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General Manager CIOs Will Focus On Operational Excellence

General manager CIOs will concentrate their efforts on boosting the efficiency and operational excellence of IT. Business execs and staff are IT's customers, and the general manager CIO creates an organization focused on supplying what these customers request and are able to fund. This CIO role is not new, and arguably has been the default role since the dot-com meltdown.

Looking ahead, these CIOs will:

• Structure their organizations to drive standardization. Standardization of technology and applications is the key to driving down IT costs, standardization of processes the key to driving up quality and consistency. As cost and quality are key metrics for these CIOs, they will continue to centralize their organizations and organize skills and processes around centers of excellence in order to drive standardization and achieve higher quality and lower cost.


• Improve transparency, measurement, and monitoring to uncover efficiencies. General manager CIOs will increasingly manage their organizations "by the numbers." In 2008, more of these CIOs will create performance feedback loops from application, project, and infrastructure efforts, thereby increasing the effectiveness of operational planning and execution. Application scoring mechanisms that gauge the fitness of business applications will become more common as they enable CIOs to justify application modernization, replacement, and retirement choices, streamline the portfolio, and decrease excessive lights-on IT costs (see endnote 6).


• Assume management of other corporate "shared" services. In 2008, a growing number of general manager CIOs will assume management of non-IT functions (see endnote 7). Recognized for their expertise at running shared service IT organizations, general manager CIOs will adopt other shared-service organizations that might include anything from facilities management to customer service. The new responsibilities will expand CIO career options, with the limitation that these are functions in which the goals are quality service at a managed cost.

Next: What It Means

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