Roles and Responsibilities


So given this balancing act between art and science, what's the best way for the organization to approach BTM? Chapter Two emphasized that it is the office of the CIO that needs to take ultimate responsibility for alignment. This statement is true as far as it goes. But by now it should be clear that the cast of characters that contributes to business model definition, process optimization, and technology automation extends far beyond any one person and his or her immediate staff. In BTM, to make the jump from promise to practice, you should consider the five general roles and responsibilities shown in Fig. 9.1.

Figure 9.1. Five roles and responsibilities help BTM make the jump from promise to practice: the CxO suite, the office of the CIO, the project/program management office (PMO), business professionals, and technology professionals

- The CxO Suite, including the CEO, CFO, COO, and other business unit heads, which is responsible for understanding the impact that IT has on the business so they can make investment decisions accordingly , achieving general visibility into IT portfolios and projects, and setting the example for how the firm as a whole should view the IT function.

- The Office of the CIO, which is responsible for identifying broad opportunities for using technology to innovate the business, managing the IT portfolio, and overseeing risk and general governance of IT.

- The Project/Program Management Office, or PMO , which is responsible for controls, prioritization, consolidation, and standards that span individual projects and programs.

- Business Professionals, who are responsible for contributing business and process expertise to the activities of BTM, including visualizing and understanding the impact of IT, and for managing operational change.

- Technology Professionals, who are responsible for designing applications and systems, coordinating with business professionals to validate IT decisions, implementing the final design, and managing technology change.

CxO Suite

The CxO suite should assume three responsibilities that are related to BTM. First, they need to make smart IT investment decisions by understanding how technology impacts the business. They need this technology acumen for the same reason that the CIO needs to understand the impact of business decisions: to understand IT's transformational capabilities and to allocate funds accordingly. Understanding the impact of IT will help the CxO suite communicate their vision and goals for the company to both their IT colleagues and also to the board of directors ”who should be aware of how the CxO suite intends to leverage the company's considerable IT investments to increase shareholder value.

The second responsibility of the CxO suite is to achieve general visibility into IT ”to take the general pulse of IT programs and projects, in other words. Without the integrated view of the IT portfolio (supported by business, process, and technology models) that is advocated by BTM, it is difficult for the CxO suite (or any other members of the general business audience, for that matter) to become familiar with the basic workings of IT. Throughout the entire cycle from a project's conception to rollout, the models developed during the activities of BTM improve visibility into IT, which is crucial for collaborating to develop a shared vision with the CIO. In a broader sense, improving visibility into and communication with IT is really the core of BTM, since translating between stakeholders who speak fundamentally different languages ”such as the CxO suite and the IT function in general ”is a huge part of closing the disconnect.

The final responsibility of the CxO suite is to set an example for how the business should view IT, and create an environment in which the CIO and IT can succeed. Surveys show that 78% of CIOs still earn grades of D “ or F with their companies because "they are perceived to be functioning as commodity-based 'order takers'" [1] rather than as strategic partners . To improve this mark, CxOs should include the CIO as an active, visible, and empowered member of the executive team. This may require changing traditional reporting structures and turning over some discretionary powers regarding budget issues. By including the CIO in both short-term and long- term strategic planning sessions, the CxO suite promotes the early integration of technology into the company's goals, and a joint agenda that will reduce risk and increase return.

Behavior and culture also come from the top down, and the organization looks to the CEO to indicate what the company's attitude is towards IT. (This focus could be extended to the entire CxO suite, but it is the CEO who ultimately sets the overarching cultural tone.) Unfortunately, there are still a number of CEOs that either choose to shun this responsibility or are not equipped to respond appropriately. Michael Earl, director of London Business School's Centre for Research in Information Management, and David Feeny, director of The Oxford Institute of Information Management and vice president of Templeton College, group the IT management styles of CEOs into seven archetypes in their Sloan Management Review article, "How To Be a CEO for the Information Age" (see Table 9.1).

Table 9.1. The seven creeds of the CEO: hypocrite, waverer, atheist, zealot, agnostic , monarch, and believer

Only one archetype , "The Believer," actually combines the right behaviors and attitudes that help companies reap the rewards they expect out of technology. But even today, few CEOs actually qualify for inclusion in this category. [2] Without strong CEO sponsorship of the IT role in their organizations, the CxO suite and companies in general are destined to perpetuate the behaviors and attitudes that thwart alignment and organizational success.

Office of the CIO

The next role that must tackle BTM is the office of the CIO. The CIO, as Ch. 2 discusses, is ultimately responsible for alignment between business and technology. This means that it is essential to make the CIO and his or her office the BTM champion within the organization. Typically, it is the office of the CIO who combines high-level strategies and priorities from the CxO suite with emerging technology trends to identify concrete IT programs and projects. The mechanism that the CIO uses to make these crucial decisions is the IT portfolio, which Ch. 8 describes. By managing this portfolio, the office of the CIO can keep tabs on overall investment and risk, and provide a unifying authority for governing IT.

But the CIO's interaction with the CxO suite needs to run the other way as well. The CIO should participate in developing overall corporate strategy by identifying opportunities for IT innovation, and bringing these to the CxO suite. Again, models and the IT portfolio are important mechanisms here, because they help the office of the CIO identify trends, and more importantly, explain trends in everyday terms to their counterparts within the business.

Thinking Like a CEO

"One of the most significant changes in the last five years is because of the rapid proliferation of technology. The CIO definitely emerged at the forefront of the business table and has become the epicenter of the organization. Conversely, CEOs have become extraordinarily more technology savvy because they realize that effective use of technology whether it's insourced or outsourced is going to directly affect the bottom line. And so the role has changed whereby the CIO is now viewed as a strategic business partner. All of the things that a CEO thinks about ”acquisitions, divestitures, organic growth ”the CIO needs to think about too.

What is required is for the CIO to be much more savvy about where he spends his time, his money, and his efforts. There is virtually no other function in any Global 1000 organization that has a larger capital and expense budget than the CIO. So in reality the CIO ultimately has the largest piece of business, virtually larger than any other stakeholder or executive in a corporation. It's caused the CIO to be much more business oriented, focusing on things like growing the top line, controlling the bottom line, margins, and expenses.

So the CIOs that are not strategic, that are not business partners, that are not aligned ”those guys are getting 'sunset-ed' in the marketplace ."

Paul Daversa, president & CEO, Resource Systems Group

Despite the well-recognized trend in the industry for CIOs to become strategic partners in the business, many companies still leave IT out in the cold when it comes time to set strategies and determine goals. This especially happens when the CIO's subordinate position is institutionalized by unit pricing or charge-back systems, whereby the business pays for IT services. This is the right step if you buy into the argument that IT needs to become a profit center, but it's the wrong approach if you want IT to be accepted as integral to the organization just like other functions such as manufacturing, sales, and marketing.

Project/Program Management Office (PMO)

The next crucial role is that of the project/program management office, or PMO. After the office of the CIO has identified new projects to meet the strategic objectives of the enterprise, they should coordinate with the PMO to monitor, track, prioritize, and retain broad tactical control over these projects. The PMO, which can be organized as either an engaged internal consultancy or a hands-off repository of best practices and general project information, reports either to senior IT executives or to a joint steering committee composed of business and IT leaders . The steering committee is typically assembled in response to a specific initiative, and includes members with a direct stake in that initiative's success. For example, the PMO tasked with a CRM initiative may report to a steering committee that consists of the CIO, vice president of Marketing, the CFO, and senior representatives of the sales and support functions.

As projects move from concept to completion, the PMO periodically re- evaluates them to make sure that they remain on-track to meet their initial promise. Both leading and lagging indicators of the project's performance can trigger these re-evaluations. During each, the enterprise model helps to communicate progress and gives the IT steering committee the information they need to make accurate and timely decisions about the initiative's fate. After a project has been implemented successfully, the PMO rolls up design decisions made during impact analysis into a central repository of best-practice templates and company standards. These design decisions, which are the basis for reuse in BTM, can take the form of standard processes, approved application packages, network and technology configurations, or even complete, end-to-end project designs that can be reused in later initiatives. The PMO also helps to prioritize individual projects and tasks , so that resources in limited supply (whether that means a specialized programmer, network bandwidth, or database storage space) can be allocated intelligently to maximize their benefit to the enterprise. Other key responsibilities of the PMO are to select a project manager, define project methodologies, secure funding, assign resources, and engage service providers for IT projects.

Business Professionals

The fourth and fifth roles that are responsible for BTM ”business and technology professionals ”collaborate closely to complete the activities of BTM. The process starts with the capture of an as-is enterprise model, continues as companies develop potential to-be scenarios and perform gap analysis between the to-be and as-is states, and concludes when a final to-be scenario is selected and moved along to implementation. Every scenario should include three general areas ”business, process, and technology ”each of which corresponds directly to one of the activities of BTM: business model definition, process optimization, and technology automation.

Business professionals, of course, are more directly concerned with the first two of these activities, and their expertise and in-depth knowledge of the subject matter should form the basis for developing the business and process models that make up the business architecture. But at the same time, business professionals should be familiar with technology automation so that they can understand the impact of IT and visualize how new and updated applications and systems impact how they do their job.

One final ”and often overlooked ”responsibility of business professionals is to manage the operational change that is required to take advantage of updates to the technology architecture. For example, a new supply chain management system may require demand planners to adjust how they work. In this case, the business professionals need to make sure that these changes take place (through the use of incentives, training, or creating new positions , for example).

Technology Professionals

The final role that is responsible for BTM is technology professionals, who can be either internal resources from the IT department or external service providers. Technology professionals are responsible primarily for designing and implementing the technology architecture, which includes the applications and systems that are modeled during technology automation. But, at the same time, they need to work with business professionals to validate the impact of IT decisions and make sure that the technology architecture matches back to the company's business needs and objectives.

Technology professionals, including developers, system analysts, and other specialists, are frequently responsible for implementing the final project as well. Once a project receives funding and moves into implementation, the to-be enterprise model developed during the activities of BTM becomes a reference point which helps to make sure that the project stays true to its initial business goals. One other advantage that the enterprise model provides during this stage is that it helps to improve decision-making when the development team faces unexpected but inevitable design changes. In the past, these changes would have been made on a piecemeal basis. But BTM makes it realistic to do end-to-end impact analysis for almost any modification, so that even last-minute technology changes are made with the overall good of the project in mind.



The Alignment Effect. How to Get Real Business Value Out of Technology
The Alignment Effect: How to Get Real Business Value Out of Technology
ISBN: 0130449393
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2001
Pages: 83
Authors: Faisal Hoque

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