The Evolved CIO
May 6th, 2008
Career Is Over?
When talking about our 100% SaaS / Open Source strategy at Ingres, I am often asked, “what will that mean for your future as a CIO” or “how do you maintain control of technology at the company” using this model. The first thing I let them know is that CIO means “Career Is Over” – then I try to smile.
Enablement & Alignment vs. Control
First things first. Control is overrated. The role of the “evolved” CIO is to focus on strategy, innovation, and enablement rather than worrying only about operational efficiency. Sure we have policies, governance, and security measures, and we need to assure the company’s information assets are protected. But we count on people to follow the policies, and we put technology in place to assure no harm is done.
Then I hear – what about all these SaaS offerings – people can just sign up and you have no idea what they are doing. I think several CIO’s have stories about the tool, utility, or even application that suddenly appeared on the network. I certainly have my own.
The First Time…
My first experience with SaaS was at my last company. We were mired in a very poor implementation of “Project Accounting” from a legacy software vendor. When new management for the Services group came in, we discussed the situation and the difficulty we were having upgrading this on-premise nightmare. The new local VP went out on his own and found several SaaS based PSA tools, and came to the conclusion that we should seriously consider 2 finalists, and rip out the legacy provider for this function.
At first I had the typical reaction to these events – shock and horror! How could we abandon the platform in preference for some point solution? What about integration? What about reporting? After this wore off, I realized this had to be a business driven solution, and I was either going to be a part of it, or be a detractor. Well, we ended up going through a bake-off and selected OpenAir, which quickly became a huge win for the services organization and for IT as well.
Darwin’s Theory
Instead of worrying about where this would fit in the data center, what servers it would run on, and how I was going to train our operations staff on its use, I had a chance to concern myself only with how to make this work for the business as effectively as possible. We transformed Lilly from our operations department into one of the best business analysts I have ever known. IT got out of the position of being a roadblock to the services group, and into the position of being a key partner.
Does this all mean there is no room for the CIO? Not at all – these are still complex decisions that require architectural consideration and due diligence. Vendor management becomes a bigger part of your life. Making sure there is air and power in the dc becomes less a part of your life. It’s all about focus.
I have a very similar story about the adoption of open source software – the need to evolve and adopt these solutions is very much the same as with SaaS, and will cover that one in a future posting.
May 16th, 2008 at 5:12 am
As a SaaS provider, we are always interested in how to position ourselves to the CIO - are we viewed as an outsider based on previous platform choices for the legacy systems, or are we viewed as “cutting edge” and dealing with a CIO who is pushing the envelope, challenging us to be more tech-forward. We work with both kinds, but the realized benefit to the company of the Forward Thinking CIO is much greater.
The Forward Thinking CIO’s are the ones who are shaping the future of the SaaS industry. Much of the technology for next generation SaaS solutions already exists, it’s the appetite of the customer that dictates the pace of adoption. For example, when integrating systems, are you going to go with batch file transfer, or are you going to leverage web services. No single answer is correct for every organization - CIO’s have their internal customers of course. But leveraging web services introduces real-time benefits that legacy systems can’t match, and SaaS point solutions then become part of a SaaS infrastructure that is superior to the cleint-server legacy infrastructure.
As Doug points out, SaaS has traditionally been driven by the business need rather than the CIO’s office, but we’ve seen this changing in 2008 as CIO’s are becoming repeat-SaaS customers and the CIO’s are now promoting SaaS solutions to their constituents, rather than being dragged into the discussion by the business side of the house. This is where the innovation around SaaS solutions will really start to take off.