The CIO’s Imperative: It’s More Than Fixing the “Moving Sidewalk”

by Chris Wain, Intel Corporation

IT in a corporation is like a “moving sidewalk” in an airport. The moving sidewalks eliminate manual work (walking, or sometimes sprinting, through airports) and accelerate a process (moving people). Travelers have become dependent on moving sidewalks, much as a company’s employees depend on information technology.

The challenge for IT managers, according to Dave Weber, CIO of NW Natural, is to “demonstrate our relevance, so that we aren’t just perceived as the guy in the jumpsuit who fixes the moving sidewalk when it breaks.”

At the inaugural CIO/IT Managers Forum in January, 2007, Dave led three CIOs in a lively panel discussion of how to make IT a business partner and strategic asset to their companies. Strategy-level engagement is critical, Dave said. Without that, IT becomes a cost center, rather than a driver of business value.

The problem for IT departments: “We build ‘sidewalks’ based on predetermined destinations,” said Keith Bearden, a former CIO and general manager of Virtual Information Executives. Often, he continued, IT’s sidewalks are inflexible, difficult to reengineer, and based on business knowledge from 15 years ago. Continuing the airport analogy, he said: “What if the traveler wants to stop off at the new Starbucks that’s halfway down a long moving sidewalk?”

To overcome this problem, Keith laid out three imperatives for CIOs:

• One, make sure your “utility” is in order.“ The sidewalks have to keep moving or IT’s business partners get frustrated.
• Two, elevate yourself so that you have a relationship with your management peers in the lines of business.
• Three, align your IT organization so that you’re integrated into the business.

Engaging the business
IT must engage with its business partners at all levels of the organization.

For the CIO, that means to know how every function in the business operates. Also, CIOs must engage the business in setting a strategic technology vision. For example, “ERP has to be a business project, not a technology project,” Dave said.

For all IT employees, that means to understand what drives the business and how the company makes money. “Get your teams out in the business to understand business processes, and look at common processes across the business,” said Larry Luck, CIO of Schnitzer Steel Industries.

Sometimes an uneasy partnership
Partnering has its risks and challenges, though. In his consulting business, Keith once had to be prepared to walk away from a client that simply wasn’t ready to implement the ERP system that they wanted. The client subsequently came around, but CIOs aren’t in a position of being able to walk away from a client. What options do CIOs have in the face of unrealistic expectations? “We can’t walk away, but we can learn to coach,” Keith observed. Coaching will include asking questions like, “How shall we deal with these 200 systems that need to be integrated into this new project?”

It’s also essential to make the effort to educate the business about IT. “One of the hardest things in this job is to not just sit back and be an expert,” Dave said. Education goes both ways: IT must learn the business, and, in turn, must educate the business about information technology and put technology in a context that business partners can understand, relate to and buy into.

Another key is to share the risks with the business. When Larry joined Schnitzer Steel Industries as CIO in 2005, he inherited an aging IT infrastructure and a financial system that was breaking. The company needed a new financial system, but it had to be deployed in six months to coincide with the start of a new fiscal year. At the beginning of the project, IT set up milestones for the business that highlighted the challenges and shared the risks. “We showed why we needed a chart of accounts completed in just three weeks,” Larry related. “And we engaged the business in researching 28 interfaces to the financial system.”

When IT works: a case study
An example from Keith Bearden’s tenure as CIO of A-dec illustrates the power of IT when the business partnership is strong and healthy.

A-dec’s line of dental furniture had been stuck at $15 to $16 million in annual sales, in spite of a continual stream of new products.

Keith’s direct reports, the business systems managers, were embedded into all of the company’s functional staffs. As they worked with their business peers, the problem became clear: the product line’s complexity was a barrier to growth. There were 1.4 million different configurations of the furniture lines and the product catalog was the size of a phone book. Ordering the right products was daunting.

A solution then took shape. IT worked with the business to build a Web-based ordering system, which simplified the ordering process and streamlined the order form from 14 pages down to just 3.

The result: sales were $45 million in the first quarter after the new system went live!

“We were able to raise ourselves above the moving sidewalk perspective,” Keith concluded.

About the CIO/IT managers forum
In 2007, the Moving Sidewalk Forums will focus on how IT can and must drive technology business value. Mark your calendar for Part II of the series on April 26: “Replacing the Engine While the Sidewalk is Moving.”

About the CIO panel
Dave Weber, chair of the SAO CIO Committee, joined NW Natural in 2000 as the company’s director of information services and chief information officer. Previously, during 16 years at IBM he developed systems, managed projects, marketed services and provided business consulting support throughout the United States to almost every industry.

Keith Bearden is general manager of Virtual Information Executives, an executive-level IT consulting firm in Beaverton. VIE provides CIO-level services to small and midsize companies that don’t have a CIO. He has also served as chief information officer of A-dec Inc. and Sequent Computer Systems.

Larry Luck joined Schnitzer Steel Industries in July 2005 as vice president and chief information officer. Previously, he was the vice president and chief information officer for the Xerox Office Business.

About the author
Chris Wain is a long-time Intel employee and a 10-year veteran of e-business and Internet marketing. His e-business experience encompasses Web-site management, communications, training, managing a user-experience team, and most recently transition and change management. A common thread in all these roles is a passion for understanding the customer or end user, and ensuring that they’re both ready for and receptive to the solutions being delivered to them. He can be reached at chris.wain@comcast.net.