Managing IT Complexity the Role,

Managing IT Complexity

The role, related initiatives, strategies and programs of any leader that manages an IT function is critically important to the success of any enterprise. As global economies and their value have been transforming from being based on physical assets to being driven by information and knowledge (Peffers, Gengler, 2003) the role of the CIO and IT leader has also markedly changed. For a CIO to be effective they must first be a strategist who can appreciate the market and competitive dynamics that can quickly render an entire corporation obsolete. One need only consider the rapid and nearly lethal impact of the Internet on Microsoft, who had in the early 1990s become so complacent in their dominance of desktop operating systems and applications that they nearly missed a market opportunity that would transform their business yet also cripple it and render it irrelevant if ignored. The pace of competitive dynamics, due both to the global economic recession and the rapid pace of technological change brought on by next-generation development tools including AJAX (Zucker, 2007) is also making the CIO's role even more critical than before. With rapid prototyping tools based on Web 2.0 technologies including Web Services (Serrano, Aroztegi, 2007) not only are the development timeframes for internally-generated applications shortened, but much more critically, so are the expectations of those internal customers for these applications as well. For the CIO the ability to manage expectations while at the same time overcoming resistance to change critical for getting their organizations' strategic goals achieved can be daunting. The CIO then becomes just as critical if not more so than the Chief Marketing Officer, as the data, information and internally developed applications must quickly and significantly make contributions to the attainment of an organization's strategic objectives over time. The CIO has the task of translating the unmet needs of entire departments and divisions of the organization they serve into IT requirements while at the same time keeping existing systems providing data and knowledge. This goes beyond just keeping the "dial tone" of the IT systems running, it requires that the IT staff have a sense of how their work contributes to the organizations' attainment of objectives. For the CIO they must be a transformational leader who can give staff members an opportunity to internalize their own goals and see how they relate to the broader, longer-range strategic goals as well.

The CIO as strategist however is most tested when an entirely new enterprise-wide system is installed and then launched. The most complex and costly of these and the one that requires the greatest change to existing systems, processes and roles of people is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The functions of an ERP system are quite varied depending on the specific requirements of a company's business model. The core functionality of them however focus on coordinating suppliers throughout a firms' supply chain, then synchronizing their forecasts and shipment data with production schedules and customer deliveries. The key success factors involved in such an enterprise-wide system implementation require the CIO to think purely as business strategist if the most critical factors are to be addressed and the system implementation succeed (Ngai, Law, Wat, 2008).

Conclusion