George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, wrote an interesting article about the role of the CIO in particular and IT in general in the triad technology-process-organization.
And the fact that CEOs are not looking to the CIO to be a proactive leader in innovation and process is not bad news. [...] Why? In most companies, the CIO is too busy keeping the ship’s engines running smoothly to come up onto the command deck and make suggestions to the captain on course changes. Leading business innovation and process change is not in the skill set of most CIOs–nor should it be.
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Obviously the CIO is always working on systems innovation–that’s part of keeping the engines running smoothly. But when it comes to business innovation, he is again not the proactive driver, but rather the steady partner with business executives who are chartered to lead business innovation.
To my mind this article shows an accurate view of IT’s role as an enabler, but George Colony has forgotten one thing: IT is a mean and therefore it can stimulate a “mean-event”. In other words: The CIO may recognize and introduce a new technology that facilitates new processes and from this point of view the CIO might be the proactive driver.
