A change agent CIO, his real strategic stake.

CIO contribution is often assessed on the basis of IT value indicator which most of the time is improved when costs lower, quality of service rises, and risk level is acceptable. Furthermore, some firms expect from CIO to be one of their most important change agent. This is an opportunity for CIO’s which helps to bring them front and to give them a true strategic role. Then, the scope of CIO is not limited to IT Division but encompasses the whole company.

Often in the past, the widespread thought was that’s enough to find the right technology and company people will immediately get it and change its way of working.

IT vision and IT Strategy what is the difference ?

In my previous post, I addressed the point of view that IT Strategy is not only business alignment, but should rely on a strong vision of IT role in the company.

Then, in this post, I propose to address the points of IT vision utility and how to build it with respect to IT Strategy.

Unfortunately, in the business world, few situations support to undertake no move, because usually stakeholders are facing externalities which raise questions on the way the company business is done. Beside, business undergo internal pressure when, for example, company reach poor execution performance in some areas.
The same happen for IT, if you choose to not move when all your environment is changing, you are quickly out of the business, or if you perform poorly you out your buiness at risks.

IT Strategy and IT alignment

Holidays ending up shortly, it is time to rise up a little bit our views and to start discussing about Strategy.

When reviewing papers regarding IT Strategy, they often talk about IT Strategic alignement. Most of them seems to assert that the only acceptable strategy for IT is to be aligned with Business. Despite this general point of view, when rewinding the tape, some messages looked questionable.

For instance, when considering strategy you deal with long term goals and action plans. As it seems obvious, the spreading of strategic planning methods like Balanced Scorecard (BSC) has set the long term line to next year which is pretty short. Are we really still in strategy ?