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Information systems have become essential to every organization. The last twelve months have at least had the merit of revealing this truth to as many people as possible: as never before, IT decision-makers have been at the helm of a Digital transformation that has accelerated throughout the enterprise, to guarantee its economic performance, development and resilience.
So, have the CIOs gone from obscurity to the limelight? Not really. Admittedly, the crisis has highlighted the ability of IT teams to respond. But when it comes to managing their own business, the situation hasn’t changed, and CIOs are still “in the mines”. As far as their own management is concerned, which in turn should enable them to develop, perform better and be more resilient, CIOs have not (yet?) embraced digitalization.
The CIO, the surprising poor relation of digitalization
Videoconferencing, ERP, CRM, HR IS, selfcare… In all corporate functions, whether business or support, activities are being digitized. CIOs are at the helm of this transformation, driving projects that are structuring and decisive for organizations.
To streamline interactions with company departments, channel the flow of incoming requests, organize and prioritize activity, and respond to sometimes contradictory injunctions, IT departments have indeed implemented a number of facilitating digital solutions – ticketing tools, request and project tracking, etc. – but these tools are essentially top-down. But on closer inspection, these tools are essentially top-down. They are above all dictated by the expectations of the “ordering” business lines, to communicate with a CIO who is ultimately confined to an executing role… the opposite of the crucial role it now plays in the company.
That’s the whole paradox that we’ve already had occasion to point out: a CIO’s budgets and Teams are often significant, commensurate with the Projects it coordinates and the digitalization challenges it addresses. But when it comes to orchestrating these projects, the IT department has remained in the Stone Age, steering its activities with the means at hand – in other words, in 95% of cases, with “simple” spreadsheets such as Excel…., which are by no means easy to manage. Mickaël LUPINACCI, one of the CIOs we support with our Abraxio platform, recently aptly put it this way “It’s ironic that the CIO is entrusted with the onerous task of digitizing the company, while at the same time having string, pebbles and Excel at his disposal for his own steering. “.
The CIO is in charge of digitalizing all aspects of the company, but has forgotten to digitalize itself, to optimize its own management resources, even though it is so central to the life of the company. In the final analysis, it has been left behind in this great internal revolution.
The CIO has often remained in the Stone Age, managing its business with the means at hand,
in other words, in 95% of cases, with “simple” Excel-type spreadsheets…. not so easy to manage.
Lack of resources: impact on productivity and team involvement
In all our discussions with CIOs, we’ve come to the same conclusion: between managing Budgets, Project portfolios, Teams and Vendors, on average 30-50% of their time is devoted to managing their department. This is a considerable proportion of their activity, and the trend is for it to increase, since in an era of tightening budgets and increasing numbers of suppliers, real-time management and reporting are becoming increasingly important.
Inevitably, when you manage so many dimensions, you end up manipulating 5, 10 or even 15 Excel spreadsheets that are as elaborate as they are complex to update, that you hardly dare to upgrade, and that each attempt at reconciliation makes time-consuming. When it comes to entering and re-entering the same data from different entry points, the ease of use of the flat file reaches its limits, and is even a potential source of errors and, at the very least, uncertainties. So much so, in fact, that these files are not shared.
This is where the problem lies. This anachronistic management is not only tedious and extremely time-consuming for the CIO or his managers: by discouraging delegation, by discouraging collaboration, it becomes counter-productive and impacts the efficiency of their entire management. How can we involve our Teams – at the very least, the1st circle of managers – if they don’t have the means to easily intervene in certain aspects of their own management? How can we make them more responsible and encourage them to communicate the CIO’s action if they can’t get involved in proactive steering and have visibility over usage feedback? This is yet another paradox in the age of collaboration.
On average, CIOs spend 30% to 50% of their time to the management of their department.
Put collaboration back at the heart of Tracking and optimize management
The IT decision-makers we work with are well aware that their management can no longer do without management and steering solutions worthy of the name, just like the other corporate functions they know how to equip perfectly. Collaboration is a central concern for the whole company, including the CIO. It’s hard to spread the word and extol the virtues of digitalization when you don’t set the example yourself.
In any case, CIO management is essential. Putting collaboration back at its heart is as much a guarantee of performance as it is of smooth operation. By equipping themselves with the right tools, CIOs can create a common working framework, and at last offer their Teams a relevant and effective means of facilitating activity tracking, optimizing the time they devote to it, and collaborating on a long-term basis, remotely or otherwise. In so doing, it responds to expectations of sharing and cooperation, and formalizes inclusion with regard to tasks wrongly considered as individual. Tracking is everyone’s duty. Optimizing the quality and time spent on it is the responsibility of the CIO, who can hope to benefit in the process from increased, and even automated, means of analysis and reporting.
Once structured, organized and collaborative, CIO communication with business and management becomes open and straightforward, even in today’s remote world! A virtuous circle, in short!
Abraxio, the obvious choice for IT departments
CQFD? But how do you add the challenge of digitalizing the CIO to the long list of ongoing business projects, not to mention the bandwidth-hungry run? How do you put the CIO ahead of other company departments? As former CIOs, it’s because we’ve experienced all these difficulties ourselves that we developed Abraxio, the first collaborative platform for CIO management and steering. Our mission is simple: to relieve IT decision-makers and their Teams of their day-to-day tasks, and boost their performance with a turnkey, ready-to-use solution dedicated to their business. The result is a new working environment that effortlessly puts the CIO back on the same footing as the rest of the company: digitized to good effect, with a platform calibrated to meet its day-to-day management and steering needs, and enabling it to communicate on its activity. Let’s hear it…