Engaging in Cio-Cxo Conversations That Matter

Individual Assignment Engaging in CIO-CxO “Conversations that Matter”: An Interview with Peter Keen. MIS Quarterly Executive 9(1): (2010). Hamza Lahkim Bennani 10-24-2012 MIS 3301 Dr. Chihab Benmoussa Reflection Q1: I have heard you say more than once that CxOs are not interested in “IT. ” Can you explain what you mean by that? Peter Keen, The chairman and advisor of Keen Innovations, answered this question very clearly, where he stated that it is important that CxOs know the importance of information systems in their company and how it can extend and integrate relationships between the companies processes.

For the majority of CxOs, knowing the innards of an information system is not as crucial as knowing how the plateform developed is used and how it can increase the performance of a company. He talked about Facebook where he showed how 300 million people use it daily but don’t know how the plateform works, they just use it for communicating with people. CxOs are tuning out, and the more comfortable they are about the value of IT, the less they want or need to tune in on the old technology discourses” said Peter Keen, which means that even when CxOs start using IS in their company and giving it importance, they don’t regret it and think that is enables more business capacities. “Over the last five years, the whole business has become much moreIT-aware and IT-literate, and sees the need to get more involved in IT so that business benefits are delivered.

As a result, It has become more influential and more proactive. , and has driven an increasingly an entreprisewide culture. ” (Andrew Mullock, CIO, BNP Paribas) As far as CIOs are concerned, Peter Keen thinks that their role in the corporation is as important as the role of any other CxO, sometimes even more important. CIOs know exactly what is going on inside the comany, and through information technology they know how to solve problems in a very efficient and effective way.

CIOs should be among the decision making commitee inside the company; their influence on strategical decisions could be very important and fruitful. Peter Keen thinks that business-savvy CIOs are the ones who know how to communicate with other people inside the company, from the CxOs to the emloyees in the IS or IT departement. Key skills of today’s CIO include the ability to translate Board requirements into solutions. He needs to talk the language of the Board and the investors. All innovation in our industry will be technology- led or technology facilitated. (McGill, 2011)

As I see it, CxOs and CIOs are interdependant in an organization, they should all work in a harmony that will enable the company to perform better in terms of solving inner problems that will eventually enhance profi making and more revenues. It is illustrated in the example Peter Keen gave by saying that and General is not an army without his subordinates. In this case, the general are the CxOs, and the subordinate are the CIO and the people working in the IT department. To put it in a nutshell, companies should not think that It is involved only when there is something not working weel inside the company and work is not well synchronised.

Q2: As you look back at the last 30 years, how do you think that the role of the CIO has changed in terms of its focus on the operations mission vis-a- vis business strategy, and what does that suggest for CIO role changes in the future ? For Peter Keen, the role of the CIO nowadays compared to 30 years ago underwent some changes. Before, a CIO was just a technology shop manager that is considered one of the costs to be controlled; but years later, the role of the CIO has changed to be a crucial part of an organization, that is now responsible for many tasks such as cost containment and operations liability.

Insourcing and outsourcing is also one of the tasks a CIO is responsible of, and it is bringing competitive advantage to organizations. CIOs have got a lot of attention recently despite the economic turdowns in the recent years. CIOs have some skills and capabilities that can help comapnies concentrate on business operations and help them solve some cross-functional problems that still confuses many entreprises. “For yesterday’s CIOs, and many of today’s as well, it was enough to have two out of three key capabilities – personal leadership, technology leadership and business acumen. Tomorrow’s CIO will need all three. ” (Brumby, 2010)

I think that CIOs should be in charge of more strategic tasks. Being a CIO and evolving well inside the company is difficult and requires certain skills that not all CxOs have. As for Peter keen, he assumes that the CIO’s role will have more importance and gets more attention within time in the future. The following diagram illustrates the role of a CIO in an organization and how it works. (IBM, 2008) Q3: At your ICIS 2009 presentation you talked about “conversations that matter. ” Could you expand on that? Peter Keen in the answer of this question focused most on innovation, and how the CIOs innovation can better help an organization.

Besides, Professor Keen talekd about the importance of use of the appropriate language to between CIOs. He also pointed that for a conversation to be effective, the things that should be discussed are things that are worth sharing, questioning and arguing about rather than shop-talk and social chat. For Peter keen, some intersections that are between CxOs, CIOs, IT proffesionals and educators’ dialogs, are the kind of discussions where CxOs are present and that are never cancelled anr successful because there is someone high up in the organization who cares about them as personal and leadership riority. In these intersections, some irreversible business decisions are made, where most fruitful discussions are about how to enter a market overseas and other important subjects. CIOs are usually present in those conversations for the aim of bringing somme innovation in sloving some issues like costs of operations and not discussing them. Few years ago, moving IT as a profession towards business awareness has well progressed as CxOs came late to see that IT is a great opporunity for them to evoluate the coordination of technology for thei company, saying that they were unimaginative ever before.

As I see it, companies have been losing or badly investing in some things that are worthless relatively to what IT has done in the business domain. Q4: Why do conversations that matter in CxO circles address innovation, rather than invention? Dr. Keen thinks that innovation is better than innovation because invention is bout product features the logic of benefits, however innovation is about inventing value. As far as CxOs are consered, Peter Keen stated that they should be among the exclusive people in an organization to be able to talk about innovation.

For him, no invention nor innovation should be under/overestimated. RFID is an example of the problems happening while going from invention to business value. “Successful companies actively cultivate new ideas, put those ideas to work quickly and efficiently, and harvest the business value benefits of successful innovations. Discussions of innovation often focus on what a company offers, that is, its products and services. In Managing Information Technology Innovation for Business Value, Esther Baldwin and Martin Curley show how successful IT innovations pay back handsomely as well.

Innovation is not just about what a company offers, innovation is also about how a company conducts business and how IT innovation can transform an organization into a significantly more efficient company. ” (Baldwin & Curley , 2009) What Peter tried to say here is that investing in an innovative IT solution provides even greater business value. Practicing innovation is necessary to make a firm’s IT investment successful, and that is what some Intel Corporation IT managers have learned through many years of experience. Q5: Can you give us some examples of conversations for innovation?

Peter Keen explained and showed what conversations for innovation talk about, mostly about how IT is changing the financial structures of the enterprise in a deleveraged world, and how we are moved to a variable cost business model. He used Amazon as an example to show that IT makes organizations decrease their costs the maximum; for Amazon for instance, thei have over 2 million storesbut did not invest in fixed capital assets. For him, the discussions and conversations between the CIO and the CFO is very important, and that a good collaboration between the two is very advised for the better making of money.

Both of them can learn from the other, and so come up with very good ideas and make strategic decisions when needed. He also said that these one of a kind companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and Wal-Mart inspire other companies and help them make better decisions based on one of a kind companies. There is the famous example of Wal-Mart, where CIOs and other CxOs work in harmony and have conversations mostly on implementing new strategies that will help them minimize costs as much as they could. The strategy of Wal-Mart is having no warehouses.

When they run out of stock, people in the IT departement can have access and check their suppliers warehouse and see if the product they run out of stock from is available, if so they just order it through this database. This strategy helped Wal-Mart minimize the cost of the warehouses, their electricity bills, less employees to pay, and finally decrease their phone bills fee. Q6: Let us take the example of a currently-hyped technical issue such as cloud computing. How can we transform that into a conversation for innovation?

For this question, Peter Keen said that when talking about cloud computing as a conversation for innovation, things that could be discussed are about how can cloud computing change the variabe cost structure of the entreprise, and how it can add flexibility and speed of responde for the IT organization. For Dr. Keen, chaning the customer experience is very important, and IT can help do that. He said that it is useless if CxOs are going to talk about virtualization or open cloud standards. Cloud computing has present an attractive opportunity to both small business and large enterprise.

Traditional information systems were predominately operated on physical machines that were in house. The emergence of cloud computing makes it possible to develop information systems on virtual machines that are hosted by cloud service providers. For the companies that IT is not their core business, cloud computing presents an opportunity to save costs on the development of information systems that support their major business operations. (Chou, 2007) Q7: What is it that you think the IT professional worker in general knows that brings special value to the organization?

What is their distinctive competence in the next decade? For Peter Keen, the competences that distinguish IT professionals are bein good at analyzing business processes and multi-functional at the same time. It is in usually necessary and plays a crucial role in the innovation conversation because CIOs know how to integrate and put all pieces together. He gave the example of people in the organization not kowing how things work in other departements, but stated that people in the IT departement have an idea about the general processes of the organizations they are working for.

What also distinguishes IT people is that they really understand data assurance, data integrity and version control, which are distinctive competences thay have. For Keen, it is important not to underestimate the difficulties of implementing the innovation of a new genration technology. The IT coordination skills can equally live in the business, the IT organization, or in a third-party provider. In a world where achieving results can often require the participation of a multitude a loosely related resources, effective coordination skills are paramount. Among these skills we find coordination, analysis and innovation. (Reichental, 2011)

Q8: What does all this mean for IS academics as researchers and teachers? Keen briefly stated that executive education needs to be reinvented in order to develop the next generation of IT leaders, for him CIOs and CxOs who innovate have their efforts becoming practice by other IT professionals who are growing in order to become next CIOs or CxOsIn terms of their educational function, IS academics need to consider their role in the wider context of social and political changes. These include the delivery of generic IS/IT skills through all levels and types of education (Gough, 2000). (Hemingway, 2000) References Charles, B. (2002).

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