From IT sections to boardrooms

Dubai: Chief information officers are increasingly finding themselves between a rock and a hard place.

On one hand, they're being asked to step into the board-room and help find ways to make the latest technology help a company succeed, but on the other hand, they're being told to save money.

At least that was what was being discussed on Sunday morning at the IBM CIO conference held in Dubai.

At the heart of the discussion is the IBM Global CIO study for 2009, which included input from 2,500 chief information officers, of which about 40 were from the GCC. The report was released in September.

"More and more CIOs in the region have started to realise that there's a conflict," said IBM's Sreeram Visvanathan. "They are told, ‘cut costs, cut costs, cut costs.' That IT is an expense. At the same time they get beaten up and asked ‘where's the value?'"

The problem, Visvanathan said, is companies traditionally see the CIOs as the person in charge of making sure computers and the networks work right, not as someone who can make a company more competitive.

In the Middle East, CIOs are being asked to step up and help guide the companies even less than their western counterparts, although Visvanathan said there is a recognition that they need to do so.

"It is still developing in the region," he said. "Very few CIOs in the region are on the board or members of a governing body. They're seen as a facilitating function instead of a leadership function or innovating function."

But according to Harvey Koeppel, executive director of the Centre for CIO Leadership, based in New York, companies need to seriously look at the roles of their CIOs, especially after a down cycle.

He points to automobile manufacture Saab and Genentech, a leading biotechnology corporation, as examples of companies that have successfully integrated their CIOs into the executive leadership.

"What we are seeing at companies that are really successful and high performing is the attitude that now there is a wonderful opportunity to step back, to get things standardised, to get things simplified, to get things streamlined… so when the economy turns around, which inevitably it will, we're ready to take on the competition. That's happening more and more," Koeppel said.

According to Visvanathan, the reason the Middle East's CIOs are not as influential is the region's hierarchical business culture.

Collaborative leadership is still getting a foothold.

"It's one hell of a big cultural shift," he said. "In some parts of the region, it's still difficult for people to digest that."

But finding good CIOs isn't easy, either, even in the more developed regions. Globally, CIOs looking to make the transition from the IT department to the board-room have to know how to manage a company as well as understand the latest developments in technology.

"It is a lot tougher to hire someone to sit in a board-room and understand the corporate strategy than to understand how technology can help to evolve that strategy, two years, three years, five years out," Koeppel said.

It gets even harder for them if you look at the rate of change in technology, he said. "If you look at the rate and volume of changes that are occurring in technology, it's exponential. So the ability to keep up with that is even more demanding than 10 years or 15 years ago."