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CIO DNA

Kenneth and Will Hopper’s book “The Puritan Gift: Triumph, Collapse and Revival of an American Dream” is an entertaining and thought provoking read that places the ills of global financial chaos squarely at the door of ‘(so-called) Experts’, modern followers of Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915). Taylor was the world’s first management consultant.

As inventor of Scientific Management, to Taylor an organisation was a collection of numbers with its management reducing to number crunching; to the neo-Taylorist ‘(so-called) Expert’ management is a standalone profession separate from its domain of application. The Hoppers level the unflattering, but not unjustified, criticism of the ‘(so-called) Expert’ as living in a world of ‘semi-fantasy, making life-and-death decisions about organisations that [are seen] only through a statistical glass darkly.’ In contrast, the Hoppers’ eponymous Puritan is the ‘generalist manager,’ endowed with good interpersonal skills and domain knowledge gained by spending a lifetime in an organisation or industry, or by working closely with people who have done so.

The Hoppers trace the generalist manager from the European Puritan forebears that founded modern America, and American growth and prosperity. The Hoppers, and other modern critics, ascribe the rise of the Taylorist to Business Schools, their ‘Temples of the Cult of the (so-called) Expert’. Their critique is that MBAs place insufficient emphasis on understanding the domain of application in the development of management skills, and on ethics and on other social considerations, so as to be detached from reality. Although not be a criticism that can be levelled at all business schools (for instance, Sloan’s students have, on average, 5 years of full-time management-relevant experience before joining their MBA), it’s true that many, if not most, new MBA graduates will enter their new management career with little more to trust than their studies.

However, the god was false. Nassim Nicholas Taleb in “The Black Swan” is as complimentary about experts as are the Hoppers, saying that ‘certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. [...They’re only] much better [...] at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. Now, whereas managers have always had sophisticated thought tools to help them manage, Taleb’s mathematical complexity is possible only when backed by computation. Taleb lays much of the vulnerability of banks and trading firms at the door of their defective models, models made possible by Computing and accepted in haste as genuine.

The most cursory of scans reveals how computation-dependent is business and finance, all the way from the lowly desktop PC that pushes emails around an organisation to the complex derivatives that have leveraged a shrinking real-asset basis to generate great wealth for the few. The true impact of that dependence is revealed only with the recent crash: IT has been and is at the centre of the radical transformation of the organisation into one with global impact. The problems of scaling the organisation—slow communication and poor distributed information management–have been overcome by IT and the Internet leading to removal of all terrestrial limits to growth. Banks, for instance, have grown to be global organisations mixing dour retail business with risky pleasure in the world’s financial markets, with no safety net to protect the exposed governments and tax payers below. With IT and the Internet, banks have become ‘too big to fail.’

By removing the limits of growth, IT is implicated in the moral hazard of being too big to fail. The organisational pull for IT outdid IT leadership’s ability to say ‘No!’. It can, therefore, be argued that the failure of IT leaders to stand up and take responsibility for guiding their organisation’s use of information has been a key factor in recent high-profile failures; by permitting the creation and use of false metrics and measures they have allowed and enabled other leaders in the business to, often wilfully, delude themselves by creating their own idea of truth and consequently scientifically mismanaging their businesses into catastrophe.

After the crash, what can be learned? Today’s three key enablers of the organisation are finance, talent and information. Should IT aspire to the established position of CIO (Chief Information Officer) within business as a board level appointment, sitting alongside the HR Director and CFO (Chief Financial Officer)? To do so, rather than just a compliant ‘yes’, we must expect from our CIO the same ‘No!’ as that the CFO gives when they see bad finance.

That’s a great deal of responsibility and, for our aspiration to become reality, we must understand the metaphorical DNA of the few CIOs that currently occupy that responsible position. This CIO DNA includes their background, their behaviours and their actions in support of their organisation, but it must also include their understanding of their environment— that which determines their fitness-for-purpose—and so, to be IT leaders, we really need to understand the business effects of the use of information and of information systems.

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