If you are a CIO and you want to stay relevant 5 years from now, your #1 job is to make every employee at your company more productive.
Yes, you have to deal with compliance, and security, and IT projects and budgets and infrastructure maintenance and cost control. But in comparison, none of those tasks can have the strategic impact and scale of achieving small incremental gains in empowering your company’s employees with technology.
By choosing to ignore (or in some cases directly hurt) this responsibility CIOs relinquish their seat at the table with the top executives at a company. Of equal value to sales, finance and operations is a function that maximizes the return on human capital, and these days it’s not really HR’s job to accomplish this. (On a personal note, I feel HR, as traditionally conceived in most organizations, is a bankrupt paradigm). It’s the CIO’s.
Some things you want to stop doing:
- Preventing employees from installing software on their computers
- Preventing employees from bringing their own laptops to work
- Blocking access to sites such as Facebook, Twitter, meebo.
- Saving money on monitors
Some things you want to start doing:
- Find the line managers trying to innovate within your organization (maybe they have Macs on their desks or are running wikis under them)
- Implement grassroots systems: IRC, Forums, wikis, IM
- Implement personal productivity tools: GTD software, email search, mindmapping software
- Help teams get organized: Basecamp
- Provide the means for semi-structured information to flourish: wikis.
The days of the centralized large IT organization delivering centralized large IT projects are counted. As viable SAAS alternatives emerge and a younger, tech-savvy, self-sufficient employees make it through the ranks, they will demand the freedom to innovate their own way, they will provide their own tech support, and will want to run their own systems.
Like Ross mentions in a recent CIO magazine article on the role of wikis
Most employees don’t spend their time executing business process. That’s a myth. They spend most of their time handling exceptions to business process.
The logical conclusion to that is that most business value is derived from empowering those employees to handle those exceptions and capturing and disseminating the knowledge generated by solving them.
And it’s real hard to do that without the right technical tools.
