By Martin Veitch, Editorial Director, IDG Connect
This is the year of living differently for CIOs – and for many of the rest of us too. In the 1970s, John Kenneth Galbraith’s bestselling book of the same name proposed that we lived then in The Age of Uncertainty: a time when we had lost the uniformity of thought that characterised the economic consensus of the nineteenth century.
Today, it’s not over-egging things to argue that we live in a new age of uncertainty and have reached a stage where there have rarely, if ever, been so many imponderables. We’re dealing with phenomena ranging from stagflation, a lingering pandemic, geopolitical turmoil, war in Europe, a fuel crisis and Brexit, to the biggest changes to working patterns in a generation.
The pandemic has given us one initiative that may ultimately be deemed positive: a radical re-engineering of what we mean by ‘work'.
“A change is gonna come”, sang Sam Cooke, and he was right but not, sadly, in the way he had hoped, and the news cycle continues to swing alarmingly to the negative.
What has the role of information leader got to do with this? Well, plenty.
Even if we can hardly expect the CIO to deliver peace in our time nor figure out the politics and ramifications of departures from economic blocs, the job of the modern IT leader is surely to anticipate, hedge and plan for all possible outcomes. It’s not so much about A/B testing as something encompassing the whole gamut of the alphabet recited amid a fiendish and disturbing symphony of ‘what if’ scenarios.
Taking a stance
It seems to me that the best CIOs adopt a boxer’s stance to address risks and opportunities: they have one fist extended with which to lead and another clutched close to their chests to defend. And it’s important that they retain this balance because even the most dismal backdrops see winners – the ones who benefit from a bear market have seen it coming and acted accordingly.
Today, every right-minded CIO will be examining how to make best use of their resources and many will be considering what can be done without. But only the most defensive of leaders will be pulling up the drawbridge and locking down (in the pre-COVID-19 business sense).
The fuel crisis and mandate for sustainability has a direct line to the CIO’s list of responsibilities. Data centres account for about two percent of global greenhouse emissions and are forecast to account for 10 percent of global electricity for 2030.
I think here of Paul Martin when he was CIO at packaging giant Rexam and his insistence that, even in tough times, he retained his budget for research and analysis because it enabled him to be forward-looking.
With this in mind, let’s look at some of the matters likely to need to be addressed and some potential solutions.
Extremely high levels of inflation
This will doubtless be testing, not only cramping consumer spending but, for CIOs, leading to rising prices for IT products and services and staff wage growth. There will also be a mandate to enable spending reductions across the organisation through IT automation. Adding to the challenge, this will be the first time that many CIOs have encountered significant inflation so they will be venturing into the unknown.
Solution
CIOs should negotiate with suppliers for optimal pricing. Some IT buyers are already attempting to plug gaps in their infrastructure by purchasing at a premium in order to guarantee fast delivery, for example in procuring laptops. Those who can wait for goods may be able to benefit and many suppliers are happy to create flexible tariffs.
Cloud/SaaS is another obvious way to get to minimal upfront spending and to swerve price spikes that occur, for example from annual maintenance charges on core software such as database and ERP products.
IT chiefs should also pick the brains of older cohorts and take comfort in the wisdom of one CIO who advises to “never waste a downturn” because this is a time to get houses in order and think creatively.
Rethinking how we work and the workplace
The pandemic has given us one initiative that may ultimately be deemed positive: a radical re-engineering of what we mean by ‘work’.
Even after decades of IT, mobile computing, the internet and wireless networks, before COVID-19 we were still locked implacably into a culture of presenteeism. We were largely expected to work standard office hours and, where possible, to show up in workplaces.
Stay-at-home orders have effectively smashed that model definitively and organisations face a ticklish challenge in balancing the desire of many staff to work remotely and the need to create a working culture of shared beliefs and creativity.
Here the CIO needs to take a leaf from Apple’s culture and “think different” by considering ways in which the new world of work may play out. Many are already implementing more hotdesking, collaboration areas and meeting rooms as standard-issue pods and cubicles are a bad fit for the innovation and creativity that have never been so badly needed. But they will need to go further and reconsider how they serve home and remote workers: leaders will pay close attention to ergonomic furniture, wellbeing status, feedback loops on IT remote services, hardware equipment, security and bandwidth.
Sustainability
Of course, we need to put this in perspective: the digitisation of business and society will massively reduce usage of major physical phenomena such as transport and manufacturing. But we can and must do more.
CIOs need to investigate modernising data centres to reduce emissions and heat through use of free-air cooling and modern servers, storage and networking gear. But few will want to take on this burden themselves. The obvious alternative is to reduce or remove the use of in-house data centres in favour of co-location and/or cloud where there are huge economies of scale and where infrastructure and facilities management tend to be state of the art. By taking a lead in sustainability, CIOs will also help to promote the green credentials of their organisations at a time when these are under intense scrutiny on behalf of employees, watchdogs and non-execs.
Ultimately, realistic CIOs know that another key strategy this year will be to listen. The changes being undergone are vast, wide-reaching and, by necessity, impossible to predict precisely. But listening CIOs also need to be taking proactive steps. In the new age of uncertainty, they have much to lose but also much to gain.
