Gartner surveyed 1500 CIOs and published their results about their business priorities in their companies and the technologies that they were planning to spend money on in 2008. The #1 business priority is Business Process Improvement and the #1 Technology that they will be spending money on is Business Intelligence Solutions.
This raises the profile, expectations and the roles CIOs will play in Business Process Improvement! There is a lot of discussion about whether an IT person should be directing Business Process Improvement efforts or should those be in the domain of the Business People!
This is one of those Chicken-And-Egg situations. Unless CIOs get down and dirty among the Business Process weeds, they will not get an idea of what the problems are and draw upon their technology expertise to come up with good solutions. Unless business people are convinced that CIOs can contribute something worthwhile to the Business Process Improvement effort, they will consider them techies who just want to talk about some arcane technologies.
This impasse can be broken in some creative ways. CIO Offices should split themselves into Business Units and Company Insfrastructure units. The Business Unit related people in the CIO office should be attached to the businesses and sit along with business people. They will have only dotted line relationships to the CIOs office. The Infrastructure group within the CIO offices does not do applications, or implementations of IT solutions to business problems. Their only job is to make sure that hardware and basic software operating systems and office desktop software are all standardized and be only responsible for the hardware, basic software applications, security, business continuity, etc.
All business unit related applications and software should be in the domain of the business. They are the best people to manage this properly and should be in close proximity to the business end users. This way, they can be very familiar with the business processes side of things and come up with good solutions.
I know of a handful of companies that have reorganized their IT department this way and found that it is working well! Bringing Business Process Improvement to the top of the business priority list is very useful for the CIOs. They have a lot to contribute to Business Process Improvement, if only they leave their technology hats behind and put on their business ones!
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." -Albert Einstein
