Abbie Lundberg's interview with Martha Heller on The CIO Paradox

[Listen to audio of the complete interview.]
[All about The CIO Paradox]

Abbie: The name of the book is The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership.  What exactly is The CIO Paradox?

Martha: The CIO Paradox is a set of contradictions that permeate the core of the CIO role.  The contradictions do not go away, but the most successful CIOs have found a way to manage up, around, over, and through them. As an executive recruiter, I am often asked to replace a CIO who did not work out. More often than not, it is the CIO paradox that has done them in. 

What’s the fundamental problem here?  What’s at stake?

Here’s a paradox:  IT can bring a company to its knees and be a company’s market opportunity. And yet, corporate boards rarely employ CIOs. 

So what’s at stake here are companies’ inability to harness and leverage technology to their advantage because of the business’s lack of understanding about how significant it is.  And that’s been important for the last 10 years, but going forward it’s going to be a much bigger deal.

Given that much of the “IT problem” comes from the CEO side, how much can CIOs do on their own to solve the paradox? 

A huge part of solving the CIO paradox is wrapped up in the business, their degree of IT fluency and their willingness to engage in IT strategy and execution.  One CIO told me that getting the business to do their part when it comes to IT project execution is like pushing a rope.  Another CIO said that her former boss used to say, “There are two kinds of projects, business successes and IT failures.” 

At the end of writing the book, I realized that there is one paradox that actually is at the heart of all of this: the accountability versus ownership paradox.  ERPs, CRMs, deployment, mobile applications, these are supposed to be business projects. And yet, when the program or project goes awry, it is the CIO who is left holding the bag.

How do you have accountability for something that you’re really not supposed to own?  How do you influence business executives – many of whom are a little more senior than you – to do their part, pony up the sponsorship, resources, people to get programs and projects done?  It is at the heart of the CIO paradox. 

A major challenge for CIOs is to build credibility with those business executives so that they can get on the same page with them about IT strategy and execution.  But not every CIO has those influencing skills. 

Do you think that the paradox can ever be resolved? 

I am sad to say that I do not see a great deal of improvement in the way executive committees are conceptualizing the CIO role.  But, I do see a much greater set of challenges. Infrastructure, data centers, and technical services are still a part of the CIO role, whether they are outsourced or not.  CIO’s still have legacy.  At the same time, there is such a heightened demand for mobility, cloud, and devices coming from every fissure and pore of the organization.  The rock and the hard place that CIOs have always found themselves between -- that little tight spot is getting a little bit tighter. 

There are brilliant CIOs who will stay on top of all of this, and they will have phenomenal impact on their companies and on the way we work and live. It is very exciting to see.  But for every one of those success stories, we’re going to see that CIO revolving door keep spinning.

Is it too much of a stretch to say that the future winners in business will be those companies that are able to manage the CIO paradox?

A company’s ability to manage the CIO paradox so that they are getting the bang for the buck when it comes to IT investments is going to be a critical success factor– as big as anything else those companies are involved in.

In your book, you say that we are in a world of "ands".  You're not going to get rid of your ERP or legacy transaction systems.  But, you are plugging in all these new things like consumer technologies. You say that to be successful in that kind of environment you need to simplify, get rid of context, and hold on to what is going to be core, but in a much simpler environment. 

That’s exactly right.  This was one of the paradoxes that really resonated with most CIOs.  It’s the futurist versus archivist paradox.  As CIO, you’ve got to be out in front of your company thinking through, “How’s your customer demographic changing?  How’s the technology marketplace changing?”  And you’re not alone out there.  You’ve got the CEO, the Head of Business Development and the Head of Marketing out there with you.  However, unlike them, you are chained by decisions made 15 years before you even got to the company as CIO.  The Head of Sales really doesn’t care how products and services were sold 15 years ago.  But you cannot be so cavalier about the past. 

So the more you can get rid of that legacy, make it simple, get somebody else to do and get the iron out of your shop, the more you can turn your team’s attention to this new onslaught.  And in companies where IT has been under invested for years, that’s a tough nut for the new CIO to crack. 

The CIO paradox actually encompasses a dozen or more individual paradoxes.  If you had to choose just three for a CIO to focus on, which would they be?

Number one would be the archivist/futurist paradox and the ability to develop a strategy that allows you to mitigate the past as you focus on the future. 

The other is the accountability versus ownership.  How do you, as one CIO put it, drive from the backseat? The ability to get a business executive to lead is an amazingly challenging skill, and one that CIOs need to focus on. 

The third is the strategy versus operations paradox.  When you interview for your CIO job, you’re talking strategy with the executive committee. But two years later, you’re putting out fires.  When the CEO turns around and says, “We’re spending an awful lot of money on operations. Where’s my strategy?” you don’t have an answer. That’s a paradox.

How is this book different from other books on the CIO role?

The book takes a step back and views the CIO role as a set of opposing forces.  And in that reframing, CIOs can look at their own role and understand it differently.  As CIOs are thinking through their own role and developing their senior people, their ability to describe the role in terms of paradoxes provides a conceptual framework that makes managing the role a little easier.  So, the conceptual framework is different from what I have seen in other books.

Also, my background is as a journalist reporting on the CIO role since 1999. What I have always done with the CIO community is to facilitate peer information exchange.  My goal is for this book is to sit in that rich tradition of CIOs sharing information with one another.  So ,what I’m not doing is a 7-point system for building an IT organization or a 14-phase approach to project management methodology.  I’m not a consultant.  That’s not my background.  My background is talking with CIOs, understanding what their issues are, framing their problems in a certain light, and filling that frame with their best practices and experiences.  That is really what I put into the book.

The book is refreshing and readable and does not feel like homework.  How would you like people to use this book?

First, I would ask readers just to enjoy the book without worrying too much about, “Where am I in all of this?”  “How do I stack up?”  “How do I use this?” 

But in terms of really applying the lessons in the book, I would focus on the last chapter, which is called “Breaking the Paradox.”  As I was doing these interviews, I noticed that there were certain behaviors, attributes, approaches, and philosophies that all of the CIOs seemed to share.  So, I collected those into a checklist.  Readers might go through the list and put check marks next to the skills that they possess. And for the skills that they are missing, they might think, “Do I have a consultant who can help me?  How important is it for my particular company?”  And if they find that they can’t check off many of the items, they might do a gut check and say, “Am I in the right company?  Am I in the right industry?  Am I in the right role?” 

If you can put a check mark next to all of the items, then it’s time to start thinking “What’s my future, because I’ve got it all!  I’m business oriented.  I can build credibility.  I am a great leader.  I have deep understanding of technology. Where is my place in this incredible era of technology innovation?”  

You also address the future of the CIO role and present multiple futures.  Given how fast things are changing and how unpredictable the future really is when it comes to technology-enabled business, where would you place your own bet?

I think we’re going to see two evolutionary paths for the CIO role.  The operationally oriented CIO will wind up outsourcing quite a bit of that IT and will have the leadership capacity to manage other shared services like HR, like legal, like finance.  That’s a Chief Shared Services role where they will have accountability for functions in addition to IT. 

In companies where data is very close to the revenue stream, it will not be about business process reengineering; it will be about business model reengineering.  CIOs who have that product focus are going to wind up being in “the business” as Chief Product Officer with P&L responsibility and defining what the company actually does. I think it is very important for CIOs to understand which track they are on because operational and innovative skills don’t always go hand-in-hand. 

Abbie Lundberg is President of Lundberg Media, a consulting firm that helps IT and business leaders translate complex issues into focused, compelling messages to speed buy in and delivery of results. Abbie was Editor in Chief at CIO magazine from 1995 - 2008. Under her stewardship, CIO received over 230 editorial awards and became the leading source of trusted information for chief information officers and all executives interested in the use of information technology for business value and competitive advantage. She appears frequently as a speaker and moderator at key industry events.