By George Colony, Tue Feb 27 2007, CNET
Throughout my career, I have watched the "odd couple" of the chief information officer and the chief executive officer try to live together.
In the 1980s and for most of the '90s, their paths rarely crossed--the CEO didn't think much about technology, and the CIO rarely interacted with executives beyond his boss--the chief financial officer. With the exception of some techie leaders like Ned Johnson at Fidelity, Fred Smith at FedEx or David Glass at Wal-Mart, chief executives perceived IT/BT (I now refer to information technology as business technology, or BT) as an important underpinning of company operations, but not as a critical strategic tool.
Added to this general ambivalence were the high-profile cases of chief executives having their reputations and budgets scorched by IT/BT projects gone awry: perpetual IRS systems overhauls, Citibank's futile effort to create a "single customer view" in the mid-'80s, and SAP R/3 "kitchen sink" leaps of faith in the early-'90s come to mind.
Then the dot-com collective insanity hit and CEO panic set in (Amazoning, etc., etc.). In those days, I ran a tech session at the Harvard Business School for CEOs. To prepare for the session, I surveyed chief executives at 25 large companies. When I asked them how much time they spent on technology issues, the response was "25 percent." They were lying: CEOs--even the techies--could not afford to devote a quarter of their time to systems.
Read More ....
0 comments:
Post a Comment