The conundrum of leadership and open collaboration in the social era

For those leaders that think social collaboration is a waste of time, think again. The chatter among many leadership pundits today is on the topic of open leadership and letting your employees get to know you on a more personal level. Being a leader doesn’t mean you have to be isolated from daily interaction with your most important asset – your people.

Leaders within many organizations have a difficult time effectively engaging with their workforce outside of the traditional weekly e-mail updates from the CEO or monthly all-hands conference calls. Often these types of communications are event driven and business focused in nature which doesn’t offer much opportunity for employees to develop a relationship with senior leaders. Employees want to know what drives the CEO and identify with their passions and values. While town hall meetings and the rare one-on-one conversations are traditional ways to accomplish this, it is not the only means in today’s social world.

Socially-driven processes are challenging traditional approaches to business and allow people to connect and interact with unprecedented speed and ease as social engagement proliferates deeper into our personal and professional lives. Stephen Lamb, CIO of the British Columbia Institute of Technology, is one of those leaders that has given much thought to how social engagement can be leveraged effectively.

“Open collaboration affords leaders to reach-out especially in larger organizations as their true-self, as opposed to just a title on an org-chart somewhere. Making the connection; reinforcing a common purpose is key,” says Lamb. True…leaders of large organizations are busy and pulled in many directions on a daily basis – we get that. How do leaders keep pace and connect with employees in today’s world when it is unrealistic to have weekly town hall meetings?

Engaging in the social world doesn’t mean the only options to connect with employees are on Twitter or LinkedIn when social software platforms are proliferating for internal organizational use. (See Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social Software in The Workplace). Leaders need to think deeply about the power of social employee engagement.

“If you aren’t focusing your attention on listening to your employees and customers, then you aren’t going to be very successful in driving the organization forward,” says Lamb.

I don’t encourage CEOs to do social for social’s sake as the purpose isn’t to do social, it is to be social. To be successful with a social strategy, you need a clearly defined purpose so that you are effective in your approach. There are consultants and analysts out there today, if not people in your own organization, that know how to engage in the social world effectively to help start you on the path to a leadership style that is based on open collaboration.

Lamb would advise leaders to consider this, “Through a more open and collaborative approach where ‘thinking out loud’ is encouraged at all levels, leaders can begin to bridge the gap with employees that is often so difficult to do on a sustained and genuine basis.”

Until CEOs embrace social as an unstoppable trend in today’s business world, we will continue to see a gap between employees and senior leaders.


About the Author: Brian Clendenin is an award-winning sales leader and contributing writer for ITBusiness.ca on leadership, strategy, cloud and the future of work. Brian speaks at industry conferences across Canada 

Posted by:Brian Clendenin

IT Governance is Killing Innovation

Recent CEB research shows that work has become much more interdependent — employees increasingly need to tap a broader array of internal and external colleagues and partners to be successful in their jobs. The emergence of this new work environment has significant implications for how IT should enable business growth and, more specifically, for the kinds of investments IT should be making to support employees.

Unfortunately, when it comes to IT's ability to allocate investments in response to the new work environment, traditional governance processes prove grossly outdated. Some of the key challenges:

• Companies don't identify the very best ideas for investment because most capital allocation processes start with business partners' existing ideas about projects to fund. As we've noted in our previous blog, senior business partners might not be that knowledgeable about what actually drives productivity on the front lines.


• Companies allocate capital to the wrong investments because our traditional emphasis on ROI-based business cases undermines IT's ability to invest in high-return-but-hard-to-measure areas like improving knowledge worker productivity.


• Companies tend to spread their capital allocation bets too thinly across business groups or functions, often for political reasons. This practice helps 'keep the peace' but means that often the most transformational opportunities get short-changed.

Across our year of research into this problem, we have identified a select group of companies that are rethinking their governance and investment processes to circumvent the problems outlined above. 

 

Expand First, Filter Second
Most CIOs will tell you that they have no shortage of ideas to invest in — the hard part is whittling down to the right ones. Push that a bit further and what most CIOs say is that those ideas are in the form of project requests from business partners. The problem is that these "bottom-up" project requests often miss the big picture as too many are incremental or uninspiring. Yes, while most of these requests are vetted for alignment with corporate strategy, what's often missing is how these requests fit within a broader context of how the business overall generates value. Furthermore, this lack of context prevents organizations from identifying other investment ideas that have high potential but haven't bubbled up organically through project requests.

To address this challenge, a global transportation company we spoke with is using a strategic lens to expand the list of project ideas to find the ones with the highest potential corporate value, before filtering them. They start with a map of the company's critical business capabilities — those concrete business activities that are vital to meeting a strategic goal (e.g. rapid new product roll-out). Then, they look at the health of the information available to business leaders who manage those capabilities. They find this leads them into all sorts of overlooked opportunities and provides them with a good proxy for where IT investment can have significant business impact, which can better inform prioritization decisions. 

Prioritize Capabilities, not Projects
The currency of most IT project prioritization meetings is the ROI-based business case. As mentioned above, this measure works very well for comparing projects that deliver hard benefits, but undermine the ability to invest in critical capabilities that have a long-term payoff horizon or highly innovative capabilities where the payoff is uncertain.

A global high-tech equipment provider is taking a different approach. Similar to the transportation company mentioned earlier, they start with a top down view of critical business capabilities and pillars required to support long-term business strategy. Then, using customer preference measurement methodologies like conjoint analysis, they survey senior business leaders to determine the relative criticality of each of these pillars. Based on this — and before any projects are even discussed — they are able to map out the relative level of IT investment each capability should receive. So, if the business leadership agrees that capability A is twice as important to realizing their goals as capability B, capability A is targeted for twice as much investment. Projects can then be assessed on contribution to the needs of that pillar, rather than purely on financial metrics like ROI.

CIOs are being asked to arm employees with the capabilities required for success in a new, much more integrated and interdependent work environment. But to do that requires more than capital: it requires a different approach to making decisions and, specifically, rethinking traditional IT project-centric approaches to identifying and funding capital investment opportunities. 

Andrew Horne and Brian Foster

Andrew Horne, a Managing Director at CEB, works with the CEB’s membership network of Chief Information Officers, and leads global research teams in producing best practice case studies, benchmarks, implementation tools, and executive education. Brian Foster, a Managing Director in CEB’s IT Practice, oversees a global team that provides advice and consultation to a network of more than 2,500 IT leaders, including CIOs, enterprise architects, applications, infrastructure, security, and PMO executives.

The Hidden Truth About Today's CIOs And The Future Of Work

There have been lots of discussions lately around how CMOs are potentially swallowing up the role of the CIO. In fact within the next few years CMOs are projected to have larger operating budgets than CIOs. Everywhere you turn it seems like the topic of conversation is around the death of the CIO, how the CIO is in trouble, and how the CIO needs to change; basically doom and gloom. Several of the CIOs I’ve spoken with agree that this can get to be a bit depressing and demotivating and doesn’t really further the conversation. 

Meet Stephen Lamb, he is the CIO of the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) and he sees something that flies in the face of all the talk of the CMO out-pacing the CIO.  BCIT has 45,000 students and a faculty just shy of 2,000.  A few months ago a company wanted to do a case study on the social enterprise collaboration software roll-out at BCIT and they asked to speak to whoever was responsible for all the project marketing and communications, Stephen said, “You’re talking to him.”

According to Stephen CIOs are not standing still or running for the hills, and they are certainly not down and out for the count. In my conversation with Stephen he brought up a few things that are not being addressed and discussed when it comes to the CIO which we need to remember. 

CIOs Touch All Aspects of Organizational Life

CIOs are uniquely positioned within the organization and reach everyone and everything and they are perhaps the only ones with the ability to do so. Whether they do so or not is dependent on the culture of the organization, influence in the C-suite and the disposition of the person (there is no cookie-cutter CIO). For every CIO who is happy to stay back in the data center there is one trying to break free of the old stereotypes of solely looking after boxes and wires. For some reason we seem to be neglecting to highlight this type of CIO, why is that?

CIOs as Scapegoats
It’s convenient to paint CIOs, and for that matter, IT in general as the corporate dinosaurs who are going to become extinct.  Stephen believes that it perhaps helps “validate” the actions of those who have gone off and done their own thing (fueling the App-lification of the enterprise and consumerization of technology).

How About Some Acknowledgement?
There is little acknowledgement and mention of the new breed of CIO. The primary focus is typically on historical pain points and doesn’t take into account the new generation of CIOs that haven’t necessarily cut their teeth on coding or infrastructure management. There are plenty of CIOs who don’t come from a computing background, Stephen is one of them.  CIOs today don’t need to have a pure-bred computing background and in fact it can be more beneficial if they don’t.  Having a background in knowledge management, analytics, marketing, or other line of business can be a unique differentiating factor for today’s CIO.

CIOs can dance!
The notion that you can only be creative if you are in marketing is nonsense!  According to Stephen you have to be creative regardless of what leadership position you are in. At Stephen’s institution, he (nor marketing) is leading all of the creative efforts around marketing and employee adoption. The job is about selling ideas and getting people to change their behaviors or adopt new ways of working more effectively.

CIOs aren’t all about the numbers.
While cost savings and revenue generation seem to fall squarely in the lap of CIOs, many of them are actually deeply vested in supporting and even changing cultures within organizations. Oftentimes the CMO is typically external facing and can have very little connection or affinity with the workforce. The new breed of CIO however, is all about building that connection and adapting to the corporate culture.

Stephen makes some crucial points which I think we should all consider. Most people acknowledge that the role of the CIO is changing, but then again so is the role and responsibility of pretty much everyone else in the C-suite as new technologies and behaviors enter our organizations. I think it’s refreshing to hear from someone such as Stephen who is not focusing on the negative aspects of what is happening to CIOs. CIOs are still very much alive and uniquely positioned to drive amazing change within their companies. As Stephen aptly put, “perhaps a few CMOs might want to do a quick shoulder check.”

Jacob Morgan, 

The Rise of the Digital CMO

by Jake Sorofman

Fact: When it comes to marketing spending, analog still outstrips digital by a factor of three to one. How could this be?, you ask. Digital marketing provides targeted reach and measurable impact. Innovative digital marketing approaches in social media, CRM, and other areas dominate the discussion. Nevertheless, analog spending still rules, as confirmed by Gartner's 2013 digital marketing spending report. Shouldn't CMOs and all marketers be shocked by this? Sure, an ample pile of dollars can be attributed to big spending on a few analog media channels, like Super Bowl ads, for example. But I would suggest that there is something more fundamental happening behind the numbers; something lurking in the very nature of digital marketing and what it asks of leadership and what it means for accountability.

The Digital Disconnect
First, there's a digital disconnect in the executive ranks, a leadership vacuum created by a mismatch between expertise and authority. Like so many other revolutions, digital marketing has taken hold from the bottom up. Here, we find digital natives steeped in digital culture and practice — twenty- and thirty-somethings who came of age on the social web. Squint your eyes and you see tomorrow's CMOs. But today's CMO is different: the corporate attire may be gone, but the assimilation to the new digital culture is incomplete. 

You can see a strong precedent for this in the open source software movement, which didn't go mainstream until its early adopters progressed through the ranks. Yesterday's Linux hackers are now the chief architects and CIOs of the largest enterprises. Unsurprisingly, open source has become a key part of most enterprise IT architectures. But open source only crossed the chasm once its champions came of age. Many CMOs see their digital future, but struggle to make the case across the executive ranks, where resistance is born of unfamiliarity, fear, or misperceptions about what digital marketing means for the brand. "But we're a traditional company" is no longer a credible line of defense, though, unbelievably, it is still a more common one than you'd think. 

Perhaps digital marketing won't go native until the natives occupy the executive suite. But I'm betting it will only accelerate because, unlike the open source movement which was initially about cost, digital marketing is plainly driven by revenue. Digital experiences and engagement draw consumers closer to a brand and more efficiently drive conversions and transactions, both online and off. 

The Consequence of Measurement
Second, digital marketing is illuminating in ways both powerful and problematic. Analog practices leave room for ambiguity. The numbers matter, but can't always be counted with precision. ROI is often ambiguous and anecdotal, which can relieve the CMO of true accountability. To be fair, many CMOs do want greater visibility. They're tired of the murkiness clouding the space between investment and impact.

Others, however, long for the bygone days when the big idea was sufficient. The CMO could tap dance through the average board meeting, as long as revenue tracked up and to the right. Like Mad Men's Don Draper, the CMO became the master of the soft-shoe performance. 

But with digital techniques, everything is measurable. Feedback loops tighten, segmentation becomes microtargeting, and optimizations can happen on the fly or even in real time. The relationship between investment and impact becomes correlated and causal — and the CMO becomes accountable down to the dime and moment by moment. Light dawns on the marketing spend! This transparency is powerful when quarters are turning into dollars for the business — but potentially perilous when the opposite is the case.

The Digital CMO
Now, a few CMOs may feel unfairly implicated here. Apologies! Of course, there are indeed strong examples of digital converts who have completed this assimilation successfully and built world-class digital marketing organizations that reimagine brand engagement, and even reinvent business models.

What do these "digital CMOs" do differently? They experiment aggressively. They hire smart digital natives — and empower them. They partner with great agencies. They have the humility to admit what they don't know, the courage to toss out the old playbook, and the confidence to allow digital metrics to illuminate the results. 

Some hire a chief technologist. Sometimes it's a peer to the CMO, perhaps a chief digital officer, which Gartner predicts will be present in 25% of enterprises by 2015. Sometimes it's a chief marketing technologist reporting to the CMO, which Gartner already finds in 70% of marketing organizations today. In both cases, this role is the designated left brain to the CMO's right. 

Digital CMOs also think beyond digital marketing. They look for opportunities to create digital experiences and revenue streams enabled by the nexus of forces, which is Gartner's description of the convergence and mutual reinforcement of social, mobile, cloud and rich information. The collision of these factors unlocks opportunities to reach and engage with consumers across the physical and virtual worlds, drawing them closer with targeted, contextually relevant experiences and offers. Further, it can allow brands to redefine how value is created and delivered — the way Apple has with music, Amazon has with IT infrastructure, and Netflix has with movies.

Last year, Gartner predicted that by 2017, the CMO's technology budget will exceed the CIO's. Why? Because more often than not, it's the CMO who is expected to drive this digital transformation, which is deeply dependent on technology. Is the average CMO ready to step up to this challenge? 

Some CMOs are preparing for the digital revolution by filling the gap between expertise and authority. In other words, they have the self-awareness and the confidence to take bold action even when the context has shifted beyond their sphere of influence and scope of expertise. That is leadership. Others are afraid of the digital disruption — or exhausted by what it will take to convert digital resistors in the executive suite. 

But as we've witnessed through the economic and technological upheavals of recent years, and the resulting creation and destruction of business models, markets and careers — disruptions can be swift and unrelenting, and it is much better to be a disruptor than one of those being disrupted.

Jake Sorofman

Jake Sorofman is a research director with Gartner for Marketing Leaders, from Gartner, Inc. Read Jake’s blog and follow him on Twitter @jakesorofman.

Why a Botched IT Project Will Destroy a Major Corporation in the Near Future

The risks associated with major IT projects are being vastly underestimated, according to the largest study of global IT projects ever undertaken.

Back in 2003, the US clothing manufacturer Levi Strauss made the fateful decision to upgrade its global IT system. The project was budgeted at $5million and the advantages appeared huge. 

As Levi Strauss had grown into a global company, its IT system had become fragmented and antiquated, with different systems in operation in different countries. So switching to a single integrated system seemed eminently sensible. “But very quickly all hell broke loose,” say Bent Flyvbjerg and Alexander Budzier at the University of Oxford in the UK.

For example, the supermarket giant Walmart, one of its biggest customers, demanded that the new IT system connect seamlessly with its own supply chain management system. That created an entirely unanticipated set of problems.

Then, when the new system was switched on, the company discovered that it could not fulfill orders and had to close its three US distribution centres for a week. In 2008, five years after it began the project, the company took a $193 million charge against earnings to compensate for the problems and company’s chief information officer was forced to resign.

That’s one example of a nightmare scenario–a  botched IT project that forced a major company to its knees. But this kind of problem is much more common than you might imagine, say Flyvbjerg and Budzier, who have carried out the largest global study of IT change initiatives ever conducted. “We examined 1,471 projects, comparing their budgets and estimated performance benefits with the actual costs and results,” they say.


The results are eye-opening and should come as a warning shot for anyone in charge of major IT initiatives. Flyvbjerg and Budzier say that the average cost overrrun for an IT project is 27 per cent. That seems more than manageable for most companies.

But this figure holds a surprise because more than one in six of the projects these guys examined had a cost overrun of 200 per cent. 

“This highlights the true pitfall of IT change initiatives: It’s not that they’re particularly prone to high cost overruns on average, as management consultants and academic studies have previously suggested. It’s that an unusually large proportion of them incur massive overages,” they say.
In other words, the average cost overrun is an entirely inappropriate measure of the state of affairs and gives little indication of the true risks associated with IT projects.
  
The limitations of taking averages are well known in many areas of science. An average is only a useful figure when it is associated with certain distributions. For example, the height of fully grown men follows a so-called normal distribution for which an average is a useful description. However, it’s possible to calculate the average size of an earthquake but the figure is entirely nonsensical since it gives no indication of the size range of earthquakes which vary over many orders of magnitude. If building standards were based on the average size of earthquakes, they would fail to account for the huge devastation that big earthquakes can cause.

IT projects fall in to a similar category. Calculating the risk associated with an IT project using the average cost overrun is like creating building standards using the average size of earthquakes. Both are bound to be inadequate.  

These dangers have yet to be fully appreciated, warn Flyvbjerg and Budzier. “IT projects are now so big, and they touch so many aspects of an organization, that they pose a singular new risk….They have sunk whole corporations. Even cities and nations are in peril.”

They point to the IT problems with Hong Kong’s new airport in the late 1990s, which reportedly cost the local economy some $600 million.

They conclude that it’s only a matter of time before something much more dramatic occurs. “It will be no surprise if a large, established company fails in the coming years because of an out-of-control IT project. In fact, the data suggest that one or more will,” predict Flyvbjerg and Budzier.