I read a recent article from CIO magazine that was very thought provoking. It reports on the finding from their 2010 State of the CIO survey and makes the case that progressive CIOs are spending more time and energy working directly with customers and driving direct revenue from IT services - and most importantly, that this is where the future of the CIO role is going.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I'm a huge believe that CIO's should really view themselves as CEO's of IT services companies who are providing a set of services to a group of customers. I believe that it is a paradigm that positions IT in a manner that can enable it to provide significant value to the business in a meaningful way. From this model, it is not difficult to imagine the "CEO" of IT developing a new product offering whose customer is, well, the customer.
In some cases, this may very well be a true expression of the paradigm. Particularly in information-based industries, IT is often providing a product that is directly consumable by the customer. But I also believe that there is a risk here that the true foundation of this paradigm gets lost in the rush to deliver a direct IT revenue source. Many of the examples offered in the article were not, in my opinion, true IT services. Instead, they were IT-enabled services of the business. In such, IT was not providing these services directly to the customer by themselves, but was truly partnering with another part of the company to enhance services or the customer experience.
Don't get me wrong. I think that every CIO should read this article and ask themselves what they need to be doing to move their organization further in this direction. But this must be done without losing sight of the paradigm and the grounding it provides. If IT is to be run as a business, then it will provide a wide range of services to a wide range of customers. Just because a service that IT provides is consumed internally, doesn't mean that it is not valuable. Every service has a customer - whether internal or external - and IT has a duty to ensure that the customer's needs are understood and that the service is provided efficiently and effectively to meet the needs of those customers.
This article is simply demonstrating how that might be done in partnership with a business unit to meet the needs of an external customer, but the fundamental process and approach should be universal. If you are providing an on-demand CRM service to your company's sales and customer service teams, the process should be the same - your "account managers" should be meeting with senior executives to understand their needs and value model, your "product managers" should be spending time with the consumers of the service to understand how it may be improved and to identify new services that can extend the value of the current service offerings and your "production teams" should be relentlessly looking for ways to reduce the transactional cost of providing the service.
So, should IT executives be actively looking for ways that they can extend the value of IT services to the customer and potentially drive direct revenue for the business? Absolutely. But in my opinion, that process should merely be an extension of how they design, provision and deliver their services to all customers - internal and external.
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