The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

6.8. What Should You Look for in a CIO?

It should be clear that spearheading major change is not an easy task. As a group, CIOs are famously risk averse. They know that if the system goes down, or if a hacker gets into sensitive areas, it will be bad for the corporation and maybe the end of their careers.

So CIOs tend to be a cautious breed. "Don't mess anything up" might as well be the official IT motto. But to make the kind of changes I have called for, you are going to need somebody who can see the big picture and imagine things two, three, or five years into the future.

The key here is that we are talking about a new kind of CIO, a CIO not cut from the follow-the-herd, don't-rock-the-boat cloth of the 1980s and 1990s. What this different CIO has to do is really completely understand how IT is used throughout the organization, especially paying attention to what tasks people perform in the course of their jobs. He or she needs to create an IT group that continually analyzes these tasks, ruthlessly hunting down any activities that are not actually creative (which means that they have decision points which cannot be structured).

The IT group is still concerned with technology, of course; it still needs to make sure that the network stays up and that the bad guys are kept out. But more and more the IT group is becoming the business process analysis and automation group. It is a whole new mind-set, starting with a whole-hearted commitment to building disposable software, and building ...