Higher expectations from end users and a larger focus on efficiency and value for money drive change in the public sector. In many cases, these contribute to a fundamental re-evaluation of service delivery and the need for transformational change to achieve the industry’s desired outcomes. Given IT’s role as a key enabler of business transformation, the CIO needs to be at the executive table to share how IT can contribute to transformational initiatives.

For more than 17 years, I have advised government clients on public sector reform and have led large complex transformation projects for their back office functions. In my experience, if technology leaders want their voices heard by chief executives, they must demonstrate that they recognize their key role in business transformation.

Since there is no universal way to do this, I have provided three steps to help CIOs become more influential during transformational projects.

1. Manage government stakeholder needs.
Since IT is a service-driven department, CIOs must be aware of their stakeholders and actively manage them. Stakeholders can include your customers, CEO or company employees. CIOs need to know who they are, understand what they need from your team and communicate the IT department’s requirements to them. By engaging stakeholders in dialogue and fostering relationships with them, CIOs will be able to address concerns at the executive table and build credibility.

2. Obtain clarity on how IT can align with business requirements while competing for scarce resources.
In any corporate environment, the CEO faces competing bids from different departments within the organization to fund strategic projects. With increasing demands on public sector finances, this is becoming ever more relevant to public sector organizations. In order to compete for scarce resources, CIOs must be present at the executive table and demonstrate the value that IT can add to the business requirements.

To prepare, consider how IT investments can help fulfill the business’s objective, the scope of work involved and how the IT department can fit their needs within the broader business strategy and budget. Clearly demonstrating this alignment will contribute to the CIO’s influence during long-term transformation projects.

3. Demonstrate the benefits of technology-driven changes.
If IT departments want to introduce new technology, CIOs must be able to demonstrate the benefits to the end user, how it will contribute to the organization’s strategic goals and its financial and business benefits. This requires a detailed understanding of the end-to-end business processes. The business insight CIOs gain from this will create a unique combination with their technology expertise to help them become a vital and respected contributor in the boardroom.

Large-scale business changes require a business-savvy CIO who is able to articulate the IT department’s benefits to decision-makers and help deliver their agency’s objectives. CIOs who can see how IT aligns with their organization’s business strategy and clearly articulate the alignment to executives will create meaningful transformation that ultimately benefits Canadian citizens.

Roger de Montfort led a panel, The Leadership Role of the CIO, at GTEC’s CIO Boot camp on Monday October 5, 2009.

Online conversations are transforming the relationship between people and organizations. Are government bodies listening? By David Jacobson, PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada LLP

With blended or multimedia search results at our fingertips (including video, images, blog posts, and personalization searches), leisure and business are rapidly and dramatically changing and converging. Welcome to the age of the “selfsumer”. In this new era, Canadians use discussion forums, blogs, email, text messages and a variety of social networking tools to share what, when and how they buy. The way they communicate has changed the rules of business. If government and the public sector wish to participate, they cannot continue using only traditional approaches to connect with their staff and the public.

My experience as an emerging technologies director with PwC Canada indicates that selfsumers are a growing number of consumers and employees who search for, discover and create information on products, services and companies via multiple sources on the web. They collaborate online using various social media to find and make purchase decisions. This is a new type of consumer that is less reliant on hard sell commercials and more reliant on discovering products and brands using the internet and social networking.

With one voice that can morph into a community in minutes, selfsumers’ online influence has begun to alter the relationship between businesses and the public. This shift has challenged business leaders to think more creatively when developing new products, promotional content and e-commerce channels. Public sector leaders can do the same to increase their level of engagement with Canadians.

Analyzing selfsumers’ digital behaviour can help government organizations refine their ability to capture consumer intelligence, gain insight into their changing needs and build connectivity. It can also help cash-strapped agencies save money because targeted campaigns are supported by a deeper understanding of consumers which removes guesswork and decreases the likelihood of wasted time and financial resources.

Government executives must rely on their CIOs to translate selfsumers’ ideas into a business and IT strategy. To be fully effective, the IT centre will need different approaches to read digital behaviour and meet strategic goals.

To stay agile with changing digital conversations, CIOs need to be more creative when strategizing with the executive team. For example, they can deliver new types of lucrative business applications, uncover ways for departments and data servers to share information and knowledge, and improve data-warehousing to keep pace with growing amounts of information exchanged between Canadians on blogs and message boards. This creativity, agility and innovation will become more beneficial as selfsumers’ tastes and skills continue to influence more business applications and practices.

According to PwC’s study How the Consumer Conversation Will Transform Business, the number of online discussions about a customer-facing organization – its brand and reputation – can reach thousands or even millions per day. Aggregating and analyzing these online conversations will require increasingly sophisticated technology and a commitment to continually improve strategies to listen, process and quickly respond. Government agencies that embrace these methods demonstrate their commitment to helping Canadians.

For more information on the dialogue with consumers, read PwC Canada’s 2009 Report on Emerging Canadian Software Companies: A CEO Perspective and Navigating the Era of the Empowered Consumer.

By Ivan Milam, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

More than a decade ago, most Canadian public sector and government CIOs focused on providing “the pipes, power and ping” for their organizations. Their primary job was to keep the department’s IT infrastructure and applications running. Their priorities were often set by other executives whose primary purpose was to drive down cost while demanding increased service.  However, over the past 10 years public sector CIOs have increasingly come to the  understanding that to be an equal partner at the executive table they must break from their traditional “infrastructure delivery” roles and embrace a much more strategic one of an equal business partner in the organization.

As a trusted public sector advisor with PwC, I have helped many departments make this very important transition.  Through these experiences, I’ve witnessed CIO’s make this journey by using, to varying degrees, elements of the following 6 key activities.

1. Deliver core services efficiently

IT departments are continually asked to do more with less. CIOs who are strategic partners demonstrate to business executives that they’re delivering core services at the lowest expense while achieving high levels of client satisfaction.  Without this foundation piece, CIOs typically get stuck in the process of continually defending IT’s cost instead highlighting its value.

But doing so means utilizing all available options to enhance IT efficiency. These include outsourcing, co-sourcing, co-partnerships, and improving collaboration with other stakeholders and partners.  Leveraging all options to improve the day-to-day IT functions free up CIOs to do what CIOs do best – highlight strategic and innovation opportunities to help drive their organization’s to meet their strategic goals and outcomes.

2. Immerse yourself in the business and demonstrate your knowledge

CIOs must not only show value by delivering services efficiently. They must also develop a genuine understanding of the business outside of IT operations. High performing IM/IT executives learn about the business processes, business drivers, and strategic focus of all business units in their organization.  By showing their knowledge of the organization and selling ideas supported by data and a sound knowledge of the business, they demonstrate they are not only a technology person but a strategic peer at the executive level.

3. Align your innovation and ideas with the organization’s strategic vision using a structured process

Instead of taking orders at the board room table, leading CIO’s are proactive in presenting ideas that align IT’s investments with the organization’s priorities. One way to do this is to develop a structured process for prioritizing innovative ideas for IT investment. A structured process helps to identify, evaluate, develop and present new IT innovations to the organization. Then, as an executive team, they can determine the best ideas that align with the organization’s strategic vision.

4. Stay engaged by connecting with people

Gaining visibility at the executive, stakeholder and staff level with active participation and collaboration is another tool used by many CIOs. Building these relationships allows CIOs to share the organization’s vision and learn how vendors, suppliers or employees can contribute.

Successful CIOs are often seen engaging stakeholders by participating in local public speaking events to communicate where they’re taking their organizations and how stakeholders can help. Other platforms used to get the message out to staff include wikis, blogs and social networking tools. These methods contribute to collaboration and innovation, and build awareness around the IT department’s value to the organization.

5. Enable agility with effective architecture

Typically, a lot of companies have a complex IT architecture with different systems that do not work well together. This hampers innovation and the agility to solve problems quickly.

CIOs who bring IT from the back office to the executive table develop and more importantly implement architectures that provide flexibility to handle the changes that innovation brings. Reducing system complexity and increasing standardization are two key approaches that allow organizations to pivot on a dime when embracing new technologies or discovering new priorities.

6. Keep an eye on risk

The balancing act for CIOs is to bring value while remaining cognizant of risk. IT represents a significant area of vulnerability for an organization in different ways. Without adequate controls, companies may leave themselves open to fraud, security breaches, or a loss of intellectual capital. 

Effective CIOs balance security, risk and compliance requirements with innovation.

With technology playing such a large role in our lives today, CIOs must be equal partners at the executive table.  Today, an ever increasing number of CIOs are advancing down this path. For each CIO and each organization, the journey is different but many of the steps are similar. 

Late Tuesday afternoon, we launched NRTube which is NRCan’s internal, YouTube-like video sharing tool.  Consistent with our suite of tools, NRTube is open source with a simple interface.

The tool was quietly announced via an email from the CIO to all employees.  There was no great fanfare.  No balloons, no confetti, no big splashy posters.  Just a short message inviting employees to test out NRTube by using it as much as possible and posting any performance or other issues to a feedback page on our Wiki. 

What resulted in the 24 hours following the launch was inspiring.

1. At 8:28 on Wednesday morning I received an email message from an NRCan scientist with the subject line:  NRTube – no contest!  His message read:  I posted two videos at around 16:30 last night. Currently sitting at #1 and #2 most watched overall. #3 is so far behind we can’t see it in our rear-view mirror.
2. At 10:43 am I received a telephone call from a 2.0 colleague at NRCan absolutely giddy.    “Have you seen the stats for NRTube?”, he exclaimed.  “Check out the number of watched videos!”  At that time the number was 913.  It was pretty cool to watch the number increase as we continued our conversation and by the time I hung up the receiver about 15 minutes later, the number of watched videos had climbed to 1,191. 
3. At 1:58 I made a phone call to a Director in our Sydney, BC office with whom I am coordinating a Web 2.0 workshop for the Fall.  He sheepishly admitted he has spent about an hour of his morning watching some NRCan videos on NRTube and proceeded to tell me about his favourite ones.  

Wow!  On all three counts I was thrilled. 

Regarding the scientist, this is the same scientist who was luke-warm to NRCan’s suite of collaboration tools back in April when I first contacted him to set up a meeting.  When we finally met a few weeks ago to talk about how he and his group could begin incorporating some of the tools, I suggested he use NRTube, once it was released, to help him manage his volume of video.  This suggestion was met with indifference and a comment about not seeing the value of sharing his material with an internal audience.   And now, he posted 2 videos to NRTube within 15 minutes of its launch and by the next morning his two videos were, by far, the most viewed videos out of 21 videos posted. 

His initial reluctance to use the tools for internal knowledge creation and sharing is in keeping with most from the science community.  Scientists are quite adept at collaborating and sharing their knowledge – just not so much outside their community of peers.  But now, I suspect another Web 2.0 champion is born!

At the time of writing this blog posting, NRTube had 36 videos that had been viewed over 1,650 times.  I think I am catching my colleague’s giddiness.  The fact that employees are using NRTube is great.  That they are watching videos about NRCan science – amazing images of explosives testing, a succinct history of the Geological Survey of Canada, instructional videos on how to make our homes more energy efficient and more – is fantastic!  These videos are imparting knowledge. 

All of a sudden I feel that employees at NRCan are really beginning to see the value of Web 2.0 in the workplace.  There has always been a very active community of Web 2.0 champions, but it seems that NRTube might just be the tipping point that sees Web 2.0 tools become so integrated that we forget what it was like not to have them. 

Put out the tools and let the community decide how to use them.  Darn right!  For me, it’s the small victories that are the sweetest – one employee at a time! 

 It’s a tall order to fill. Here are some indicators of what will be required of future CIOs.

By John Soat
InformationWeek
June 21, 2008 12:00 AM (From the June 23, 2008 issue)

If the question is, “do you have what it takes to be Tomorrow’s CIO?” (and that is the question for aspiring business technology leaders and IT vets looking to stay relevant), the answer is, maybe not. I hate to be harsh, but it’s a tall order to fill. Let’s review.

In our recent InformationWeek Analytics 2008 Tomorrow’s CIO Survey of 720 senior business technology executives, the following attributes were agreed on as the most desirable for future business technology leaders, and in this order: leadership, ability to execute, collaboration and communication, vision, innovation, team building, consensus building, and technical breadth and depth. Oh, and you can tack on raw intellect.

Sounds like qualities you look for in any leader, you say? Fair enough. But let’s face it–it’s hard to find leaders who exhibit more than two of those qualities, even the really good leaders. Now put those in the context of business technology, and things get a lot more complicated.

“First, they have to make sure they really want to be a CIO,” says Steve Phillips, CIO of technology distributor Avnet. Phillips says he meets individuals who view the CIO position as simply the logical extension of the technology career path. What they don’t understand is “the broader context of being a CIO,” he says, the business context, how they must hone their business process skills, learn to engage with leadership, and develop their people management skills.

On the other hand, CIOs can’t underestimate the technology demands. For one thing, it’s a matter of credibility. “If an executive isn’t seen as credible in their own function, they’re not credible across the table,” says Doug Tracy, executive VP of IT, North America, and global chief technology officer for Rolls-Royce. Another IT exec says he knows Fortune 50 CIOs who get calls from their CEOs having problems with their BlackBerrys. “How many CFOs get calls about their CEOs’ expense reports?” he says.

Those are the challenges of today’s CIO, and hard enough at that. What about Tomorrow’s CIO?

“For survival, the CIO has to move up and reinvent the role,” says Bruce Rogow, a consultant and researcher who knows as much as anybody about CIOs, having traveled the country interviewing a database worth of them for the last several years. “And he better reinvent it before the new boss does.”

Business technology is a bet on the future, Rogow says, though many CIOs insist on viewing it as a here-and-now issue. Tomorrow’s CIO has to have the tech savvy to make smart bets, the salesmanship to sell those to the organization, and the process and architecture expertise so that they make sense when–not if–business models change, along with revenue expectations and the faces at the top.

If you’re interested in finding out your potential to be Tomorrow’s CIO, test yourself against our online interactive tool,” Tomorrow’s CIO: Are You Ready Today?“. Also, “Tomorrow’s CIO” is the theme of our upcoming InformationWeek 500 Conference. Rub elbows with the real thing, and share experiences and challenges with a network of your peers.

Share your thoughts and experiences at our CIOs Uncensored blog.

To find out more about John Soat, please visit his page.