|
Designated Drivers
Imagine arriving at your new company knowing you're next in line for the CIO job. The succession plan is set, then suddenly the current CIO falls out of favor and leaves. The board decides to look outside for the new IT chief. You've been passed over. Not long ago, that unhappy scenario befell a friend of mine; she felt as though the company she had counted on pulled a bait and switch.
As our story ("The Replacements") notes, succession planning is a "long and difficult process with no guarantees." Robert Half Technology says that only 19% of CIOs do such planning. Gartner Inc. analysts weigh in to note that the probability your designated successor will get the job is quite low. In some cases, CIO successors tire of waiting and leave. But just as often, the designated IT drivers fail to win the confidence of senior management.
So why bother? Because when CIO succession planning works, it enhances the reputation of IT, keeps business running smoothly and fills the talent pipeline with good-to-great managers. Check out our story for advice and examples of midsized companies working through this tricky process.
In this month's case study ("Virtual Vault"), senior editor Tom Kaneshige takes you to the Texas panhandle and looks at a high-touch approach to Web banking security that caters more to customer loyalty than to predominant industry outsourcing trends. "I think outsourcing is more expensive if you take into account customer service loss and reputation risk," contends Senior Vice President Jason James, whose four IT staffers not only handle security in-house but also throw in some old-fashioned customer home visits each month. This story underscores how much individual customers still matter to midsized businesses (when you read about the bank's "Del Rio incident," you'll know what I mean).
On another technology frontier, we enter the buzzword-rich realm of Software as a Service, also known by the bleating acronym of SaaS. Still controversial in some corners, this Internet-based delivery model for hosted or on-demand software is nevertheless catching the interest of many mid-market companies, which are always more constrained by limited staff resources than are large ones. But this isn't just another story about Salesforce.com, that poster child for SaaS customer relationship management applications. In "What You Don't Know About Software as a Service", senior editor Megan Santosus delves into the concerns about SaaS, from reliability and customization barriers to management headaches and security. In this month's CIO Habitat, Thornton May discovers gaping holes in CIO awareness about SaaS and addresses the top two concerns -- trust and control -- that skeptical CIOs have about this trend.
Finally, for those of you following Les Johnson's ERP Journey column from our first issue in April 2005, the journey's end is in sight with this second-to-last installment. Les demonstrates how North Coast Electric's new enterprise resource planning system has expanded IT's role with dozens of external partners, suppliers and vendors. "By this time next year, we will likely have another hundred vendors as partners," he writes. "IT must be flexible enough to integrate them into our ERP system. ... We must be nimble and do in days what used to take weeks."
That ever-increasing speed of business is what makes IT leaders the designated drivers of change. Let us know if the navigation aids in this issue help keep you behind the wheel.
Maryfran Johnson, is the founding editor in chief of CIO Decisions. To comment on this story, email editor@ciodecisions.com.
|
