In the age of tech-ubiquity, it’s easy for CIOs to bury themselves in tools and avoid the people they serve. However, the dangers of this are summed up nicely in this exchange from the recent James Bond film Skyfall:

Q: I hazard I can do more damage on my laptop in my pajamas before my first cup of Earl Grey than you can do in a year in the field.

Bond: Then why do you need me?

Q: Every now and then a trigger needs to be pulled.

Bond: Or not pulled -- it’s hard to know which in your pajamas.

To understand the need for CIOs to enter “the field,” consider the amazing change that’s occurred over the past few years thanks to cloud, mobile, social and other flexible technologies. In old school IT, you spent millions on a huge implementation and then tried to force everyone in the organization to fit their behavior to it. The CIO was like the mother who bought her kid a sweater that he hated and made him wear it because she spent too much for it to sit in his closet.

Now flexible technology makes it possible to fit technology to the behaviors of your users. When rolling out a platform, you shouldn’t have to do that much convincing to get departments onboard, because ideally you’ll have done your homework and created a solution that supports how they’re already operating. In this way, you become the mom who buys clothes her kids think are cool.

This, however, requires much more than an academic understanding of business departments’ challenges, goals and operations. It takes the kind of understanding that only comes to one who has “lived it.”

READ MORE>>