IT leaders are under increasing pressure to keep their business knowledge and leadership skills sharp.

Business transformation means fundamental changes to a company’s organization, strategy and vision. It can be driven by external factors such as regulation, competition and consumer demands; or by an internal desire to discover new markets and create groundbreaking innovations.

The CIO and the technology resources he or she directs represent a powerful transformative force. But that’s been true for the 50 years that IT management has existed. What’s new is how market-leading companies are defining the role of the CIO, and the extent to which top CIOs are leading business transformation.

According to an e-book, Aligning Technology with Strategy (Harvard Business Press, Feb. 2011), companies that most successfully manage their IT investments — including hardware, software, services and staff — generate profits and revenue as much as 40 percent higher than those of their competitors. Factors that distinguish these top performers include collaboration among CIOs and top business executives around priorities and deriving value from IT initiatives, says the book, a compilation of recent articles from the Harvard Business Review.

“The benchmarks for the CIO role have changed pretty radically in the past two years,” says Shawn Banerji, Managing Director and Co-head of the Information Officers Practice at Russell Reynolds Associates, a global executive search firm. Market-leading companies are looking for business people with technology expertise who can identify new technologies that will enhance the business. They also want individuals who understand big data and analytics to see what’s happening with personnel and resources, observe consumer trends and anticipate future markets and needs, Banerji says.

“Keeping the lights on is still an important responsibility for the CIO, but it’s a baseline,” adds Banerji, who has extensive experience in head-hunting CIOs for major corporations. The best CIOs, he says, are not attracted to organizations where IT is just a functional backbone, but to those where IT is strategic.

According to a recent survey of 685 CIOs conducted by  CA Technologies, those IT leaders are still in the minority. In the survey, 16 percent of CIOs said they were always involved in strategic activities, 29 percent were sometimes involved, and fully 55 percent reported never being involved, says George Watt, VP of Corporate Strategy at CA Technologies and co-author of a new book, The Innovative CIO: How IT Leaders Can Drive Business Transformation (Apress, 2012). One of his co-authors, Andi Mann, VP of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies, also says that IT leaders need to communicate IT’s business value to all business units.

Some researchers believe this is starting to happen. A 2012 report produced jointly by INSEAD, a leading graduate business school, and CIONET, an IT organization of 3,500 European CIOs, says CIOs spend a significant amount of their time doing things other than managing information services. The report, “Three Ways to Thrive: How CIOs are enabling their organizations to grow and strengthen in today’s challenging economy,” identifies three areas as emerging responsibilities for CIOs: collaborating with non-IT colleagues, managing enterprisewide business processes, and working with external customers and partners.

Further, of the 188 CIOs surveyed for the report, 37 percent defined their roles as technology-driven, 41 percent as business-process-driven, and 22 percent as client-driven. Nearly 60 percent also say they expect their role to become more client-driven over the next three years, says Nils Fonstad, Associate Director of the INSEAD eLab.

The Customer-Facing CIO

Five years ago, it would have sounded strange to hear that a CIO’s duties included working with customers and partners. Now, the customer-facing CIO is in the vanguard of management trends.

Cisco System’s Rebecca Jacoby, for instance, is both CIO and Senior VP of the IT and Cloud & Systems Management Technology Group. This means Jacoby runs the IT operations and also heads a customer-facing product group. With both a degree in economics and an MBA, and company experience dating back to 1995, Jacoby has a unique and highly desirable collection of business and technology skills.

Another highly regarded customer-facing CIO is Oliver Bussmann, Global CIO of SAP. The INSEAD report states that during his first 100 days at the German software maker, Bussmann developed an award-winning strategy: transform the IT structure from silos into an agile department aligned with the various business groups. Bussmann then went on to launch the “SAP Runs SAP” project, whereby SAP is the first customer of new ERP software products. He then met with more than 250 SAP customers to share his IT department’s experience and best practices.

CIOs can enhance their skills and become transformational CIOs in a number of ways. The first is on the job: participating in key strategy initiatives and demonstrating for other C-level executives how new technology and processes can deliver business results.

Other approaches involve education, such as an MBA, which takes about one to two years to complete; certificate programs, which are shorter in duration and more targeted; and executive education programs, which focus on tactical business functions, such as financial or change management. Formal MBA programs in the U.S. and Europe stress a T-shaped skills portfolio, which includes vertical skills such as software architectures, data analytics and information security, and horizontal skills such as finance, marketing and customer relationship management.

A growing number of graduate business schools have been adding technology skills to the MBA course lineup. Rutgers Business School, located in New Jersey, for instance, added the Master IT Program in 2008. Its main focus is to give both technical and business professionals a grounding in data analytics. “We teach both technical and business analytics,” says Hui Xiong, an Associate Professor who runs the Rutgers program. “In addition, to succeed in this field, students need domain expertise, such as how analytics is used in retail or in pharmacology.”

One example of analytics in the healthcare domain comes from Premier Healthcare Alliance, which aggregates huge amounts of healthcare and business data for its member organizations. Premier’s business is organized like a professional society. Members include 2,700 hospitals and 90,000 healthcare facilities. Premier focuses on helping its affiliates transform their businesses through improved performance. “A substantial amount of what we offer involves IT,” says Randy Thomas, the company’s VP of Portfolio Strategy and Design.

By aggregating financial, purchasing, clinical and supply chain data, Premier is able to spot patterns and recommend business changes that lower costs and increase efficiency. Member CIOs are crucial in helping their organizations understand how to use this data to bring about process change, Thomas says. 

CIOs wishing to deepen their business and leadership skills will find many targeted university programs. The State University of New York’s Institute of Technology, for one, offers an MBA in technology management, an online program that combines business essentials with a technology focus.

Another program, the Information Technology Leadership Program offered by the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University, provides IT executives with general management and executive-level skills. “For most of its history, IT has been an operational and functional resource, not a strategic [one],” says Peter DeLisi, the program’s dean.

For IT leaders in the public sector, the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania offers a Certified Government CIO program to help them respond to changing requirements. The program focuses not on technology, but on leadership skills, strategy setting and business management.

Educational programs that provide business and leadership skills help CIOs collaborate effectively with other executives. Business executives need to be involved in conversations about IT, but such conversations should not be about technology. Ultimately, it’s about how the business can leverage information to innovate, inform product decisions, affect the customer experience or create new business models, says Joe Peppard, Professor of Information Systems and Director of the IT Leadership Program at Cranfield School of Management in the U.K. “This is what transforms forward-thinking companies into industry leaders,” he says in a report from CA Technologies entitled, “The Future Role of the CIO.”

Another expert, David Houle, author of a new book, Entering the Shift Age (Sourcebooks, 2013), says CIOs can no longer focus only on technology. Instead, he says, CIOs should aggregate the intellectual property of their companies, then make sure it’s dispersed throughout the business. Houle believes the rapid technical and business changes taking place make this knowledge-sharing imperative.

MBA: Essential?

So, is an MBA or other advanced degree crucial to CIO success, given the CIO’s growing role in business transformation? “Having an MBA is helpful,” says Marv Ritter, a former CIO and CTO at many large companies, and the holder of an MBA degree himself. “It enables CIOs to speak the language of their business counterparts.”

Even without an MBA, CIOs need certain business competencies, argues Ameet Patel, a former CTO at JPMorgan Chase and now a business-transformation adviser to start-ups and other growth companies. First is finance. “You need to understand the numbers and be able to talk the language of the CFO,” Patel says. “The CIO needs to focus on cost and risk mitigation.” As CIOs can be responsible for thousands of employees, hundreds of systems and millions in costs, “They need to explain to the CFO how the IT investment leads to revenue generation,” Patel adds.

For CIOs, having a strong interest in emerging technologies and an entrepreneurial spirit can also be important. “When you have a deep understanding of how new technologies can move the company forward, and you combine that with the ability to create, prototype, deploy and iterate, then you have the classic McKinsey case-based approach to looking at complex problems and innovative solutions,” says Patel.

In fact, many highly recognized and successful CIOs do not have MBAs. Randy Mott, VP and CIO at General Motors, holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics. Ben Fried, CIO at Google, has a bachelor’s degree in computer science.

Others have advanced degrees, but in fields that closely align to their company’s business. Daniel Lebeau, Group CIO at GlaxoSmithKline, holds a doctorate in nuclear physics. What’s more, in his previous position as CIO at the company’s Biologicals unit, which produces vaccines, Lebeau did not hire anyone with an IT background. That’s because his BioIT group was responsible for business process management. Of the 100 people on the team, only 12 were responsible for IT infrastructure services, and just two had degrees in computer science.

To be sure, there are many ways to learn, and many ways that CIOs can gain the skills and influence needed to advance business transformations. CIOs stand at the crossroads of all of critical business data, and all the systems that drive key business processes. CIOs with leadership skills in both technology and business should remain in demand.

Karyl Scott is a freelance writer in San Diego.

Smart Practices

October 2008

Toyota, GE Money, and Procter & Gamble hope their sound strategies for keeping IT in sync with business requirements will carry them into the future.

by Paul Desmond

Barbra Cooper, CIO of Toyota Motor Sales USA, had long been frustrated with the elusive alignment of IT with the business, the difficulty CIOs face in their efforts to rise in organizations, and other professional development concerns."I thought the operating model for corporate IT [must be] fundamentally flawed" when it came to dealing with the challenges of the next decade or two, Cooper says.

In 2006, to keep her own team on track for the future, Cooper transformed Toyota's IT structure to better meet business goals. She created an Office of the CIO that includes three major functional areas: finance, IT strategic planning, and organizational development, which includes human resource specialists dedicated to IT. She believes that if IT operates more like a traditional business unit, it can better drive change. "It's a subtle difference, perhaps, but it was important to me to start to break away" from IT being viewed as a cost center, she says.

With the new structure in place, her team is now looking at ways to help lead the business forward, such as identifying efficiencies in interdepartmental processes. Because IT crosses all business groups, it's in a good position to identify such opportunities, she says. "You have a unique lens into all the business logic."

Toyota is but one leading organization taking a fresh look at how to prepare its IT team for the years ahead. While their approaches vary, most forge a close alignment between IT and the business units and tend to have concrete programs for career advancement and leadership development. Leading IT organizations also often advocate a more challenging and interesting IT work environment as a way to keep talent flowing through the pipeline and staying at the company. Many are also taking a hard look at how they transfer knowledge among employees and train the next generation of IT staff.

Walking the Walk on Alignment

Aligning IT with business needs has been a long-time goal for most, but now companies are addressing it head-on. Ahmed Abdelmoteleb, Chief Technology Officer for GE Money Australia and New Zealand, based in Melbourne, introduced two major changes to the IT department (CIO office) to help better align it with the business. In addition to its dedicated teams for projects, service, support, quality, communication, IT finance and IT HR, Ahmed created an Enterprise Architecture team, which is mainly responsible for tactical alignment with business strategy. Its job includes long-term technological and architectural decisions, skills development, capability and organizational readiness. The second change was for senior IT managers to become members of the departments they serve — a change that occurred over the last couple of years. Some of the departments include home lending, personal loans, insurance, credit cards and various other lines of business that collectively employ some 4,000 people in the two countries.

The senior IT execs and managers "live with the business units, attend all the business-unit meetings, and are considered part of the leadership of those business units," Ahmed says. The IT execs also participate in regular strategy sessions with GE Money Australia and New Zealand's CEO and the divisional VPs.

Toyota takes a similar approach to interspersing the IT organization within business units. In addition to the Office of the CIO, Cooper has four divisional CIOs, or DIOs, who are accountable to major business segments including: Automotive, Customer Service & Service Parts, Business Support Services, and Dealers & Affiliates. A central enterprise services group provides infrastructure, design, engineering and operations services to all the DIOs, who, in turn, are accountable for developing applications and supporting their respective business units. They're also responsible for the operation and performance of IT services, including those that are outsourced to the enterprise services group, Cooper says.

This structure balances business needs with "maintaining certain elements of standardization that are necessary to keep costs down" and reducing redundant functions, according to the Toyota CIO.

Grooming New Leaders

Beyond organizational changes, IT executives require training in additional skills, and young workers need to be groomed for leadership roles. That's why, two years ago, when Procter & Gamble overhauled the career model for the company's IT group, known as Information Decisions Solutions (IDS), it created an Executive Development Program aimed at training the next generation of IDS leaders. The program largely falls to Tim Massa, Director of HR for the Global Business Services and IDS group — which means he is part of the IT group, reporting directly to the CIO.

"We provide an accelerated mentoring and sponsorship program where [candidates] connect with leaders outside of IT," Massa says. Roughly 8 percent to 10 percent of the 3,000 IDS employees worldwide get nominated to participate in the program. "Not everyone will make it, and we're clear on that," he says, "but we want to provide opportunities for the best of the best," to quickly learn and grow.

GE Money Australia has two IT leadership development programs. The first, called the Information Management Leadership Program (IMLP), grooms junior employees over a two-year period. The GE global leadership training offers talented university graduates the ability to rotate among GE's IT groups, including at least one rotation in another country. The IMLP typically covers four six-month assignments through one of GE's major business units. Included are: on-the-job training in various technologies; formal in-class coursework in advanced information technology concepts, finance, leadership and business skills; extensive peer networking in more than 50 countries, and exposure to senior IT and business leaders. "At the end of two years, they apply for available roles" in IT, Ahmed says. The second program is an advanced leadership development program aimed at preparing senior IT leaders for executive roles.

IT employees can also take advantage of the training that the parent corporation provides to all employees or choose from different streams of IT disciplines such as engineering, technical management and general management. As a result of the program, "we know whom we want to bring into the organization, what resources we have, and where these resources will be going in the future," Ahmed says.

GE Money Australia also wants to better use its talent for innovation, and not for routine processes. To work smarter and do more with the current IT staff of approximately 300 employees and contractors, the company is piloting a program to automate many routine IT jobs in service provisioning and management. When a new employee joins the company, for example, the "on-boarding" process is automated using the Service Catalog and other IT systems. As a result, IT personnel are able to handle more challenging, strategic jobs that lead to greater alignment and realization of business strategy. Ultimately, this leads to greater staff satisfaction and, therefore, retention, as well.

At Toyota, communicating IT's goals to the team was key to Cooper's management style and the culture she wanted to create. She held individual 90-minute meetings with each of her 25 managers to outline her ideas for the new IT direction. She described what success would look like, explained what she thought each manager's strengths and weaknesses were with respect to the plan, and let them ask questions. Afterward, she wrote each manager a personal letter outlining the discussion — a process that took about two hours per letter.

Cooper says she had never spent so much time on any other employee development project but believed the investment was worthwhile. In particular, she wanted to reset expectations among middle management, who will ultimately either block or enable the change. By setting a new baseline and model, and spelling out expectations with customized plans for each manager, Cooper says she got "a lot of traction. It worked."

Knowledge Transfer

Cooper is now attempting to tackle another tough IT problem: knowledge transfer. She says that keeping intellectual property within an organization is a fundamental requirement, given the constantly changing nature of IT and the high turnover rates.

To address the issue, Toyota is using collaboration tools, such as wikis, to create a series of e-learning modules that capture knowledge from subject-matter experts and let the modules be consistently updated as necessary. With this in place, new staff can quickly grasp at least some of the intricacies of the job, Cooper says.

Procter and Gamble is continually looking at tools that capture and catalog job-specific information as well. "Collaboration is key to keeping that information and experience alive," Massa says. Given P&G's size and resources, it has an established corporate program to enable employees to connect with counterparts around the globe. On-line collaboration tools and the launch of a global network of video collaboration studios are both part of this program.

At GE Money, Ahmed says employees often fall into two categories when it comes to knowledge-sharing: those who take pride in leading technology initiatives and transferring and sharing the knowledge with others, and those who hoard knowledge and keep it to themselves. He believes that transparency is critical to innovation, and therefore, is "building an environment and culture that is enabled by processes, tools and people that endorses knowledge-sharing and teamwork. This allows us to lead rather than follow."

Nurturing and training future IT leaders, of course, is a job that's never finished. Ahmed has seen promising results so far from his service-management strategy, which has been partially implemented in Australia and New Zealand. Once complete, he would like to see it adopted globally if it can be adapted successfully in the more than 55 countries and cultures in which the company operates.

Looking back on what she's learned over her 30-plus-year career, Toyota's Cooper says IT must anticipate business requirements and lead rather than follow the trends.

With IT's constant operational demands, it's easy to say there's never time for planning or training, Cooper says, but that's a poor excuse. "If I'm leaving anything for the generation of executives who are going to succeed me, it's hopefully that you can't ever just stop" training your workforce or addressing their career development. For Cooper, that's time well spent.

Paul Desmond is President of PDEdit, an IT publishing company in Southborough, Mass.

ASK THE EXPERTS

Barbra Cooper, Group Vice President and CIO, Toyota Motor Sales, USA Inc.
Barbra.Cooper@smartenterpriseexchange.com

When IT is disruptive, how do IT executives evolve and grow? To find out, and to celebrate the 20th issue of Smart Enterprise, we revisited three executives featured in the past.

Current Position: CIO, H.D. Smith Start Date: August 2011 Previous Employers: Acxiom Corp., GSI Commerce, Yankee Group Originally Profiled in Smart Enterprise:“OpportunITy to Make a Difference,” May 2009

David Guzmán: Transforming Healthcare

When profiled by Smart Enterprise in 2010, David Guzmán was CIO/CTO of Acxiom Corp., a Little Rock, Ark.-based provider of business intelligence and marketing database services. Today, he is CIO of H.D. Smith, a privately held healthcare distributor and services provider based in Springfield, Ill. The new position, he says, gives him a new opportunity to help transform not only a company, but also the country. “Healthcare is such a critical issue for our country that we cannot continue going along the current course trajectory, now approaching 20 percent of GDP,” Guzmán says. “We’ve got to improve the outcomes of patients. Technology is going to play a key role in allowing us to execute this vision of controlling healthcare costs and improving patient outcomes.”

While the bulk of H.D. Smith’s revenue now comes from distributing pharmaceuticals, Guzmán is committed to a vision that will see more than half the company’s revenue coming from IT-enabled healthcare business solutions and services. “Technology is going to enable the personalization of medicine,” he says. “And this will ultimately lead to longer life spans and more productive lives.”

But before H.D. Smith can run, it has to learn to walk. That’s why Guzmán’s first order of business in his new position has been to implement a huge ERP project. It has involved automating the company’s warehouse facility in New York, modernizing its e-commerce platform, and moving large-scale computing resources to the cloud. As part of the strategy, Guzmán recently spearheaded a move of the company’s entire data center into a privately managed external cloud. He expects this to free the IT staff to work on more innovative projects, and to position his company for its transformation into a services provider.

Guzmán is proud to have a seat at the executive table at H.D. Smith, and he says the IT upgrades and changes are crucial to the business. Now, IT can focus on creating new services for the business, instead of just keeping the lights on. This focus will become increasingly important because H.D. Smith serves not just one or two customer segments, as do most traditional pharmaceutical companies, but many. In addition to serving both the retail and institutional markets, H.D. Smith also serves specialty medicine providers, such as disease-specific clinics, and individual patients. In fact, the company’s push into consumer-directed medicine has led to the development of several IT-enabled business services, mainly via a majority acquisition of Triplefin.

To accomplish all its goals, Guzmán has partnered with CSC, the Falls Church, Va.-based provider of business solutions and services. CSC is the same company that provides cloud services to many U.S. federal and state government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, NASA and the Maryland State Highway Administration.

Going forward, Guzmán expects IT to allow for more and better personalization of healthcare. And he expects H.D. Smith to be at the forefront of that effort. “Today, medications are mass-produced; they’re not targeted toward the individual,” he says. “Think of genomic recognition, and then combine that with family and personal medical histories. That will allow a much more proactive, personalized treatment that’s going to prolong and enrich our lives.”

Current Position: Senior Director, Global Infrastructure Services,  Expedia Inc. Start Date: January 2013 Previous Employers: Best Buy, Nationwide, Wyndham Worldwide Originally Profiled in Smart Enterprise: “Green IT 2.0,” June 2011

David Blodgett: Getting Agile

When David Blodgett appeared in a 2011 issue of Smart Enterprise, he was then VP of IT and Data Center Operations at Wyndham Worldwide Corp., a Parsippany, N.J.-based hotels and hospitality company. Today he is Senior Director of Global Infrastructure Services at Expedia Inc., the online travel service provider. In making the move, Blodgett has also moved from supporting customers in hotels to helping customers book not only hotels, but also the airplanes, trains and boats that bring them to their destinations.

“ Performance and compliance requirements don’t go away. Nor does the need to be a good financial steward and to maintain operating-environment visibility.”

The transition, Blodgett says, has been an exciting one. His most recent effort involves developing an infrastructure-services framework that is optimized to support Agile software development. “A key focus area for modern infrastructure teams, including my team, is to enable Agile and other time-to-market-focused application delivery methodologies while maintaining environmental stability and control,” Blodgett says.  “Performance and compliance requirements don’t go away. Nor does the need to be a good financial steward and to maintain operating-environment visibility.”

A key change for Blodgett, as well as for other IT executives, is the shift toward external cloud services. Internal IT, he says, is no longer the only game in town. In a world where anyone can spin up a Software-as-a-Service contract or their own servers on Amazon, Blodgett and his team must strive to provide not just competitive services, but also services that address the business’s need to rapidly innovate and expand. “To do this in a way that ensures that systems remain stable and highly performing, and remain compliant with a myriad of regulatory and operational requirements, requires extensive use of automation and careful planning,” he says.

Another shift for Blodgett involves the types of skills needed on his team. Expedia has more than 10,000 employees across its dozen or so brands, including Expedia.com, Hotels.com and Hotwire. Because many of these workers are either involved with development services or direct consumers of IT services, Blodgett’s team must have what he calls customer-facing polish. “There was a time when the only way you got anything out of a traditional IT shop was to submit a request form and wait weeks until your service was delivered,” Blodgett says. “But now, in the end-user and developer-driven IT culture, business teams can circumvent IT with external cloud-based engagements. So IT professionals have to have a bit of salesperson in them. They need the ability to manage and deliver a service, versus performing some isolated IT function.”

Of course, IT executives also need expertise with technology. Blodgett’s areas of expertise include virtualization, self-provisioning and cloud management automation. “We’re focused on enabling innovation and speed to market,” he says. “We’re building out internal capabilities that go well beyond the traditional scope of cloud service providers.”

The end goal, Blodgett says, is “allowing developers and business teams to instantiate, on demand, the operating environments they require to innovate and drive the business forward, and to do so economically and with quality.”

Current Position:Site Executive/CIO, Palisades Medical Center; Siemens Healthcare Start Date: February 2013 Previous Employers:Senior Healthcare Consultant for Fortune 10 Corporations,  Kings County Hospital Center, New York  City Dept. of Health Originally Profiled in Smart Enterprise: “Hospital, Heal Thyself,” September 2008

Albert Porco: Healthier Medical Records

Healthcare and IT are recurring themes in Albert Porco’s career. In 2008, when Smart Enterprise first interviewed him, Porco was CIO of Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. Today, he is a contract CIO at the Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen, N.J., and an employee of Malvern, Pa.-based Siemens Healthcare. “I view myself as an IT guy who happened to spend 20 years in the healthcare field, rather than a healthcare guy who happens to do IT,” he says today.

While Siemens is Porco’s official employer, he spends his days in the 200-bed community hospital with a view of the New York City skyline. Much of what he oversees is technology from Siemens. Yet Porco is making decisions that will shape the hospital’s future. The medical center is relying on Porco’s expertise in its quest to meet the objectives of the Medicare Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Program — referred to as “Meaningful Use.” The program is intended to spur adoption of certified EHR technology by using Medicare/Medicaid funding as a lever. Eligible providers and hospitals can earn cash incentives by demonstrating their use of certified EHR technology. Then, as the program advances, new standards will be set for how users are meaningfully interacting with EHRs. This level of Meaningful Use must initially be maintained over a 90-day reporting period. Later, it must be maintained for one year. Compliance is important, because hospitals and other medical providers that do not use certified EHR technology in the future could be penalized with reduced Medicare payments.

As Palisades progresses from Meaningful Use Stage 1 to Stage 2, Porco is ensuring that the solutions achieve a high degree of clinical adoption and utilization. One challenge has been finding new ways of using electronic medical records (EMRs) as an incentive for patients to engage with their physicans. That’s a new goal for many hospitals, as well as one that has been written into the Meaningful Use Stage 2 requirements. The problem is, many patients don’t want to look at their EMRs when they’re not sick, Porco explains. And when they are sick, they just want to see the doctor. Adds Porco: “I can’t force people to look at their EMRs.”

“  My job is to tap into the infrastructure and technology, and create a foundation so that we’re ready to make it happen.”

That said, doctors’ offices and hospitals can at least tempt patients to look at their EMRs by bundling these records with other services, such as making appointments and viewing lab results. “If you add that ability to a portal — if one of the features says, ‘Click and look at your medical record’ — well, you might look,” Porco says. “Or you might want to see results of a lab test and take a peek at the rest of the records while you’re there.”

The push to EMRs also affects what Porco’s team does on the back end. That’s because as patients are added, the hospital’s infrastructure requirements expand exponentially. To make sure these resources are always up and available, Porco is depending on virtualized servers, storage resources and desktops. He’s also implementing a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategy for employees’ smartphones and computing tablets, a project similar to one he previously managed at Kings County Hospital. As part of the first element of his new strategy, Palisades Medical Center will virtualize its entire technology infrastructure. “We’ve got young physicians coming in who want to bring their own devices, but that only works in a virtualized environment,” Porco says. “We have to be able to meet the demand of the doctor who says, ‘I want to get the electronic medical record on my phone.’”

Another major effort aims to let authorized medical clinicians gain anywhere, anytime access to the center’s medical records. Even for a simple medical procedure such as drawing a patient’s blood sample, everyone in the process — the presiding physician, the phlebotomist who draws the blood and the lab technician — act as essentially independent agents who move around the hospital to perform various services. And because even something as simple as a blood draw can be affected by other factors (such as food or medication given to the patient), Porco and his team intend to use the EMR, and other ancillary systems, to prevent delays or duplicative efforts that can both frustrate patients and present hospitals with large costs. “When you’ve got that kind of dynamic in place, you can’t simply say, ‘We’re going to put two computers and a printer on the nurse’s station, and we’re done,’” Porco says. “You have to go where the work is being performed, the point of care. You need intelligent systems that are managing and optimizing the workflow, and delivering patient care in the most efficient manner.”

Porco is also working on a plan to reinforce the Palisades Medical Center against powerful storms such as 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. The Medical Center sits just 100 feet from the Hudson River, and because of Sandy, it was forced to close for a time. Among Porco’s efforts in this area is a new plan for more robust disaster recovery.

Porco’s main focus, however, remains on helping patients and improving their healthcare experience. “All those things we’ve read about in sci-fiction — like genomic therapies, growing organs with stem cells, and individualized medicine — are becoming more and more of a reality,” Porco says. Hospitals, he adds, must at least consider these types of services and make intelligent decisions about whether they want to offer them, how they can offer them, and how they can partner with others who offer them. “My job,” Porco says, “is to tap into the infrastructure and technology, and create a foundation so that we’re ready to make it happen in any way the hospital decides to proceed.”

Karen J. Bannan is a New York-based writer and editor, and a former Executive Editor of Smart Enterprise.

Click here to download the pdf version.

Now that everything is connected, CIOs must make creating a great customer experience their top priority.

We live in the era of the network. Over the years, I have come to believe in the power of networks as the most fundamental driver of progress. Everything is connected, and information flows through networks with ever greater intensity. This interconnectedness changes everything, both inside and outside of companies. In turn, it means more challenges for the CIO, and also more opportunities.

What are some examples of these changes? Traditional markets are disappearing, and they are morphing into networks of information with the customer at the epicenter. As the outside world becomes more interconnected, companies have to create their own ecosystems as well. Enterprises that don’t evolve in this manner won’t match the speed, intensity and impact of the forces outside their company walls.

Three-Month Strategies: Tents, Not Pyramids

Let’s not forget, we live in a world where volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) reign. As the pace of this world accelerates, it becomes nearly impossible to plan for the long term. As a CEO recently told me, “We have a new five-year strategy every three months.”

The same rapid-fire pace applies to the IT department. The CIO has to rev up to the clock speeds of the rest of the company and of the outside world. As a result, the CIO focus will shift, and there will be only one primary goal for the company: offering customers the best possible experience. The entire organization will be geared toward this aim, and the CIO will have to act more swiftly — building tents that can be deployed or taken down quickly, not pyramids that require lots of planning and work. The CIO will have to lead innovation, help redefine the company’s strategy and product set, and provide guidance for business expansion. In short, the role will become much more strategic and less operational.

Redefining Corporate Hierarchies

At the same time, the IT department will be set up as a network, too. Hierarchy will no longer be the accepted organizational mode. The team will function as a connected set of individual specialists — each responsible for his or her project in a larger mesh of interrelated projects that all support the flow of the business.

Terms such as employee retention will need reexamination, too. Employers in a networked world will no longer be interested in keeping people on board for life. A couple of months ago, I spoke to managers of a company that encouraged people to have friends and relatives join the company. The idea was that having a family network inside the company would keep them on the job. But going forward, employees will no longer seek lifelong employment, and this company will definitely need to change its HR policy.

Employees — an “old normal” term — will switch from one project to another, from one company to another. Long-term loyalty is out. Even family loyalty, illustrated in the example above, will not tie professionals to a company for life. One of the most important functions inside the new IT department will be that of the recruiter, who will attract top talent for short-term engagements.

Taking an Outside-in Approach

The evolved work environment will require a completely new mindset by the CIO. The most important challenge will be to connect the outside world to the inner workings of the department. Trends and technologies — such as social networks, the cloud and the consumerization of IT — will have to be incorporated inside the IT department, too. The speed of change taking place in the outside world must be mirrored by the speed of change in IT.

I have long urged CIOs to get out of their ivory towers; staying inside is no longer an option. I strongly advise you, as IT leaders, to spend lots of time looking out of your window. Observe how networks are pushing innovation, and then make that connected disruption your own.

Peter Hinssen is co-founder of Across Group and Chairman of Across Technology; a speaker and coach; and the author of The New Normal (Mach Media, 2010).

As everything becomes digital, CIO success must increasingly be measured by business, rather than IT, outcomes.

How quickly the world has changed. Increasingly, CEOs tell me, “We are a technology company” that is in the business of banking, insurance, publishing, retail or other industry sector. In this new world order, key IT competencies and skills transcend the creation of an architecture or specific development methodology. Critical metrics for IT executives are increasingly measured by commercial contributions and desired business outcomes.

Unfortunately, many CIOs — and others aspiring to lead the digital business — are not gaining these competencies. Even more alarming is a broad lack of investment in the development of the right competencies for the technological growth of the business. In a Russell Reynolds report based on a recent global survey, “Rethinking People Leadership in IT: Four Key Findings for Improving IT Leader Selection, Performance and Succession,” nearly 1,000 CIOs and their peers shared their frustration at the gap they perceive between desired areas of mastery — including influence, leadership, performance orientation and strategic ability — and the ability of their direct reports to deliver on these areas. While CIOs rate people, results and change-related competencies as among their most important activities, they also view these areas as most in need of improvement among rising IT leaders.

In a decade and a half of recruiting CIOs, I have never seen the role of IT at a more serious inflection point. The demographics of the global workforce, and the associated covenants that these individuals have with employers, are rapidly changing, along with the very definition of work. Yet CIOs are not keeping pace.

As recently as 18 months ago, the archetype of CIO excellence was a general manager of an IT utility who could successfully deliver an ERP implementation, quote network uptime and deliver return on IT investment, measured primarily through cost reduction and process improvement. Many CEOs accepted these qualifications as rote; their CFO counterparts were equally pleased to qualify success as alignment with the balance sheet. Misguided IT leaders followed in lockstep, believing that they were “aligned with the business” if they could deliver on these metrics.

This premise is no longer acceptable — or even optimal — for maximizing corporate performance. CIOs must now figure out how to stay relevant during a digital transformation in which they risk disintermediation by vendors going directly to users (and vice versa). CIOs also need to manage emerging relationships at the board level, all while keeping things humming and secure 24x7x365.

The Future Is Now

I have often spoken about the on-demand future, when users will get what they want in the moment, made to order, in the media of their choosing, and in a secure, cost-effective manner. This is a huge change in IT service delivery, and it is no longer in the future. The future is now. IT leaders must effectively deliver a complex portfolio of services and solutions in an “on-demand present.”

As we wrote in another of our reports, “The Rise of the Chief Digital Officer,” there is a need for an executive who oversees the full range of digital strategies and drives change across the organization. I believe that a CIO must navigate this fluid landscape by balancing rigor with creativity and innovation. If the CIO job is increasingly bigger than any one individual, companies need to place a premium on finding complementary talent at all levels of the business — whether it’s outside partners or chief digital officers. The digital business deserves no less.

Shawn Banerji is a Managing Director at Russell Reynolds.

We live in an era of big data. Whether you work in financial services, consumer goods, travel and transportation, or industrial products, analytics are becoming a competitive necessity for your organization. But even IT people and those who can manipulate data successfully need partners -- business managers who can partner effectively with the “quants” (quantitative analysts) to ensure that their analytics work yields better strategic and tactical decisions.

For executives fluent in analytics -- such as Gary Loveman of Caesars Entertainment (with a Ph.D. from MIT), Jeff Bezos of Amazon (an electrical engineering and computer science major from Princeton), or Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google (computer science Ph.D. dropouts from Stanford) -- there’s no problem. But many executives -- even those in IT-- find their math and statistics background may be a bit rusty.

How do you help lead your company into the analytical revolution, or at least become a good foot soldier in it? My recent book (co-authored with Jinho Kim), Keeping Up with the Quants, and a related article in Harvard Business Review -- offer a primer for non-quants. However, CIOs and other leaders can benefit from the pointers offered as well -- especially CIOs who oversee centralized analytics groups.

The ability of quants to communicate and collaborate with executives is directly tied to their effectiveness.

At companies such as Procter & Gamble, “embedded” analysts within IT are one of the most important vehicles for connecting the company’s data and analytics with functional and business-unit decision makers.

Adding Business Context

In addition, for decisions affecting the IT function itself, CIOs can begin to think of themselves as consumers of analytics. They might be consuming data and analytics to decide, for instance, whether a new data center is needed, or whether to renew an outsourcing contract. If the quants are well-trained, they are good at gathering the available data and making predictions about the future. But most lack sufficient business knowledge to identify hypotheses and relevant variables and to know when the ground beneath an organization is shifting. As a data consumer, you need to generate hypotheses and determine whether results and recommendations make sense in a changing business environment. In other words, you can help guide the quants toward practical business applications and outcomes by challenging their assumptions -- gently, of course.

If you remember the content of your college-level statistics course, you may be fine. If not, bone up on the basics of regression analysis, statistical inference and experimental design. You will need to understand the process for making analytical decisions, including when you should step in and ask questions. Remember that every analytical model is built on assumptions that producers ought to explain and defend.

You might also learn directly from the quants in your organization by working closely with them on one or more projects. If they report to you, working with them should be that much easier.

What to Ask Your Numbers People

Many managers fear that asking questions will make them appear unintelligent about quantitative matters. However, if you ask the right kinds of questions, you can both appear knowledgeable and advance the likelihood of a good decision outcome.

Many possible questions for various stages of analysis are listed in our book. Three of the most important you can ask about data are:

1.  What are the assumptions behind the model you built? Is there reason to believe those assumptions are no longer valid?

You are really looking only for a thoughtful response here. The only way to know for sure about whether assumptions still hold is to do a different analysis on newly gathered data -- which could be very expensive.

2. How is the data you gathered distributed?

If the person can’t describe the distribution, he or she is a shoddy analyst. Good analysts should have already looked at — and be able to show you — a visual display of the distribution of your data on any particular variable. If you are interested in one variable as a likely predictor of another, ask for a scatterplot and look to see whether the data line up in any linear pattern; that would indicate a strong correlation between the two variables. You could go on to discuss whether the data follow a normal distribution, too, and if there were any significant outliers or unexpected values that don’t fit the pattern.

3. What’s the “provenance” of the data in your analysis?

This question is particularly important to CIOs. It’s important to know where the data came from and how reliable the source is. Few are better positioned to judge answers to that question than the head of the IT function. The data may also be external. As I argue in my forthcoming book, Big Data at Work, big data is much more likely to be sourced externally. Discussing external data with analysts may help CIOs understand which types of data are in demand for decisions, and which need to be brought in-house on an ongoing basis.

The main takeaway is that data analysts and quants are excellent at what they do -- culling data and drawing conclusions. But they often need guidance from senior business managers and IT leaders to make sure the information is thoroughly accurate and that it is actionable and useful for making solid, data-driven decisions for the business.

See the related Q&A here.

Tom Davenport is the President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College. He has led research centers at Accenture, McKinsey and Company, Ernst & Young, and CSC Index, and has taught at Harvard Business School, Dartmouth's Tuck School, the University of Texas, and the University of Chicago. He is a widely published author and speaker on the topics of analytics, information and knowledge management, reengineering, enterprise systems, and electronic business. Tom has written or co-authored fifteen best-selling business books, the latest, Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics. continues his pioneering work on Data Analytics begun with the bestseller, Competing on Analytics.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal held a CIO networking event where CIOs talked about moving up the ladder into the corner office. It’s logical that if technology is the future, a CIO’s deep knowledge of technology will help organizations succeed in a world dominated by big data, cloud storage and social media. Yet, technical skills alone are not enough.

In my experience as an executive coach, it takes much more than tech savvy to rise to the highest ranks of the organization.

I work with CIOs, CFOs, cyber security mangers, engineers, scientists, physicians and finance executives. Some have recently been promoted, or have excellent technical skills, but still lack leadership qualities that will push them ahead. What’s missing might be described by a supervisor as either lack of confidence or lack of what we call “emotional intelligence.”

As I have written about previously, executives who make it to the top have a unique combination of self-awareness, self-restraint and social skills that I call emotional intelligence. But even that is not enough these days.

Developing Strong Presence Two Ways

Another set of skills that need development and strengthening could be called "executive presence." What are the signs of weak executive presence? When a client defers to their bosses too much either by looking down at their notes, or not making eye contact; when presentation skills fall short or when someone has a slouching posture—these all put you at a disadvantage.

These may seem like small shortcomings, but they are very important if you want to move ahead. One of the best executive coaches I know Jeff Kaplan, writes that: “Executive Presence is about being present with your audience, whether that's one person or a room of 1,000... It's about how you "present" yourself regardless of whether you're giving a formal presentation, participating in an executive team meeting, or talking to one person at the water cooler.”

Fundamentally, it is about truly being “in the moment” with others. In our multitasking, mobile-device filled business world, this is increasingly difficult. To improve in this area, two key ingredients are required. First, you must be absolutely fully prepared regardless of whether you're giving a presentation to clients or having a quick conversation with your boss on the phone. When you're fully prepared, you can then deeply listen to what others are saying without worrying about what they're thinking of you or what great wisdom you want to say next. You’ll be relaxed, connected to your breath (instead of cut off from your breath due to anxiety or disorganization), and able to pick up nuances from what others say and how they say it. 

Fostering Creativity

The second key ingredient is that you must be fully present, completely engaged in the moment and not "in your head" with thought -- such as judging the person or audience you're speaking to, or wondering what your audience is thinking about you or what you're going to make for dinner.

When people are fully present, creativity flows, new ideas emerge, awareness gets deepened, and problems get solved.

By contrast, if someone is unprepared, in their head, or pushing through a pre-set agenda, there is no room for the creative thoughts.”

Beyond having confidence in your ideas, executive presence also means dressing the part, knowing how to hold an audience’s attention, having confidence in who you are and what you believe in, having excellent social skills, knowing when to show self restraint and being organizationally savvy. Surprisingly, these are things that can be taught-- even if initially, the new behaviors feel artificial. Many a TED talk focuses on powerful behavior and how “fake it until you make it or become it.”

Executive presence is hard to describe, yet easy to spot. Most importantly, it’s vital for CIOs and others who aspire to lead and to succeed.

Three trends are gathering momentum in the workforce. Neither you nor your business can afford to ignore them this year.

1. Diversity Is Destiny

Workforce diversity has obvious business benefits, including in-house access to a varied and broad range of skills and a market presence that says you are committed to acquiring, developing and retaining top talent from every possible source. For companies that strive to become more consistently innovative, diversity is essential to bringing new ideas to bear. And for companies designing apps for a global marketplace or delivering e-commerce services to global customers, having staff that represents the many languages, cultural backgrounds, races, genders and ages your business is trying to serve just makes sense.

But two dimensions of diversity are particularly important to address this year.

First, you must create a workplace that is geared to attract and retain women. For companies seeking a workforce with higher education, women will be essential. In the U.S., the Department of Education estimated that

women earned 62 percent of all associate degrees in the graduating class of 2013, 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, 60 percent of all master’s degrees, and 52 percent of all doctorates.

Today, women are educated in higher numbers in most major countries throughout the world, and the gap is expected to grow, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Second, for more than a decade, Hispanics have been the nation’s largest minority and, by 2050, will represent more than half of the nation’s workforce. In sharp contrast to Gen Y’ers as a whole, our research indicates that Hispanics are particularly likely to be drawn to larger, well-established firms with recognized brands. This cohort will be an important — perhaps even the single most important — source of talent for major corporations over the years ahead. Developing an environment that is attractive to Hispanics should be an immediate priority for every large organization. This will require a mix of traditional values — including well-thought-out career development options and status-related recognition — and forward-thinking practices, such as a wide variety of flexible work arrangements and options for exercising personal choice.

2. Contingent by Choice

More and more people are choosing a contingent work style — that is, temporary work that may be project-based or time-based — over full- or part-time work. The numbers will continue to grow. Yes, some will be involuntary; not everyone can find full-time employment. But, intriguingly, many people are choosing a contingent work style, seeking a better work/life balance, the ability to design their own careers or choose projects of particular interest.

New technologies and services for contingent workers make it easier and less painful to make the choice to go independent. Companies can reach out flexibly to individuals, while new types of talent brokers — such as YourEncore, an online network of retired engineers, or InnoCentive, which offers crowdsourcing services to companies with innovation challenges — connect free agents with project-based work in virtual marketplaces. 

Although the IT industry has used offshoring and outsourcing for years, the benefits for corporations of the growing pool of individuals available on an ad hoc basis are adding up: cost flexibility from adjusting staff sizes up and down based on business requirements; greater speed and agility as talent needs can change on a dime, and a boost to innovation as contingent talent brings in new knowledge and fresh ideas based on experiences outside of the company or even the industry.

To take full advantage of this important emerging cadre of workers,

get rid of any perception of contingent workers as somehow less important, less skilled or less committed

than “permanent” employees. Going forward, employers must incorporate contingent workers in meaningful ways.

3. Meaning Is the New Money

IT work today involves the successful execution of activities that managers cannot prescribe or even monitor. This work asks individuals to deal with rich content that flows through infinite links. Individuals must make intelligent, well-informed decisions about what to share with whom — and what to ignore — with little guidance from the hierarchy to simplify the patterns of interaction.

Perhaps most significantly,

IT work requires high levels of discretionary effort. People have to choose to do the work and have to want to do it well.

They must dig deep within themselves to form innovative ideas and put their best thinking forward.

My research has clearly shown that discretionary effort ties directly to the individual’s level of engagement. Engagement, in turn, occurs when our work experiences reflect a clear set of values that we share. It can’t be mandated or monitored through physical oversight, nor does it respond to monetary incentives. For most workers today, meaning is the new money — it’s what motivates people at work to go the extra mile. Clear company values, translated into the day-to-day work experience, are the strongest drivers of an engaged workforce. By strengthening meaning and increasing engagement, firms can inspire employees whenever and wherever they work.

************

Tamara J. Erickson is a McKinsey Award-winning author, a leading expert on generations in the workplace, and a widely-respected expert on the changing workforce, collaboration and innovation, and the nature of work in intelligent organizations. She has three times been named one of the 50 most-influential living management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50; has written a trilogy of books on how individuals in specific generations can excel in today’s workplace: Retire Retirement, What’s Next, Gen X? and Plugged In; and is working on a fourth book for the generation under 18 today. Tammy has also authored or co-authored numerous Harvard Business Review articles and the book Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent.

She is the Executive Fellow, Organizational Behavior, at London Business School, where she has designed and co-directs the school’s leadership program for senior executives, Leading Businesses into the Future. She is the founder and CEO of Tammy Erickson Associates, a research-based firm dedicated to helping clients build intelligent organizations. Erickson has also served on the board of directors of two Fortune 500 corporations. She holds  a degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Chicago and an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.