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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

News flash!

In another case of psychologists proving what we’ve long suspected, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, publishing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, demonstrated the inverse correlation between actual ability and self-assessment.

The better employees think they are, the worse they actually are and vice versa.

Armed with this little factoid, I expect battalions of mediocre programmers to immediately try to improve their ability to write good code by adding humility to their conversation. While the humility, however insincere, will be a welcome change, it will start a tiresome variant of the decrepit “You only thought I knew that you knew that I knew that you knew” gag.

But I digress.

I just read another version of the “CIOs need to know the business” article. I think there’s just one article on the subject, and when a writer is feeling tired he pulls it out, shuffles some paragraphs around, e-mails it in, and goes back to sleep. They’re all the same, really. They make the hoary point that businesses don’t want technology for technology’s sake — technology must serve a business need, and successful CIOs will embrace this concept.

Some insights are more startling than others, I guess. But before we go on, let’s all hold hands and chant together: “Yes, CIOs must know the business, and never propose technology for technology’s sake.” Maybe if we say it loud and proud a few times, everyone in earshot will understand that we’ve fully grasped this concept, and we can all move on to the next one.

The next one, made many times in this space, is that “knowing the business” doesn’t begin and end with abstract notions like strategies and business models. The most important part of knowing the business is knowing the interests, hot-buttons (and cold-buttons), pet programs and pet peeves of every important decision-maker in the company. At least half of an average CIO’s time is spent selling. It’s internal selling … to the board of directors, CEO, senior executives, middle managers … but selling nonetheless.

If you don’t like the idea of having to sell internally, find a different word that describes the process of persuading others to adopt your concepts, in the process adding money to your budget.

If it looks, waddles, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. If it looks, smells, and tastes like selling, it’s selling.

To sell effectively, you need to understand your prospects on an empathic level. You need to understand the business, formally, politically, and personally.

Why, oh why do so many seemingly sensible people jump from here to the ridiculous notion that the CIO can delegate the “understanding technology” part of running IS to subordinates? Would anyone reach a similar conclusion down the hall a few doors, and figure the CFO doesn’t need to understand accounting, just “the business”?

Of course not. Of course, they’d probably reach the right conclusion for the wrong reason, explaining that at the end of the day … or at least the fiscal year … the money is the business. Robert McNamara, overconfident of his ability (sound familiar?) due to his business resume, used a similar thought process in pursuit of victory in Vietnam, running a metrics-driven war in which relative body counts (profits) mattered more than the formulation and execution of strategy and tactics.

CFOs need to understand finance and accounting because they run that part of the business and they need to understand the discipline. CIOs need to understand information technology because that’s what they’re responsible for. This isn’t a complex concept, nor should it be controversial.

Go back to the idea that CIOs spend a lot of their time selling. What do really great sales people do? They paint a persuasive vision of how great your world will be once you’ve incorporated what they’re selling into it.

What’s the first step? Understand what you’re selling. In the case of a CIOs, that’s information technology. Without that knowledge, no matter how good you are at step two — understanding your prospects’ world — you’ll have no way of progressing to step three: Putting that knowledge and your product together.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Companies today need to have an e-commerce strategy.

Or is it an e-business strategy? There’s a lot of e-go in e-discussions. With the proliferation of e’s, e-ventually, we’ll all feel like we swallowed an e-metic.

E-nough!

In the past six months or so, I’ve run across an increasing number of pundits and consultants who are “experts” on e-business and e-commerce. They’ve all taken strong positions on the subject, and have no shortage of advice on how to thrive in the new, digital economy.

I don’t, even though I co-authored a book on the subject a few years ago (Selling on the ‘Net, Lewis and Lewis, National Textbook Company, 1996) so I must be an expert. Sorry, an e-xpert.

Why don’t I have a strong position on e-business and e-commerce? Two reasons: One, there are still too few success stories on the Web for anyone to have any confidence in what works right now and what doesn’t, let alone what will work in the future. If you’re looking for a seasoned, experienced e-business strategic consultant, you’re guilty of the same sin IS departments committed a few years ago when they were looking for Java programmers with more years of experience than the language had existed.

There’s a limit on how certain someone should be when logic is unsupported by anything more than anecdote. I figure, read William Gibson’s Neuromancer and you’ll have a better picture of the future of e than most of the consultants now expounding the wonders of the new electronic marketplace.

There’s a second reason I don’t have a strong position on e-business strategy: The very phrase asks the wrong question … and when you ask the wrong question, even the right answer is misleading.

Look closely at e-business and what you find are a set of new capabilities … or, in some cases, old capabilities, such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) that are reaching critical mass. While this may seem like a fine semantic distinction, there is a difference between articulating an e-business strategy and articulating a business strategy that includes e-business technologies and techniques.

In other words, e-business is infrastructure, not strategy.

Isn’t this a distinction without a difference?

Nope. It’s central to how a CEO leads the company, and to how IS organizes technology in support of business strategy. Companies that have e-business “strategies” will also have CRM strategies (and eCRM strategies), data warehousing strategies, knowledge management strategies, and a host of others. Really, they’ll have an incoherent collection of tactics with no central strategy at all.

Now what impact do you think that approach to business strategy will have on technical architecture? Disorganized goals will usually lead to disorganized tactics, fragmented infrastructure, and a lot of frustration all the way around.

Does that mean business should ignore e-business? Not at all. New capabilities are the most destabilizing force in business because they create competition on unexpected fronts and change the dynamics of competition on the fronts on which companies already compete. If you like grandiose statements, e-business collapses natural boundaries of time and space. If you don’t, e-business creates new channels for communicating and exchanging transactions internally and with customers and suppliers. Either way, there’s a good chance it changes many of the assumptions on which business strategy has been built.

How should a company go about developing an “e-business strategy”?

Step 1: Make sure you understand the strategy you have now.

Step 2: Ponder how e-business capabilities create threats to and opportunities for this strategy.

Step 3: Pick no more than three of these threats and opportunities and design the changes your company will need to make to respond to them.

Step 4: Execute.

Now … you toil in the fields of IS. What’s your role in all of this? Aren’t these activities reserved for the executive suite?

Not hardly. The strategy, after all, is the easy part. When it comes to designing solutions and executing, the spotlight will be on IS.

Which means that IS had better have some pretty good methods in place to link information technology and business strategy.

But of course, that’s nothing new.

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