The greatest happiness is digital success

The annual gathering of IT chiefs in Barcelona for the Gartner Symposium is a place to share ideas and attend sessions where the analyst firm pitches a new concept. This time it is the idea of the CIO as a “digital vanguard – a digital version of Genghis Khan, the fearless leader of the Mongolian empire.

Imagine a CIO armed with the digital equivalent of a bow and arrow advancing into a hostile territory? It’s probably not the analogy Gartner had in mind at the conference. But in many ways, the battle is an internal one: change is hard and far harder when battling to change one’s own beliefs and working practices.

The dilemma for the modern CIO is that they want to be seen as business-aligned and work with business leaders to achieve measurable business outcomes. They want to be associated with success, yet, the latest CIO study from Gartner shows that for a cohort of CIOs, success in digital initiatives is more-or-less random.

The problem, at least as Gartner sees it, is the fact that IT has traditionally been regarded as a servant of the business, rather than a leader. It was always the case that so-called business/IT alignment involved the IT team talking to business people, understanding the pain points the business needed to resolve, and then going away, writing a load of code and delivering the remedy to the problem as a new application or digital initiative.

The stats from Gartner are an indication that this is a failing strategy, or at least one where the chance of success is as likely as correctly calling ”heads” or “tails”.

But let’s flip the business-IT alignment coin and rather than IT align with the business, the business, according to Gartner, needs to align with IT. In other words, business people work continually with IT people to deliver a successful IT project.

It’s an agile approach and involves the IT department collaborating with digital teams in other areas of the business that are not managed by the CIO.

Now the difficulty, at least for some CIOs, is that this approach involves relinquishing control – losing chunks of their digital empire. It is not something a modern-day Genghis Khan would easily accept, given his greatest happiness was to scatter his enemies. Yet without giving up some of the responsibilities traditionally associated with the IT function, the CIO and IT department are unlikely to have the people and the funding to drive successful digital initiatives.

Those technologists working in other business functions are not the enemies of the IT departments. They are an IT leader’s greatest allies, who can be nurtured to deliver true business-IT alignment.