At Knowledge Infusion, in every client engagement we work on we work with the CIO of the enterprise jointly with the leads from HR, various talent organizations and of course, the line of business.
InformationWeek had an interesting blog post last week that caught my eye as we were meeting with a number of CIO's last week from Fortune 100 organizations. An excerpt that I found extremely telling is:
The pace of technology change -- and therefore
business expectations and IT culture -- is accelerating, fueled by
three things: IT's *_brief but turbulent history, a crush of external
forces that reset IT spending and user attitudes, and the strength and
resourcefulness of CIOs themselves_*. To survive in tomorrow's context, a
CIO will need to disperse staff and capability out to business units at
the same time as they acquire capacity from a supply grid. Meanwhile,
the +_CIO must switch focus from efficiency and cost to enabling greater experimentation and iteration of new ways of competing for the firm._+
The best will take over their firms' operational services, run P&L
lines, become COOs, and in tech services firms, aim sights on becoming
CEOs.
What i found very valuable about this was that the CIO will be looking to experiment more with technology going forward to drive competitive advantage. This is opposite of what most CIO's were doing the past 10 years while focusing on efficiencies.
From a people perspective, the services economy will always be driven by people. The knowledge of those people make up the competitive advantage of an organization and the CIO will begin to look for ways to leverage that knowledge more into the future. The question for HR is "are you ready?"
HR must continue to learn about new technologies such as social networking, Web 2.0, and other tools to insure that when the CIO does come knocking (hopefully this will happen); HR is prepared with open arms to say YES and experiment with IT.
2008 - an interesting year as technology matures, the business asks for more and HR continues to have a larger seat at the table.
BE READY
Another infusion of knowledge...
