Over the past couple of years we’ve all heard more and more talk about the potential for IT to transform business and drive innovation and profitability – and hand-in-hand with this, the potential for CIOs to be seen as in charge of IT groups that are true ‘strategic business enablers’ rather than simple cost centres. This is very sensible and a natural consequence of the changing role that IT has come to play in business over the past 20 years, as it’s moved out from the back office as ‘Data Processing’ to become a ubiquitous enabler for people to share information, buy products, and interact with each other.

So the idea that the effective application of IT can drive real business transformation is not what I have a problem with – I’m actually a massive proponent of this kind of vision, and indeed exploring the ins and outs of this is what MWD is essentially about.

No, the problem I have is when I see ‘experts’ positioning these things as exclusive alternatives:

• As a CIO you have to be either running an IT function that is a strategic business enabler *or* a cost centre
• You have to drive collaborative, consultative dialogues with business leaders *or* you have to be a transactional ‘order taker’
• You have to be focused on driving ‘innovation’ *or* minimising costs.

I’ve come across a number of commentators – including the normally pretty sensible Nick Carr, as well as a Research Director from one of the very largest IT industry analyst firms – argue this very black-and-white view.

The problem is, it’s a massive over-simplification of the real world. The truth is that (as many people tire of me saying over and over again) in this case as in so many others, we live in a world of ‘and’, not a world of ‘or’. The truth is most obvious in larger companies, but it’s everywhere: IT needs to play multiple roles in multiple contexts if it’s really going to serve the needs of a business in the most effective way.

If you take a capability-based view of business and explore how IT resources should support different business capabilities in different ways, it quickly becomes apparent that in some areas, even the most forward-thinking CIO with strong peer relationships at the highest level should be looking to structure some parts of his operation to act as transactional order takers, delivering ‘good enough’ service at minimal cost (email service might be a good example for many). On the other hand IT services and capabilities (examples might include services supporting sales and marketing optimisation, customer interfaces, product development) should be optimised for flexibility and creative exploration; here, IT governance policies might be best focused largely on the ‘edges’ of these areas to make sure that creative use of IT is expressed within clear boundaries. Where services and capabilities should be optimised for cost – this is where governance should focus on centralisation and standardisation as far as possible.

As the above suggests, a more nuanced view of the role that IT should play has significant impacts on the terms of reference and charters for IT governance and architecture functions. I find it alarming how many architecture teams, for example, see their role largely as one of standards-enforcement: things are starting to change, but change is slower than it needs to be IMO.

I suspect that a great many of my “Calling BS on…” series of posts are going to boil down to two possible arguments: one against simplistic either-or thinking, and the other against ‘XYZ is dead’ posturing. Let’s see, though…

As always, I’d love to get your views in comments. Come on, rant with me!

The “G” word is one of those words that’s bandied about with increasing abandon these days – but for many, “governance” is just a more sexy way of saying “management” (in the same way that “architecture” is quite often used as a sexy way of saying “design”).

So how much are organisations really walking the walk with IT governance initiatives? This is something we’re expending significant effort on finding out through 2009, and one of the ways we’re doing it is through surveys like this one, which we’re carrying out in conjunction with CIO UK magazine.

We’d love to know your thoughts. We’ll make sure we point to the results back here (they’ll be published at cio.co.uk) and we’re sure they’ll throw up a load of interesting insights.

A few days ago the results of our second CIO UK poll were published in this piece – CIO Debate: Collaboration is building momentum in 2009. The poll corroborated earlier research that we carried out for our Collaboration advisory service in the summer of last year, in conjunction with the guys at Freeform Dynamics.

The headline findings: despite all the hype, collaboration adoption is still just getting underway. A big part of the reason for this is the difficulty of justifying big up-front infrastructure investments. Where collaboration is growing fastest, though, it’s business activities “at the edge” – those involved in interactions with external parties – which seem to be driving things along. There is a significant amount of appetite for collaboration technology, though, and our research indicates that 2009 will be quite a strong year for collaboration technology adoption.

Our third CIO UK poll is now live at cio.mwdadvisors.com, and this time we’re asking a handful of questions about approaches to IT Governance. How many organisations are pursuing formal IT Governance programmes, and if so what are the reasons? Are they basing their efforts on established frameworks like COBIT and ISO 38500? And what are their plans going forward? Those are some of the questions we’re looking to explore.

If you’re a CIO or IT Director – or you know someone who is – please take 2 minutes to provide your input (or send your contacts the link)! We’ll be publishing our CIO UK Debate piece on this topic in the next few weeks.

A few weeks back I highlighted that we’d just started running the first in a series of short polls in conjunction with CIO UK (part of the international network of CIO magazines) – with a poll focused on how CIOs expect their spending to change in 2009, given the current economic climate.

The first poll threw up some really good insights, which corroborated what I’d heard in a number of other CIO interviews I’d just completed (at the Nordic CIO Summit I chaired at the end of November).

We take the output from each poll we run, and write an exclusive piece for CIO UK – which is then used as the kick-off point for some further CIO debate that’s published online. Here’s the first article. The headline: on balance, UK CIOs appear to be expecting IT budgets to dip marginally overall, but key projects will still progress (albeit in more bite-sized chunks). Fixed IT costs / IT infrastructure budgets will be managed very tightly – but in a way, this is “business as usual” these days. The health warning: with the economic / political situation changing almost daily, the analysis and assumptions could well be out of date by the time you read the article!

The next poll is already live on our website: it’s on the topic of collaboration and social software. Are companies doing more than paying lip-service to collaboration, and what do people think about social software’s value? With our short poll we hope to be able to report some more interesting insights for CIO UK.

If you’re a CIO or IT Director – or you know someone who is – please take 2 minutes to provide your input (or send your contacts the link)! We hope to be publishing our CIO UK Debate piece on this topic early in the New Year.

That’s the title of a short online poll that we’re now running, in conjunction with CIO.co.uk – the online presence of CIO Magazine in the UK (the sister of the “big brother” CIO Magazine in the US).

If you’re in a senior IT management role, we’d really like to hear about how the economic situation looks like affecting where your company gets its IT services from. If you know someone else who’s in a senior management role, it would be great to hear from them, too. Just pass them the link.

This poll is set to be the first in a monthly series that we’ll run in conjunction with CIO.co.uk, as part of the community’s new “Debate” channel. We’ll be taking the results from each poll, and using them as input to monthly opinion articles from MWD analysts that will be hosted over at CIO.co.uk. Members of the CIO community will be invited to pitch in with their views, and all of those will be posted alongside our piece. We’ll be picking off a range of topics in the coming months, and we’re really excited about participating. It should be fun, and we should be able to uncover some valuable insights, too.

The results of this first poll are set to be delivered as part of the first MWD opinion piece towards the end of November. The more responses we receive, the better our articles should be – so please see if you can spare us a few minutes. As we post our articles, we’ll be sure to highlight them here so you can check them out.

Over here is the first of what we hope will be a series of podcasts with CIOs who’ve instigated work to improve IT-business alignment in their organisations. The interview is with New Zealand-resident Peter Burggraaff, until recently the CIO of NZ retail chain Farmers Trading Company. It follows on from the work we did last year on our forthcoming book, which is due out in a couple of weeks.

Peter talks to us in this 31’34" podcast episode about his initiative at Farmers and the outcomes he achieved.

In the podcast Peter explains that Farmers was in a situation where IT cost was way too high, and although the IT organisation was doing some things well (particularly managing operational services) it wasn’t seen as a real contributor of business value as Farmers looked to put some big business changes in place. He goes on to explain how he started to turn this situation around and built a solid and trusted relationship with Farmers business management.

We’re very excited to present this podcast, and we very much hope to be doing more of these over the coming weeks and months. Thanks Peter!

If you’d like to get involved in this programme of podcasts don’t hesitate to let us know.