1. The Modern Enterprise

Remember those classic Oldsmobile commercials that said, “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile?” While information technology (IT) today has the same mission it has always had, the culture, ecosystem, and organizational needs that it serves have evolved drastically over the past 20-30 years.

The sheer scope of enterprise technology has far outgrown historical models of management, and today’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) needs to stay ahead of the curve. Sometimes this means betting on a technology or service, but more often than not it means adjusting to the modern marketplace where delivery cycles are often measured in weeks rather than months or years.

In my father’s time, IT was a “thing” that was replacing people or less efficient tools. His stenographer was replaced with a Dictaphone, and then eventually by a do-it-yourself word processor. This was both empowering and frustrating, because it enabled greater levels of self-service to more people while removing organizational bottlenecks, but it also required shifts in the way people thought about and performed their jobs.

Perhaps that shift in technology is hard to fathom today, when the smartphone in your pocket has more functionality and raw processing power than an entire office had back in the early days of computing. But that shift is still going on today, and continues to accelerate. Today we’re replacing our Dictaphones with word processors by:

• Replacing on-premises servers and datacenter management with cloud services.
• Abstracting “things” like server racks into virtualized resources such as compute and storage nodes, containerized services, and even “serverless” computing (e.g. AWS Lambda).
• Outsourcing commodity IT services like DNS, backups, hierarchical storage, and web services.
• Relying more and more on vendors, platform providers, service providers, and open-source software to build and maintain things that were once managed solely in-house.

This is nowhere near to an exhaustive list, nor is it meant to be. It simply highlights that the pace of change, and especially the introduction of new paradigms in IT, continue to increase over time. New (and sometimes disruptive) technologies are also forcing new paradigms on enterprise IT management, and the modern CIO no longer controls the tap through which new technology appears. Instead, the mission has become one of creating a healthy, dynamic framework through which the organization can sip from a technology firehose without drowning in the deluge.

This requires a shift in thinking from old models of centralized service delivery to one of empowerment through self-service. The need for IT governance and strategic curation has not gone away; in fact, it has increased dramatically! But the new paradigm to enable it is a tripod that rests on three legs:

• automation,
• self-service, and
• team-based empowerment.

Like DNA, the agile CIO can successfully combine and recombine these key elements in creative ways to build the right culture, infrastructure, and services to take an organization to the next level. But before a CIO can be an effective agent of change within the organization, it may be useful to examine the role of the modern CIO in more detail.