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From the Office the CIO
Opportunities and Challenges Lie Ahead
Gone are the dark and gloomy "do more with less" days of 2002 and 2003, when IT leaders were primarily expected to downsize and control costs. Nowadays, the expectations and the demand placed upon IT by the business are around expansion and growth. More often, CIOs tell me that they are expected to contribute to top line growth through innovation and investment in IT.
CEOs expect IT to be much more dynamic than it has been in the past so that the business can make faster operation changes. The next generation enterprise needs to be built on a fluid and flexible service-oriented architecture (SOA). However, embarking on SOA without having the executive support and buy-in from the business is tantamount to committing career suicide.
Before IT can help transform the business and gain the confidence of executive management, IT must transform itself or run the risk of being viewed as failing. Irrespective of executive sponsorship, CIOs must ensure they have a great strategy and with that strategy needs to come the right skills, the right global staffing model, the right partners, and the right vendors to get the job done. All this while the pressure from the business to continue to drive down operational expense while increasing efficiency and guaranteeing more uptime continues in relentless fashion.
Roughly seventy percent (70%) of the IT budget goes to non-discretionary spending and not to new initiatives. The ability to reduce this figure so that additional dollars can be carved out for R&D is clearly the CIO's responsibility.
Earlier this year, Taos unveiled its management consulting practice called "Office of the CIO" (OCIO). This offering specializes in enhancing the success of the CIO through partnership to accelerate IT transformation and cost optimization initiatives; specifically to work with the CIO on defining and executing on initiatives that will shift dollars from "keeping the lights on" to building top line growth. OCIO has taken off with a bang and that is directly related to where the focus of the CIO is these days.
Through OCIO Taos brings a variety of broad capabilities to the table to help the CIO fully optimize IT focusing on challenges like operations assessment and planning to leverage a global IT structure, M&A IT integration, offshore management, developing next-generation architectures, vendor negotiations, untangling telecom, creation of a PMO, IT Process Management, interim IT management, and so forth.
In this issue of the Taos Newsletter, IT Intelligence, we would like to share an article by John Keast; former CIO of PG&E and Claris, and former Chief Architect for DHL Worldwide. John provides a provocative article with pragmatic advice to the CIO who is looking at creating a next-generation architecture. Currently John is working on OCIO engagements with Taos and has been a key contributor to the success of the Practice.
Another great piece comes from Robert Urwiler, former CIO of Macromedia. In his article titled "100 weeks of IT Transformation", he shares his experience and success in transforming Macromedia’s IT organization.
We hope you find these perspectives interesting and useful. As always, we welcome your feedback on the Newsletter, and suggestions for future topics. Taos is privileged to be involved in numerous IT initiatives with a "who's who" of IT leaders in the Bay Area. If you would like to talk to me and learn more about our "Office of the CIO" or about our broader services, feel free to contact me directly at ric@taos.com.
Sincerely,
Ric Urrutia
CEO & Founder
"delivering excellence in IT"
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