Twilight of the CIO

October 6, 2007

Nick Carr is playing devils advocate again to some effect:

The CIO doesn’t matter,” writes vnunet’s Silicon Valley Sleuth. “In [the new] reality, the average firm doesn’t need a CIO – or at least doesn’t need one as part of the management team. Such a role warrants an IT organization that is constantly raising the bar on its vendors and software. Companies like Google, Merrill Lynch or Wal Mart need a CIO. But for the majority of the economy, a CIO demonstrates a desperate attempt…

The rest of the article is worth reading and corresponds with my own experience. It also links back to my post of yesterday about ICT in schools and the danger of failing to treat IT as a tool, and instead seeing its use through the filters of fetishism.

At the same time on ActKM I made two statements earlier on in the week. One to the effect that I had never seen, within the context of real, need at the time of that need (yes Matt it was heavily qualified) anyone other than a psychopath refuse someone knowledge. The second was a throwaway response to the effect that intelligent people would not refuse something that made them more effective. Now someone has chose to argue with me using a series of examples, largely derived from their personal and bitter experience.

What is interesting from this morning’s exchange is that it is evident that the individual’s cases are all of people rejecting or failing to use IT systems that would have made them more effective. I find this interesting. Now don’t get me wrong, IT is critical to the modern organisation, but the over hyped claims of IT Departments are not. It might be argued that users rejecting the hype of new systems from IT is not an example of a failure of intelligence, but rather a proof of its existence.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

About the Cynefin Company

The Cynefin Company (formerly known as Cognitive Edge) was founded in 2005 by Dave Snowden. We believe in praxis and focus on building methods, tools and capability that apply the wisdom from Complex Adaptive Systems theory and other scientific disciplines in social systems. We are the world leader in developing management approaches (in society, government and industry) that empower organisations to absorb uncertainty, detect weak signals to enable sense-making in complex systems, act on the rich data, create resilience and, ultimately, thrive in a complex world.
ABOUT USSUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER

Cognitive Edge Ltd. & Cognitive Edge Pte. trading as The Cynefin Company and The Cynefin Centre.

© COPYRIGHT 2024

< Prev

How Real is the Real Thing?

I often drop in at the Gran Sitges Hotel for a drink. The hotel is ...

More posts

Next >

The Unprincipled Principle of Least Effort.

In 1949 George Zipf, a Harvard linguistics professor, published Human Behaviour and the Principle of ...

More posts

linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram