I liked the title of Gartner’s report on the 2011 CIO Agenda and have borrowed it with pride for this blog. What was equally notable was the message that CIOs need to create a new success cycle, one that puts benefits realisation and skills at the heart of their agenda.

This message resonates with my own experiences, initially as a CIO and later working with leading organisations at Henley Business School. It is why I developed with BCS the Business Change Lifecycle that ends not with delivery of a system but with the fuzzy world of benefits realisation. That is not to say that benefits are usually soft, it is more that they require a focus as much on stakeholders as they do on process. Further, they do not arrive in neat gift boxes when you expect them to. It is hard work realising benefits and CIOs need to be at the forefront.

Of course that brings in the importance of building the right skills. It is tempting to bring in consultants to achieve early success. However, without the right balance of internal skills, there is minimal transfer of capability. Achieving that means having business-focused IT people in the group who have the confidence and the credibility to drive benefits. This may sound theoretical but I am delighted with the practical benefits of the professional development programme we have created for Deutsche Telekom. Most importantly the CIO believes he is gaining the results he wants.

One of the big challenges we all face in developing skills is defining the scope of what we do. It is something I have struggled with both as a CIO and as an academic. When I was promoted recently to a professorial position at Henley, I debated what was the most appropriate title. There are arguments for Business Systems, IT Enabled Business Change, Information Management and many others. In the end, I decided IT Leadership most closely aligned to what the CIO needs to provide. I have a very broad definition of IT, one that encompasses strategy, processes, information, systems, technology and people.

That takes me back to the title. I believe we have to re-imagine IT and our leadership of it to remain relevant in tomorrow’s world. With our core skill of systems thinking, we are best placed in the organisation to understand how to integrate the different elements of business change. The challenge will be to explain and to execute it.

If you have done this, I would be very happy to hear your stories directed to sharm.manwani@henley.com.

What skills do you need if you aspire to be a CIO?

When I ran a focus group with CIOs they were clear that business and personal skills were the most critical gaps to address. That would suggest an MBA and/or leadership training. The CIOs commented that this education needed to be post-experience to be of real value.

When the CIOs reviewed IT professional management qualifications there was more debate about the value. Some believed these were necessary in order to build IT as a profession. Others questioned the benefit of a qualification relative to experience in a fast-changing industry. This issue was mirrored in a BCS survey where 88% rated experience as high importance compared with 41% for qualifications.

More than 50% of the BCS respondents wanted to see greater standardisation of qualifications. This is a view shared by Peter Shores, Regional VP Executive Partner at Gartner, who works closely with top CIOs and proposes greater alignment between academic and professional qualifications. While experience remains the key ingredient, Peter believes that over time IT staff would benefit from standard qualifications as demonstrated by other leading professions.

My own background as a CIO was supported with a professional IT qualification and an MBA. These gave me the foundation and the confidence to discuss issues in both IT and business terms. Now, as associate professor and programme director at Henley Business School, I am on the other side of the fence, developing qualifications.

In the past year, I have become aware of a number of new post-experience masters qualifications in IT. I view this very positively as delivering the best of both worlds. Professionals relish the opportunity to gain a theoretical underpinning and apply this to resolving real-world problems.

Before outlining these new qualifications, let me describe my own accountability for creating a Master of Enterprise Information Management for a large European multinational. I was pleasantly surprised in summer 2007 to see a tender specification that covered a holistic group of business-driven IT topics that aligned with the positioning of my new book on IT Enabled Business Change.

Henley’s proposal to construct a two stage programme covering strategy development and execution was accepted and in 18 months, 35 IT professionals successfully completed the core programme. This encouraged 27 of them to take the optional management challenge project. The most gratifying outcome is the value that participants’ managers and the Group CIO have seen directly in the organisation.

These results reinforce my strong support for post-experience masters IT qualifications. Last year I was introduced to Martin Frick who heads up the e-skills group for EuroCIO, a member organisation for major European organisations.

As the European CIO for Avis, Martin became a key supporter of qualifications. EuroCIO is now sponsoring a Masters in Enterprise Architecture (EA). This subject is a module on my own masters programme hence I recognise the challenge in making it relevant to organisations. EuroCIO members chose EA due to the lack of masters qualifications and they are helping an international consortium to design the programme.

Bridging a gap was the rationale for another initiative. Recently, I was invited to externally appraise a new Master of Information Leadership qualification developed by City University London. This facilitates progression of mid-career information professionals to a leadership role. It is a part-time programme giving IT professionals the opportunity to link education to their work activities. City has raised the bar with an MBA-level price point, based on the ambitions of their target audience and quality of support given. During my review I was impressed by the commitment and passion shown by the course directors who include a former CIO.

Finally, closer to home, my colleagues in Henley Business School have created an MSc in Business Technology Consulting. What is notable about this qualification is that it has been developed in partnership with Capgemini and one module will take place at Capgemini University in Les Fontaines, France. Dr. Sam Chong, CTO at Capgemini UK, highlights this qualification as supporting the real priority of developing the next generation of industry specialists.

What do these new developments tell us? I believe that IT qualifications are reaching a new level of maturity. While I have selected just a few examples from my recent involvement these illustrate the trends towards higher profile post-experience programmes and industry engagement.

We need to encourage the professional bodies such as BCS, industry employers (suppliers and users), academia and government to work together to give IT the educational framework enjoyed by Accounting and other professions. This should be flexible enough to include the types of innovative masters that are being launched. It will not be easy but I trust IT professionals and managers agree it is worthwhile.

Dr Sharm Manwani is Associate Professor and Program Director of Enterprise Information Management at Henley Business School.  IT Enabled Business Change: Successful Management is published by BCS. Email sharm.manwani@henley.com to share your views.

 

According to a recent Computing article, the pressures on the £17bn public sector IT budget will result in reducing the size of IT projects. I faced similar challenges as a national and European CIO for large multinationals such as Diageo and Electrolux.

One perhaps positive result from this cut is that it allows IT directors to ask a question that should always be posed, ‘Can you achieve the target benefit with no or a lower spend on IT?’

This enquiry was not always well received by my colleagues who thought that my role was delivering IT systems rather than adding business value through IT. Most realised over time that it led to a much stronger business case.

Top CIOs are increasingly accountable for integrated business solutions that encompass process, information and people change as well as the technology. Much of this is hidden spend because it does not lead directly to capital expenditure. The challenge with a lower IT spend is to be smarter in these other areas and I hope that it is one that public sector CIOs will rise to.

Government CIO John Suffolk recently won silicon.com’s top CIO award. His quote for the cover of my book expressed the difficulty that CIO’s face. ‘Our ability to successfully enable business change seems inversely proportional to what we invent.’  It certainly requires a broader skill set than just managing technology.

Which brings me to a hot topic. I am seeing a growth in master’s qualifications in information technology. From my standpoint at Henley Business School, there is a need for both the MBA and for specialist Masters. The former is more aimed at those who want to move from IT to a broader business management career while the latter is for those targeting senior IT professional and management roles. I plan to cover this topic in a future blog or article although you can email me if you need more information.

Finally, despite having some internal challenges, BCS has done a great job in promoting the IT professionalism agenda. This recognises the role that IT plays in enabling business change. I believe greater skills and professionalism will help us make better use of a reduced IT spend. We all have a responsibility to make it happen.

Since my last blog, a key activity has been working with a US colleague on the development of a web site on managing business change.

As those who have developed a site will know, it takes longer than you think. The challenges range from deciding on key messages to generating content to specifying the interface to overseeing the build. In this case, Professor Shore and I decided to outsource the development to an Indian web site developer. This was a great learning experience and reinforced the type of insights we convey in our Henley information management programmes.

The web site is a natural follow-up to my book on IT-Enabled Business Change. It builds on the material in the book and provides the opportunity for topical updates. One key element of functionality for a web site is a flexible content management system. I would not say that we have totally achieved our goal in this respect but there is always a trade-off between function and cost! We have included a feedback page and any constructive comments will be welcomed.

It has been encouraging to see the set-up of a new BCS Business Change Specialist group. There is an inaugural meeting on Wednesday, 16 September 2009 at the BT Centre in Central London. Unfortunately, I cannot attend this session since I will be presenting a paper at the British Academy of Management conference in Brighton. This is entitled Re-energising Business Change: a Thomson Reuters case study. My co-author is the global head of change programmes at Thomson Reuters who provided some great insights from his team’s experiences.

I am also confident that I will gain new lessons from judging at the UK IT Industry Awards. Having been a judge for several Computing awards, it is good to see Computing and BCS come together for this enlarged event. I like the way that these awards promote professional and committed approaches alongside recognising achievements. They are also great fun to attend.

The more that I reflect on the above, the more I feel that we are continuing to progress in driving increased business IT change capability. This can sound somewhat generic but I know from working with business IT professionals that they really enjoy learning a new skill whether that is how to present an IT business case, getting a difficult stakeholder on board or understanding if Zachman has any relevance!

I recently returned from my first trip to China and it was a great experience both professionally and personally. As well as presenting at an academic conference in Beijing, I was invited to give a keynote on Managing Business Change to over 100 executives and senior managers in Qingdao. According to the travel guide, Qingdao is a beautiful seaside city located a short distance across the Yellow Sea from Korea and Japan, making it an important place for international trade. 

Of course others may know it as the home of Qingdao (Tsingtao) Beer which I had the opportunity to sample at an evening dinner prior to the conference. I was quickly introduced to the drinking culture for which every introduction is an opportunity for a ‘bottoms-up’ drink - although I did draw the line at the misnamed China Wine, a distilled liquor, which is about 80 to 120 proof. Just as well since my presentation was the first one on the next morning!

I started the presentation with one of the few phrases I learned in Chinese and then switched to English to talk about the hard and soft elements of Business Change. My co-presenter, Jonathan Du, Nimbus President in China translated the presentation into Mandarin. The talk covered the different mindsets of IT and Change Managers, the cultural aspects of doing business internationally and the need for an integrated approach to change. Much of this was based on my book on IT-Enabled Business Change.

It was very encouraging to see the real depth of understanding reflected in the questions from the Chinese executive audience. Clearly they are facing many of the same challenges that we are in the western world. In fact, at the academic conference one paper reported that only about one in 10 enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations in China are rated as successful. The audience recognised that key issues are generally more connected to business and people than IT.

On a personal note, the visits to the historic Great Wall and Forbidden City contrasted amazingly with the tour of the modern Birds Nest Stadium in the Olympic Village. Judging by the number of visitors to the latter, China will be able to recoup a large amount of taxpayers money spent on the 2008 Olympics.

Overall a great experience and one I hope to repeat.