Please wake up, CIO. - Part 1

Hello there,

I am writing on a challenging topic, especially with the viewpoint from Germany (EMEA), as I have been working with many companies here. Due to its complexity, I have split up the article in smaller parts. This article contains: Intro and current situation Part 1

What?

We are seeing a lack of adoption in the Digital Transformation, especially in mid-sized, but also enterprise companies.

The situation

I have been working with many mid-sized and enterprise companies and mostly everywhere I have been faced with a devastating lack of resources. And by writing 'lack of resources' this mostly consists in a lack of IT-people. Unfortunately, this is not only a problem of specific company sizes or specific industries - this is a general problem.

But how could it be missed from nearly all companies?

We have to take a look at the past 15 years. So there are these IT-people - speaking their own language which no one understands, having their own habits and sometimes even working hours which many people find unnormal. They are always working on topics, which non technical people don′t understand or find useful, as implementing new server versions, updating the machines, doing some crazy network stuff or even implementing security boundaries - somehow. They do their work in projects with starting and end dates, which mostly never are being completed in time and are just consuming money and resources without any visible benefit.

These guys need to be tamed!

CIO - do your job and get the resource consumption controlled.

In some companies the CIOs / Head of ITs even got a seat at the executive board and here the story starts.

Sitting at the executive board is a challenge on its own. You have to demonstrate your value and continuously justify that you have all your IT resources tamed and controlled. As a result, the CIOs are being measured in numbers. And by numbers I am speaking of consumption in IT resources:

• hardware and software
• clients and servers
• people and rooms
• projects
• more

And this is actually the first big problem.

The result

Managers are creating SLAs and KPIs on some specific parts of the IT to somehow visualize and control the working state of IT. No one is actually taking a look, what the real benefit of IT is and might be. As a result of this, IT is becoming more a less a service provider. It is just treated as a tool which brings a continous same amount of value and consumes IT resources / costs.

Like electricity.

Everyone forgets that it is

• fueling production
• optimizing processes
• allowing better communication and collaboration
• automizing processes
• and many, many more.

It just becomes the tool which is being used and no one cares about its real benefit.

Over the time, the CIOs had reglemented their organisational IT structure to the current situation: Everything is being measured granularly with SLAs and KPIs and shown in dashboard, projects need always to proof their business value, even if they are technically necessary, and the resources which IT is consuming every year is being reduced year over year.

Why?

Well - this is the only real number on which the CIO can justify his good work at the executive board.

In the end - IT just became a service provider and the service is just a running IT without any failures which has been implemented more or less good or bad over the past years and needs to just be kept working and continuously trying to reduce its needed resource consumption. This in fact, is also probably one of the biggest reasons why there have been so many breaches out there. You even don′t want to know what priority 'security' has in most companies.

I have a great quote here from a customer some months ago:

Today

Coming with this mindset which has been settled over the past decades and adding the current situation of a chronic lack of IT-resources in each thinkable way:

• professional IT people
• money
• hardware
• software

combined with the outcomes on trying to save money on all the ends which results in:

• too small IT teams
• IT teams lacking professionality (especially support teams)
• legacy software
• legacy hardware
• missing security implementations
• dependencies to software or even hardware vendors

added some additional complications as:

• lack of good IT talents on the market
• lack af assistance from politics in modernizing environments / IT infrastructure
• complicated laws trying to reglement emerging technologies

and then

- everyone is speaking about Digital Transformation.

This is hypocrisy in its best way - or may be we just call it "Hypocrisis".

We actually don′t see much movement at most companies though it is more than necessary. So - take this as a wake-up call.

_________________________________________________________________________

In the next part I will start explaining how you can get started and what the most important first steps are. (and the biggest errors)

Thanks for reading - I hope you liked it and I am very happy to retrieve some feedback or discuss some topics in detail.

All the best,

David das Neves