When more than 700 CIOs were asked what tasks and activities would consume them the most in three to five years, they listed “driving business innovation” and “identifying opportunities for competitive differentiation.” However, many a CIO’s reaction to this CIO Magazine’s State of the CIO 2011 research may be, “Tell me something I don’t know—like how to make these things happen.”
Ralph Loura is CIO of Clorox and an IT leader well known for his strategic, far-reaching thinking on critical IT matters. He maintains there are two critical paths to achieving these and other lofty CIO goals. One is to take the steps necessary to prove IT’s true value as a business enabler. And the other is to move aggressively to embed IT directly into the business.
As for the first, evolving IT into a role as business enabler, Loura says you’ve got to first deal with sweeping away niggling and persistent impediments to change.
“(In IT) we are carrying a lot of operational legacy, be it legacy hardware or software, legacy process. Some of it is legacy thinking in the way we structure and deliver systems and value,” Loura states. “We’ve got to continually challenge ourselves to stay current, to stay close to the business, to understand their needs, and then scan the industry for solutions that fit into that need set, as opposed to solutions that fit our paradigm of how we’ve structured delivery in the organization.”
Asked what specific technologies or solutions he feels will forward the cause of IT as a business enabler, Loura wastes little time in singling out services-oriented architecture (SOA).
“(With SOA) it’s a question of how do I take features and functions and capabilities from different disparate systems that were designed and operated in different ways, and bring them together to create a new and different model of a business process or create new insight in the business? SOA, I think, is at the heart of that ability.”
Then there is the mission-critical CIO task of embedding IT directly into the business. Historically this has not been the case, as IT was formed as a centralized, largely administrative entity with tentacles into the business units. Why change now? As it turns out, this gathering trend may be the key to achieving end-to-end business insight to generate competitive advantage in a particular brand set.
“It’s hard to gain insight if you’re at arm’s length from the data and the systems and the processes that support that,” Loura insists. “So it’s really vital that the digital capabilities, the analytics, the insight that can be gained from systems, be used to support that kind of transformation in the business. You can’t do that at arm’s length.”
Again, there are impediments to achieving these IT goals. Perhaps most prominent among them is legacy IT technology. Most current IT systems are built on large-scale ERP environments and large-scale enterprise applications that have traditionally taken years to deploy, and support time and lifecycles dramatically inconsistent with today’s business.
But the bigger challenge is to sweep aside the human obstacles, Loura feels. “In IT we’ve rewarded and trained people to be risk averse…to build very stable, very controlled systems. Try to tell those same people: Now your job is to run as fast as you can and as be as agile as you can and as creative as you can to help solve some challenges at the edge of the business, as opposed to the core of the business. It definitely takes a different kind of person to really want to run at that front edge, bringing technology to the business.”
