At the beginning of the year, while participating in a roundtable on Digital Transformation with CIOs from various sectors, someone asked who should lead projects when a business unit wants to acquire software. The debate was very interesting, with all kinds of arguments. Most stated that in their company, they always select the software themselves. Only a few allow the user to make the selection, with support from the IT department (to ensure integration with other systems, hardware control, and compliance with internal standards).
A couple of months later, during a presentation on the benefits of RPA technology, once again an attendee asked me who should lead these types of projects: the IT department or the user themselves, and a small discussion similar to the previous one began. I shared my experience with this specific technology, for which most of my clients have created an RPA department or team made up mostly of power users who are the ones building the software robots.
But this got me interested in the topic and led me to reflect on the following facts:
- In my company’s sales methodology, special emphasis is placed on always involving the user, as they are the ones who truly have the problem, understand the software’s functionality best, and know how far it can help them. They can also evaluate how future functionality (the product roadmap) would fit their job in the coming years. On many occasions, we receive a requirements document (RFI or RFP) in which questions about functionality are less important than those about integration, databases, and security.
- Some of my main clients, large multinational companies with whom I have an ongoing relationship, decided some time ago to decentralize software purchasing, allowing business units to determine which applications they need.
- A Harvard Business Review survey (2015) on CEOs’ perspectives regarding their IT departments and CIOs revealed that over half of CEOs believe their CIOs don’t know how to effectively apply technology in a changing business, and only 25% think their CIOs perform better than other executives.
- Department heads now understand much more about technology than they did ten years ago and are perfectly prepared to talk with technology vendors. We also see that more and more CEOs are getting involved in technology matters, and they tend to be the ones who best support digital transformation within their companies.
- IT departments have spent the last decade carrying out costly and lengthy back-office system implementations such as ERPs, ECMs, CRMs, etc. Besides being seen as a cost center, users tend to think that the only mission of IT is to keep all these systems running day to day and to prevent outages.
With this outlook, I was left wondering about the true role of IT within the company and how I could support them from the perspective of a technology provider. The answer came to me from Jon Mancini, when this summer I took the course “Meeting the Challenge of Digital Transformation” (https://es.linkedin.com/learning/meeting-the-challenge-of-digital-transformation?trk=seo_pp_d_cymbii_title_m015_learning). In one part of the course, Mancini explains that CIOs and their IT departments need to transform themselves because, for many years, they have only focused on one of the letters that gives them meaning: the “T” for Technology, getting involved in continuous application and system installation projects, while completely forgetting about the other letter, the “I” for Information.
As a fundamental premise, the CIO and their IT department are responsible for ensuring that information within a company is available where and when it is needed. From my point of view, this gives a new perspective to the IT department, which should now proactively lead all projects involving information, but not just from the perspective of compatibility, security, or standards, but from the perspective of information itself—which, in the end, is the same perspective as the user’s.
Mancini even believes that a new IT role will emerge, the Information Technician, whose mission will be to understand and care solely about information flows within the company. I believe this is a good way to involve IT in the business and a great way to start an internal digital transformation process.
I suspect that in the coming years, we will see a mix in which many will continue focusing on applications, others will continue empowering their users, and a few will take the lead and start focusing on information flows without being asked by other departments. Surely, the latter will end up gaining a competitive advantage over the rest. What is clear to me is that next time this question arises, the debate will last much longer…