The application CIO

I remember learning about the chief information officer for the first time in my Information Technology 101 course. The term was first used by William Synnott and William Gruber in 1981¹  to denote the responsibility of firm information management. The CIO was painted as a benign leadership figure – someone whose job it was to make sure the trains ran on time – as compared to the CEO and CFO, who wielded the keys to real strategy and action. Firm stewardship, while dependent on the CIO’s information resources, existed largely outside of technology considerations.

Then came digital transformation, and the role of the CIO changed forever. 

In swift fashion, strategy started flowing through technology as organizations looked at every corner of their operations to digitize the data and digitalize the workflow. CIOs were tasked with modernizing entire organizations. Every capability across the enterprise was being innovated on, and many business leaders wanted to be at the forefront of their firm’s investment in technology.

And so brought the rise of the modern business application, where a tool was created for every problem, big or small. Sometimes applications supported multiple capabilities – sometimes they did it well, sometimes only for a few. Sometimes they played nicely with others, but more often, they didn’t. And almost always, each had its own data model.

This became the breeding ground for the application CIO – a super architect who could connect technology utility with business strategy. In a sea of promising options that could act as differentiators for their firms, the application CIO wielded an immense amount of responsibility in the face of rapid business evolution. Make the wrong choice and you could set your firm back years on maintaining a competitive advantage against your peers. Move too slow, and the outcome is the same.

Digital transformation was the mandate, and the pace was breakneck. 

Homogenization & optimization of technology

We learned a great deal during the digital transformation wave. We learned how we like to interact with applications. We learned which functionalities made the most sense to be grouped together. We learned how to make them more accessible and easier to manage in the cloud. We learned how to introduce them to our organizations with minimal friction.

In short, we’ve mastered the art of the business application. We have developed an unspoken set of common expectations for the tools, we use and our team members have equally developed expectations in how change is introduced and managed. In turn, our partners, providers, and vendors have adopted these best practices. As a result, we now see less and less differentiation amongst core business applications.

As a spillover effect, organizations are increasingly commoditizing the IT organization as focus pivots back to the business’s core competencies. Outsourcing IT will continue to increase year-over-year as a viable strategy for many firms. (It’s worth noting, of all IT capabilities outsourced, application development is the most outsourced capability.)  

With differentiation and integration among applications at all-time lows and adoption and information democratization at all-time highs - the role of the application CIO is dwindling.

The new ‘I’ in CIO

In the grand timeline of business history, I believe we’ve reached another noteworthy inflection point. We’re certainly still in the very beginning of the AI transformation, but it has started nonetheless (and just in time, because conference expo floors were losing their luster). There are a lot of similarities to the digital transformation – namely the ‘deer in the headlights’ feeling many of us have as we try to project what’s about to come when it all started. Yet we adapted, learned more than we thought possible about the relationship between technology and business, and ultimately prevailed to the point of peak optimization of the tools we built.

The goal of the digital transformation was to move our data and processes into technology, and the outcome was the democratization of information at scale. A widespread success for chief information officers everywhere, the digital transformation created the most informed and capable workforce – ever – in an increasingly global and complex business environment.

The goal of the AI transformation will be to move beyond the inform…and deliver intelligence. Who will carry the torch and democratize intelligence at scale?

The CIO of yesterday may not be the answer, but the CIO of tomorrow may be. And a rebranding would be required.

The new ‘I’ in CIO should be Intelligence

From information to intelligence

What is information and how does it differ from intelligence? Information is the raw material to intelligence and must be refined before we can put it to use. Many of us have had the pleasure of sifting through mountains of data, searching for that diamond in the rough. The diamond we’re looking for is insight – the first refinement of information – something that stands out that we can examine, challenge, debate, rationalize. Find enough of these insights and you may be able to aggregate them into a new hypothesis about your customers, products, or firm. But even then, with a handful of insights derived from the mountains of information, we still often find ourselves incapable of decisive action. 

The reason why? We need to perform a second refinement of information by converting insights into intelligence.

In all of history, we have been the sole source of intelligence in the world. As the only entity capable of converting insight into actionable intelligence, it has been a long journey to effectively generate insights alone at scale. However, the next seismic shift is upon us, and, for the first time, we are beginning to hand the reigns of the second refinement over to something other than ourselves. 

Reimagining business intelligence

It’s important to note a distinction between the potential for a chief intelligence officer and the emerging role of the chief artificial intelligence officer. The latter generally focuses on the development and deployment of AI technologies within the firm, whereas with a chief intelligence officer, they would be interested in every aspect of the decision-making process that drives their firms – by both people and technology. With people in the mix between the business and the technology, natural stopgaps exist. With the  AI transformation, relinquishing those natural stopgaps will become a new change management challenge for all of us to embrace.

We learned from the digital transformation that we should expect to deal with multiple transition states – times when some things were still analog, times when others were transforming, and times when some had already transformed. If we are to navigate a similar transformation for AI, then we need someone to act as the trusted shepherd of the company’s intelligence. 

The evaluation of our businesses, beyond the tried-and-true paradigm of people, process, and technology, creates an opportunity for us to ask new questions: 

• What makes our value proposition unique? 
• What are the intangibles of our differentiation?
• What business intelligence do each of us bring and represent within our firms? 

• How is that intelligence interconnected and woven together in the pursuit of our shared goals?

The chief intelligence officer presents an opportunity for us to examine the nerve center of our businesses in a whole new way.