CIO Best Practices: Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology

Preface

Anyone working in information technology today feels the opportunities for creating and enabling lasting value, and the CIO helps define those opportunities so that they can be turned into realities. That's what this book is about. Humanity has discovered an evolutionary tool that allows us to realize our true potential—intellectually, artistically, socially, and above all, creatively. But we must be circumspect as we explore the uses of this new tool that works as an extension of our own minds. Living as we do on the edge of an evolutionary horizon, we must learn to respect the two native forces that have pulled human creativity in opposite directions since the beginning: (1) the drive to understand more about ourselves and our world, and (2) the desire for safety and security. Some part of us craves the entirely new; another part longs to be safe and is uncomfortable with change.

No senior executive feels the disjointed pull of these two forces more than the chief information officer,^[1] who seeks to create new frontiers of strategic information technology value for the enterprise while working in an environment of service and stewardship for other people's interests. New strategic frontiers demand that the CIO take bold, decisive risks as new technologies offer competitive opportunities. Service and stewardship responsibilities demand that the CIO also take care of the day-to-day needs of people that depend on more basic information technology resources to perform what ...