This week, I attended a CIO conference in Philadelphia, for the first time in a couple of years. It was really good to hear them talk about their experiences, goals and issues, and to talk with some of them one on one. It spurred a bunch of new thoughts, which I’ll be writing about in a series of upcoming blogs. This first posting is on CIOs playing offense.
In my last posting, I talked about the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde nature of data—data being both an asset and a liability. The CIOs talked about playing offense vs. defense. They really wanted to be engaged with business transformation and growth initiatives. But many were saddled with cumbersome, expensive IT environments that sucked up 90% of their IT spend and resources just to “keep the lights on”. In other words, they were spending almost all their time and energy playing defense.
A key reason why CIOs get stuck in defense mode is because data has become a liability. Their information and integration infrastructures are crumbling under the weight of the explosion in data, the rapid acceleration of business demands and the massive complexity and brittleness of the “integration hairball” present in the vast majority of enterprises. As chief information officers, information is their key responsibility, and they’re unable to get all the relevant data to the business when it’s needed.
To play offense, to drive the business instead of merely supporting it, CIOs need to start chipping away at the hairball, incrementally implementing a far more rational approach to data integration and information management. They need to make it a priority for the IT organization. They need to put the right people in place who have this as their sole focus. They need to make it clear, from the top down, that the status quo for tackling integration and data isn’t good enough any more. In short, if CIOs don’t want to continue to be back on their heels in a defensive posture, data integration needs to become a CIO priority.
Next posting I’ll talk about why data is transcendent over applications.
