Venyu Blog

With all due respects to Stephen King I’m hoping that it’s not a long leap of faith to convince you, Constant Reader, that I have and always been more of a “words” guy rather than a “numbers” guy. Yeah, I know who the bean counters are but, I’m no CFP (certified financial planner) nor do I play one on TV. Same goes for this blog.

Still, I couldn’t resist bringing your attention to this story posted in CIO (UK edition) by Craig Symons of Forrester Research. Entitled “CIOs must take on the role of portfolio strategist” he posits the proposition that as it becomes easier for tech-savvy business managers and staff to procure their own technology, it also dramatically alters the IT organizational structures and, by extraction, makes additional demands of the office of CIO.

Why the CIO? Symons makes the case that it is the CIO, with their “complete understanding of the business strategy, operating model and a global view across all of the business units, functions and geographies that is in the best position to gain a holistic view across all of the company’s varied and sundry portfolios. On point:

As organizations undergo the transformation from information technology (IT) to business technology (BT), they will have to make many important decisions in the process of moving from the current “as-is state” to the “to-be state.” Complicating matters are two powerful and related trends:

1) rapidly emerging and disruptive technology paradigms such as cloud computing that are changing the economics of sourcing and empowered BT, and 2) tech-savvy business managers and staff provisioning their own technology solutions. A next-generation BT environment requires re-architecting and orchestrating the multiple technology portfolios including the service portfolio, applications portfolio, project portfolio, and asset portfolio. Successful transformation strategies will require a strong governance framework and a CIO capable of informing the decision-making in the role of portfolio strategist. Armed with this knowledge, the CIO can provide critical input in respect to key IT governance decisions, including:

Relative weightings of the portfolios. A holistic view of the portfolio enables optimization of the entire IT spend and ensures that the maximum value is obtained at an acceptable level of risk. Tradeoffs can be made between investing in running the business, growing the business, or developing new services to transform the business.

Sourcing strategies around services. Cloud computing creates opportunities to externally source infrastructure, platforms, and applications with the potential to significantly reduce cycle times and cost, enabling flexibility to scale up or down in response to changes in demand and to convert capital expense to operating expense. The sourcing strategies can be employed with both existing and new services. The CIO is in the best position to understand when, where, and what can or should be outsourced to the public cloud versus a private cloud or even a more traditional in-sourced approach.

Provisioning strategies. The combination of growing technology savvy on the part of the business and the disruptive technologies cited earlier creates opportunities for the business to self-provision some IT-enabled business services. As long as enterprise architecture has been documented and infrastructure standards and road maps implemented and a compliance process exists as part of overall governance, enabling the business to self-provision solutions can lead to competitive advantage. The key is to understand where it makes sense and where it doesn’t and to provide the business with guidelines.

Standardization versus customization. Standardized business processes and common data definitions promote operational efficiencies that can reduce costs and speed time-to-market; however, at the same time, they can inhibit new opportunities by preventing flexibility or be mis-aligned with local practices. The CIO with a global perspective can provide guidance and recommendations on how to balance these conflicting approaches.

Symons argues that by adopting “holistic portfolio management” CIOs have the ability to become proactive in developing transformation plans that anticipates often disjointed, disparate organic initiatives that can lead to reactive and sub-optimized results. It’s a pungent yet wholly persuasive point of view. Who better than the CIO to promote provisioning or to champion the attributes of cloud computing in order to deliver higher and more reliable enterprise and corporate-wide performance?

I think Symons makes an excellent point. How so? Well, I grew up in an era where the late John Houseman, in shilling for brokerage house Smith Barney foisted on the American public a tagline that captures this CIO-corporate business intelligence and provisioning alignment both acutely and accurately: “Smith Barney makes its money the old fashioned way. They Earn It.” Indeed, and that’s true of any CIO worth their salt. After all, if they don’t have visibility and force of vision to see the forest for the trees, who does?