Many CIOs wishfully think back to the old days when a single centralized IT department delivered business applications and data processing capabilities to multiple lines of business. A time when cloud meant rain, data was small and workloads predictable. For the most part IT wrote the specs on the applications they created for the business. Life was great.
Maybe it still is. Actually I’d argue it’s even better.
The CIO has genuinely broken into the inner clique of C-level executives and is considered central to business strategy, not just IT strategy. A number of CEOs look to IT for the next big insight or market that could increase profitability. However, It’s much easier to prove the value of IT: Most enterprises have instituted granular charge back rates for all IT services provided to the business, making it easy to accurately measure the value delivered by IT. In the old days, the CIO did not garner as much respect because the scope of services was ill-defined and billing nebulous. the new age of IT has given rise to new challenges for the modern CIO.
One example is the constant friction with Line of Business (LoB) IT departments who clamor for more control, looser security, and greater agility. In addition, business users demand a corporate IT experience that mirrors the self-service, app-centric experience from their personal lives. It seems that we have gone from a BYOD (bring-your-own-device) culture to a BYOA (bring-your-own-application) culture in a hurry.
Here are four tips that could help smooth out the friction between the key stakeholders:
Pick your battles wisely: IT buying power has significantly skewed in favor of the LoB. CIOs are spending 80% of their budgets on keeping the lights running while LoB IT departments have the luxury of spending on innovative projects. Understanding the priorities of the business and managing budget along those priorities can help CIOs push certain budget requirements into the LoB thereby freeing up budget for more innovative projects in the data center.
Be prepared to manage cloud sprawl: Just as virtualization addressed server sprawl, and cloud addressed virtualization sprawl, we are now entering into the age of cloud sprawl. The good news is that despite the ubiquity and affordable pricing of public cloud providers, most enterprises were largely using the public cloud for testing and development until recently. In a sense, the promise of the cloud is only being delivered now in true earnest, and the CIO is driving much of that transition. CIOs who have embraced the open hybrid cloud are in a much stronger position to control the transition across physical, virtual, and multiple flavors of the cloud, and to control cloud sprawl.
CIO be nimble, CIO be quick: One of the top gripes of business users is that IT just isn’t agile enough – it can’t keep up with the pace of innovation needed to stay competitive, or to stay on course with emerging technologies. As you peel away the layers, it’s easy to see that an agile, software-defined infrastructure is the best way to address the agility issue. Take storage for instance. With the additional stress on enterprise storage through new big data workloads, it’s easy to see how open, software-defined storage can help data centers scale rapidly by reusing existing hardware, and adapt to changing workloads and applications, all without breaking the bank.
Hire a Business Information Officer: Yes, you read that correctly. The BIO is a new breed that straddles the IT and business worlds – one part tech visionary and one part business exec. Most report into an LoB with a dotted line into the CIO, while a few report to the CIO while taking much of their direction from the LoB. Either way the BIO could the CIO’s best friend because of the trust they enjoy from both sides and their depth of understanding of IT’s capabilities and challenges on one hand, and the rapidly evolving needs of the business on the other. BIOs can help prioritize IT projects as seen through an LoB lens and bring a lifecycle perspective to strategy discussions around new IT projects – something that is cited as a large gap in the current way of doing things. Often they turn out to be the deciding vote on whether a new service can be delivered in house vs. outsourced.
In today’s complex, rapidly evolving landscape, a CIO is expected to deliver on the availability, security, and compliance metrics crafted in the old world. While these challenges can be frustrating, the reality is that this isn’t the first time the CIO has had to adapt to the changing business landscape. Back when businesses moved from in-house applications to packaged applications, CIOs transitioned from managing software development to managing software installation and maintenance – an equally huge shift.
The CIO has transitioned some responsibilities to LoB IT and taken on new ones as IT becomes closely aligned with the business. The modern CIO has evolved - learning new skills and making new friends - to better serve the business and emerge as a thought leader in the enterprise.
Read Sarangan's article, "CIOs should know the 3 new changes in a data life-cycle."
Sarangan Rangachari leads the Storage and Big Data business unit at Red Hat and is responsible for the overall strategy and execution of Red Hat’s storage and big data software portfolio. Prior to this role, Rangachari drove Red Hat’s Cloud ecosystem strategy. He joined Red Hat in 2010 with more than 25 years of industry experience, including in-depth software product management and product marketing experience, and 18 years in storage software.
