I wrote some time ago about the notion that "CIO" should really stand for "chief innovation officer" (I put that in lower-case because some people think I am literally advocating the title! Though I have seen worse...). I felt this way 20 years ago when I was in the CIO role at some fairly large, complex organizations, but the message was not well received in those days. Most CEOs were strictly interested in IT cost reduction, assuming they were interested in IT at all...
Just when it had started to believe that things had changed, I saw an interesting couple of blog posts at InformationWeek. The first was about Randy Mott, CIO of HP. This is a guy who really has got the byte between his teeth (oh, my sides!) and is going all out to invert what i call the I/R ratio -- the ratio of resources spent on Innovation versus resources spent just keeping the shop Running.
Randy says, "We are trying to get on a path of global and common applications to where we can focus on new capabilities, new features, and new functions...We've put some very aggressive goals in front of our people to manage our way out of that." This is a guy who clearly sees IT as more than a cost center.
Soon after that, I read about HP CEO Mark Hurd's "formula for fixing IT". As reported here, Mark's got four simple IT objectives for Mott, the first of which is to reduce the cost of IT. My heart sank. Plus ca change...
GR
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