Last year, I was a little harsh on HP's CIO at the time ("HP's CIO on the ERP Problem & the Art of Diplomacy") for accepting virtualyl no responsibility for the problems with and fallout from their SAP implementation debacle (which caused them to miss their earnings number because they couldn't ship product (background)).
HP's new CEO clearly felt HP needed a new CIO and replaced Giles Bouchard with Randy Mott (formerly CIO at Dell and WalMart, two companies that effectively use IT to make the trains run on time). Mott's reputation is impressive, and I'm sure he'll do a good job at HP. Of note about this change, however, is that Bouchard is still at HP, as the EVP of Global Operations, which is apparently his area of expertise. The fact that Bouchard was a business manager responsible for IT has caused me to reevaluate my assessment of him, and brings up the whole reason I write here in the first place.
The reason I write here is that I think there is tremendous value in business managers understanding IT well enough to effectively manage what has become a critical function (either operationally or strategically) inside most companies. I tend to believe that in the short term, at least, the best top-level management of IT will come from business managers with a systems thinking mindset. This management can be either in the capacity of a customer of IT or as a nontechnical CIO.
My suspicion about Bouchard's political handling of the ERP problems is that he was in fact defending and trusting his team (and we all know that as managers, you need to trust your lieutenants, throwing them under the bus is rarely a good way to manage). However, while you need to back up your team, you also need to be capable of holding them truly accountable, and with insufficient knowledge of IT or the ability to really probe into the problems, a CIO from the business side is just as likely to be B.S.ed as the business manager qua IT customer.
Thinking back on some of the political dynamics at my own clients, I have certainly seen this as an issue, and one that is exacerbated by the rank and file IT staff's lack of faith (lack of respect, really) in a non-technical CIO. Frequently, in order to ameleoriate this distrust, the non-technical CIO may in turn be too deferential to IT (to prove that he or she is not an outsider or a bad guy). Once this happens, much of the value of having injecting that business perspective into IT management is lost. The real solution is to develop sufficient fluency in the IT world as a business manager that one can develop credibility and rapport within the IT organization, but with a stronger business head and without the inherent fondness for all things technical that frequently results in an insufficiently-aligned IT organization.
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Posted by: Cheap computers | August 10, 2009 at 08:00 AM