Chuck's Blog - Who Owns Corporate Information?
Much of modern management discussion revolves around the concept of "ownership". Yes, we all work in a matrixed world, but - at the end of the day - there's some idea of who owns the overall outcome.
Today, I'd like to explore the concept of "information ownership" from a corporate or organizational perspective, how we see this rapidly shifting from individual business functions to the lucky folks in IT, and what they might be thinking about to prepare themselves for this new responsibility.
I'm not giving much of the game away when I say that Hollis thinks the IT function should be in charge of corporate information.
It's a predictable choice on two counts. First, he is vice president of technology alliances at EMC, an information technology company whose main clients are other information technologists. As Mandy Rice-Davies (the MRD of the title) famously almost put it: "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?"
The other reason for Hollis's contention is that no other existing corporate function comes to mind as sufficiently powerful and well resourced.
Whether IT folk are up to the job is another matter. Hollis uses the term "informationist" to describe people who are more interested in info than machines (see his blog item, "The Informationist Manifesto").
If by information he means more than data [1], I would hazard there is only a small proportion of people in most IT departments who are genuinely interested in it.
15 years ago or more, there was a move to relabel IT directors and managers "Chief Information Officer". The reason, apart from the usual power-grabbing and salary-raising motives, was that these exalted personages would be best placed to exercise an overview and control of the organisation's informational assets.
Well, as Harry Hotspur said when Glendower claimed to be able to summon spirits from "the vasty deep", "Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?". CIO's didn't exercise such control then and, pace Chuck Hollis, I can't see many of them doing it now.
One reason is the (still) low professional status such a title carries with it. The jibe then as now is that CIO stands for "career is over". In the macho world of computerists, anyone who is not actually handling code is a 'suit', an object of suspicion and derision. Those who can, do; those who can't become CIOs - that sort of thing.
A second reason is the CIOs are often too low on the corporate totem pole to exercise that sort of influence and power. In 2005, the public relations company Burson-Marsteller issued a report on the role of computer experts in corporate governance. Called A Missing Competency: Boardroom IT Deficit, it said that, in 2003, only 5 per cent of Fortune Global 500 companies had a current or former CIO on their board of directors. By 2004, this had increased but only to 8 per cent.
Even by October 2005, a meeting of the CIO Roundtable (aka CIOs Kvetching) admitted that "Recognition of IT at the board level needs to be elevated from today's low - and in some cases non-existent - levels." (See Aligning IT and Corporate Governance.) Matters won't have changed much in the 18 months since then.
The final reason is that the title of Chief Information Officer is a misnomer, not to be taken at face value. If it were accurate, this person would also be in charge of the mail room, internal post, periodical subscriptions, photocopiers, the company library, product specifications, engineering and process data, product manuals, noticeboards, meeting rooms, sales literature, press relations, shareholder notices, the company annual report and everything said on the telephone system.
In fact, the CIO is still looking after the same narrow range of matter as always, which is data a computer can handle - and not even all of that. A more realistic title would be CCDO - Chief Computer-readable Data Officer. This is unlikely to attract support.
Coincidentally, in her Change @ Work blog, Patricia Kitchen has just taken a look at some of the 'CxO' titles that have been coined in recent years. In "Where the Buck Stops", she lists several, including a chief diversity officer. He must work for the Sioux Federation.
Not wishing to be left behind, I long ago gave myself a CxO-style title. I'm the CBO - Cheese (Big) and Owner - of my one-person company.
I discovered Ms Kitchen's blog via the ineffable Christopher Locke, who months ago assumed the typically sardonic nom de clavier of Chief Blogging Officer. Locke is the author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, a dazzling, honest and angry look at the state of business and the Web in the late 1990s.
It's a book that got him effed a few times, actually, having the same bell-like ring of truth to it as Robert Townsend's Up the Organization, 35 years earlier. I'm a fan of both books (and both authors). Each is worth ten times as much as the kind of safe, timid, technology-based "manifesto" that Chuck Hollis talks about.
Come on, Charlie, light my fire!
Note
[1] Most people use the words "data", "information" and "knowledge" almost interchangeably, as thought they were synonyms. When challenged, they would admit there are differences among these terms, even if they would have trouble saying what those differences are.
A quick and dirty differentiation is that:
· Data is a record of states and changes of state in a system, person, discourse or environment (detection)
· Information arises when a person or machine recognises that data as relevant (identification)
· Knowledge comes about when that information is put into a consistent framework (assimilation).
Machines and people can both deal with these three stages but they process them in radically different fashions, so much so that human-based information could be regarded as distinct from machine-based information; ditto for knowledge. Further, only human beings are presently (perhaps always) capable of higher levels of abstraction and generalisation, such as understanding and wisdom.
Feel free to disregard or disagree with these statements (not that you need permission, of course). Anything that can be apprehended and modelled only one way is scarcely, if ever, worth bothering with.
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