise ship
passengers and put Wi-Fi tethers on their kids so that parents
could manage the on-ship experience and keep track of their
families all with one user-friendly device. No one else at the
office supply distributor would have thought to put themselves into
the Web hosting business. That idea also had to come from IT.
These are the sorts of innovations that change a company's
fortunes. None of them can be done by the tech group alone, and
none of them could be done without it.
What these IT leaders have done is embraced new technologies and
augmented their own IT capabilities to create new revenue streams.
In every case, they started their discussions by talking about just
how difficult these projects were, and yet the products and
services they created all emphasize simplicity and a keen
understanding of what their constituent audience needs--even if
that audience didn't know that that particular innovation was what
they wanted and needed.
One point of all three executives made was the need to get past
thinking about internal systems. If you're spending all your time
worried about the HR system, or server uptime, or network
performance, or database contracts, you aren't doing what you could
be for the business. Of course, you have to have those important
internal systems in place, but that's when the fun starts. That's
when it's time to change the business.