Charles Makes a Point (or Two)

CIO = Chief Information Officer

If I ask this question to most of the CIOs I know, assuming they answered me honestly, they would have to answer 'no.' The key to answering the question honestly is figuring out how well and how much you really know about the information sitting on the infrastructure in and out of your datacenter. How often do you go to the CEO, CFO, VP of Sales, Chief Marketing Officer, etc., and tell them you've uncovered something in your data that shows how if a process were changed, you could squeeze a little more profit out of every transaction, or if you stopped carrying this line of product you could spend more on another and increase revenues dramatically?

I don't think there are too many CIOs in the top 1,000 companies in the U.S. that could honestly say they've ever done it. Why? Because most CIOs are not chief INFORMATION officers. They would be more accurately titled Chief INFRASTRUCTURE Officers. Don't misunderstand, keeping the IT infrastructure operational is a critical function. But we're kidding ourselves if we think CIOs are doing what the title implies. To me, this is a great disservice to the businesses we work for. That's not to say it is the fault of the CIOs. With few exceptions all the CIOs I've ever met work as hard or harder than any other executive, have the best interests of their company at heart, and have no interest in spending company money on frivolous technology for technology's sake projects. But they aren't heading up the initiatives that mine through the critical business data and seek out revenue opportunities. They are shepherds of the infrastructure which is dramatically different than being a shepherd of the information.

Think of it this way. When you think of a Chief Financial Officer, what do you think of? You think of the ultimate financial decision maker, who has a grasp on the entire financial picture of his or her organization. While they may not know all the details of every minute financial transaction (although I've met some who do), they can tell you without hesitation what the financial health of the organization is and where they stand on any given day. They shepherd the money they are entrusted to oversee. That's their job, as the job title implies. They are the chief officer of all things financial.

Contrast that to the majority of CIOs you've ever worked with. Can they tell you what is contained in the databases of the most critical applications they provide infrastructure for? Do they have an information warehouse they can pull business intelligence information from, providing critical decision making analysis back to the other business heads in real or near real time? Have they established the 'truth' about the customer base across all sources of customer related information? Have they ever been able to recommend changes in business process based upon what they see in the information they so fastidiously watch over and provide infrastructure to process and store? Unfortunately, the answer to these questions would be 'no' for most CIOs.

In all fairness, most organizations don't understand this, and so they don't require their CIO to be a CIO. All they really think about is "my email isn't working", or "ERP is down all the time", etc. Very few organizations understand the fact that their most valuable asset isn't their products, their people, their real estate, etc., but it is the information they have about their customers. In a global economy, if you mess up my customer record—and by mess up I mean lose my account history, somehow change my shipping address, fail to secure my credit card information, whatever—you can count on me moving to your competitor. Cost of movement for me is very low, even with arbitrary termination fees like the wireless industry imposes. I can move my accounts around multiple times until I find a provider that takes the best care of me, regardless of the product or service I require.

If you understand how to use the information you have about me, you can more effectively satisfy me as a customer, but more importantly, you can find new ways to generate revenue off of me. I'm not talking about those phone calls you get from your credit card company where they hard sell you into buying some service you don't really need or want and then you spend six months trying to get them to cancel the fees. I'm talking about the ability to truly upsell me on newer products and services based on trends you see in my purchasing patterns. I'm talking about communicating with me directly that I've done X in the past, and I might suggest doing Y in the future as it will save me more money.

Go look at the concept behind Sam's Club and their eValues. I don't know who came up with the idea inside of the Wal-Mart company, and it could maybe be structured a little better, but that's the concept. They have this massive amount of information about what I've bought from them over the last 10 or so years, but they don't use it in a way that is effective to me as a customer, that ties me to them. If IT came up with the idea, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. If they didn't, that's just not being a good steward of the information.

I'm going to try and explore this more with more of our customers. I'd like to explore it with any of you readers. Leave me a comment with your thoughts.