The CIO as Chief Excitement Officer

In my previous post I talked about how the CIO has needed to become the agent of transformation within the business, and how the IT team needs to lead this change, not just manage continuity.

But how do you do this? The rest of the business is accustomed to IT being a support service, to responding to the needs of the business. How does the CIO ensure that their ideas for transformation will be listened to?

For me, the key is excitement. The CIO needs to get the business excited about the opportunities for change. I talked before about our move at DHL to a business event architecture that will transform how we can monitor and manage the journey of every package. Change on this scale naturally creates anxiety for both the business and the IT team. In my experience the best way to counter this is by getting people excited. This is the responsibility of the CIO. To get the business excited about the opportunities that technology creates and to get IT excited about the positive impact they can have on the business by delivering on those opportunities.

Let me illustrate this point. DHL has a very strong quality mindset. We created a dedicated quality control team for our top customers who would monitor every package from those customers to identify potential issues before they affected that shipment. This is great, but clearly it doesn’t scale to our millions of other customers.

What made the difference was when we were able to show how we could automate this process so that all our customers could benefit. Unsurprisingly people got very excited about this and gave us the green light very quickly.

Being able to transform the scale or effectiveness of a part of our operations is one way we can create excitement among the business leadership. A second way is how IT can think about new products or services that can be created as a result of today’s ability to capture and connect the vast amounts of customer data that we now have access to. IT is traditionally treated as a cost centre. With the new mindset we have been talking about in the last couple of posts, thinking as agents of business transformation, we can also transform the IT function into a revenue generator.

I want to end however with a note of caution. It is easy to get people excited about what technology can do for the business, but you need to always be mindful of the limitations you need to work around. There are obvious limitations such as budget constraints, whether you have the right people and if they can find the necessary time. For me though, the bigger issue is explaining the opportunity to the rest of the business leadership in a way that excites them. This comes back to the importance of developing your listening skills which I highlighted in my last post.

If I take the example of our new Business Event Architecture, the answer was not to talk about data flows or streams of events. It was to illustrate how much easier it would become to stop a single shipment, anywhere in the world, automatically. For example, if one country’s customs team wanted to make a security inspection. When you have millions of shipments spread across 220 countries at any moment in time, then being able to instantly and automatically take action on an individual package gets everyone excited.? And once everyone is excited, they come together to make it happen.