The Unified CIO

By Glenn Weinstein (@glennweinstein)

The Wall Street Journal published a piece recently by my colleague Narinder Singh, arguing that the traditional CIO role should be "decomposed" into two separate jobs: a "technology" person, and a "business productivity" person. The former would focus on "cost reduction and maintenance of service levels"; the latter would then be freed up to drive "demonstrable business impact." 

I acknowledge the appeal of the idea. Who wouldn't want to shed the more mundane aspects of their job? But actually relieving CIOs of responsibility for core technology would be counter-productive for many of the reasons mentioned below. Narinder and I have had many discussions on this topic over the last few months, and he encouraged me to lay out my argument here as a counterpart to his article. So here goes.

• You Need Power. The essential purpose of the CIO role is to use technology to deliver business value, typically in the form of information flow. By removing ownership of the technology, you deprive the CIO of the power base they need to deliver. 
• You Need Accountability.  Without oversight of the technology, the CIO would lose an important check-and-balance that moderates the temptation to make grandiose promises without having realistic plans to deliver. Unfortunately too many business leaders underestimate the complexity of getting technology to actually work; we rely on the CIO as a reality check.
• You Need (Public) Cloud. The largest reason CIOs and their IT departments continue to commit around 70 percent of resources to "run" activities (operations, maintenance, keeping the lights on) is because they are so infrastructure-intensive.  By largely shifting responsibility for servers (hardware, operating systems, networking, application software) to public cloud providers, CIOs can flip the model, and commit 70 percent of resources to "build" and "innovate" activities. This is the right way to free up the CIO's time to focus on innovation. Splitting the CIO role is a noble but, in my opinion, misguided answer to this problem.
• Execution Matters. The decomposition idea implicitly relegates the overseer of "commoditized technology" to a secondary role. But day-to-day service is what employees and customers actually see from IT. All the innovative ideas in the world are worthless without the ability to execute and deliver them to the end user, every day. At the C-level, you have to deliver both big ideas, and actual execution.

A good CIO should focus a large portion of their time and energy on differentiation, and improving business productivity. And they can augment these efforts with strategy consultants, innovation teams, pilot projects, and industry surveys. But this can't be the full definition of the job. Ultimately, "idea people" need to meet up with "execution people." And the CIO cannot afford to camp with just the "idea people" - their key role is to join up these two groups, and actually deliver!

So what do you, our CIO readers, think?  Which side of the fence are you on?

Crowdsource the app you don't have

By Mike Morris (@mpmorris36)

Today at Gartner Symposium, we attended a great session by Gartner's Eric Knipp (@erichknipp) and Val Sribar (@VSribar) on the future of application development. They discussed how most companies are still forced to spend a significant portion of their budget simply keeping the lights on, forfeiting opportunities to invest in new applications that would actually help improve business processes and take advantage of the Nexus of Forces (cloud, social, mobile, information). The image below illustrates Eric and Val's point.

It's unlikely that tight budgets and increasing op and maintenance expenses will go away, so how do IT organizations and business focus on these new projects? It's our opinion that crowdsourcing is a great, cost-effective option to not only build out new applications, but also to support them.

For more than a year, CloudSpokes has helped businesses tap specialized development talent and pay for results, while providing developers an opportunity to cultivate their talents and compete for cash and recognition. Instead of trying to convince you of the many benefits of leveraging a community of developers, CloudSpokes is providing you the opportunity to see for yourself the value of crowdsourcing by launching a new contest for businesses to think beyond today's pressing development needs and crowdsource an app that will make a difference going forward.  Given an army of developers, what would you build to transform a business process? If given the chance to turn the nature of IT from reactive to proactive, how could you change the pace of innovation in your business?

If you're wondering what enterprise applications can be crowdsourced, take a look at this sample of development work that our customers have crowdsourced, and take note of the most commonly requested contests. One specific example is when a large non profit asked CloudSpokes to build a silent auction application. Based on a single challenge, the community delivered multiple solutions within 10 days. Instead of having donors manually bid on items, only to be disappointed when they lose out on something because they were outbid, the new mobile app alerts the nonprofit's donors of new bids. Furthermore, the mobile application stores bidding information in a database where the data could be mined for further donations and auctions. This project, done in little time, made a huge difference for this organization.

The contest, launched today and open through Oct. 26, is open to business owners or IT groups that haven't allocated resources to create a business application that they need or want. The submission that has the most potential to create business impact for the nominee will win a free, fully funded CloudSpokes contest.  Submissions are being accepted online and at Appirio booth #216 at Gartner Symposium in Orlando.

Information and People - The Keys to Your Competitive Future

By Narinder Singh (@singhns)

Today represents a significant step forward for a strategy Appirio believes will help us continue to redefine how technology can transform business.  This morning, we announced our intent to acquire Knowledge Infusion (KI), an incredible organization that has spent the last several years helping connect HR, and an organization’s “talent”, more directly to improve business outcomes. 

Businesses today are going through a major transformation because people are fundamentally changing the way they interact with each other at home and at work:

• Facebook has over 1B users and accounts for 1 out of every 5 pageviews on the Internet worldwide
• By 2013, there’ll be almost twice as many mobile devices shipped vs PCs
• 1 in 6 people found their jobs through social networks

Providing strategic guidance without understanding how cloud, social and mobile are transforming the interactions between organizations and their customers or workforce is analogous to planning a supply chain assuming only horses and wagons. At Dreamforce 2012, enabling the future of work emerged as a new front in the ongoing battle between the old world providers and cloud leaders.  Yet while many of these drivers have laid havoc to the ability of legacy providers to keep up, we have always recognized that great technology innovation alone does not create lasting business change.