Search

This chapter describes the taking charge process that we discerned from our research data and from our interaction with executives. Taking charge is a longer process than simply the first 90 days of a new appointment. We provide an overview of the taking charge process, identifying three distinct phases: Entry, Stabilization and Renewal. For each phase, key activities and outcomes are identified and these are explored in the context of the transition types experienced by CIOs.

Every CIO steps into an existing organizational situation when they take over a new role. This inevitably shapes the type of transition they face and is an important context for the new appointment. For example, they might be coming into an organization where technology is seen as a problem, with a history of failed IT investments and significant relationship issues between the IT department that the CIO will now lead and the rest of the organization. This chapter discusses these different transition contexts and the consequences these have for the taking charge process.

This concluding chapter provides some direct advice and guidance from CIOs to CIOs taking on a new assignment. This counsel comes directly from these CIOs themselves in the form of self-penned contributions. These CIOs share their experience undertaking due diligence during the interview process, how they approached the first 90 days and the process of what comes after that. Their wisdom includes what worked for them as well as the pitfalls to avoid. They also reflect on what it takes to be successful as a CIO today.

This chapter provides guidance to CIOs on how to be more effective and ultimately play the role of a business executive with special responsibility for information technology in the organization. To this end, we have boiled our research down to ten key prescriptions for CIOs when taking on a new appointment. Following these recommendations will maximize the probability that a CIO will be successful in transition. We also share ideas on how to implement them.

Building relationships and having influence are key mechanisms in getting things done as a CIO. This chapter presents a framework that provides guidance for the CIO in building peer relationships and exerting influence. From our data, we identified different categories of CxOs that CIOs are likely to encounter in their work. Understanding these and how to engage and interact with each type is important in successfully taking charge. In this chapter, we also introduce the concept of social capital, suggesting that this is really what the CIO is building in the early weeks and months of their tenure. It provides them with the resource to get things done.

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) role has evolved over the decades and continues to do so, resulting in a C-suite role that has become very ambiguous. In addition to tracing the origins of this ambiguity, this chapter surfaces the consequences this has for a newly appointed CIO. The chapter also explores the emergence of Chief Digital Officers and Chief Data Officers (confusingly both CDOs!) and what this means for the positioning of the CIO and the IT leadership role.

This chapter examines how new leaders “fit in” to an organization. It introduces research that lays the foundation for what will be discussed in the remainder of the book as it pertains specifically to CIOs. Two specific streams of research are reviewed. The first is role theory, which describes how a person’s role is shaped. The second, organizational socialization, which describes the process of actions taken by the organization to shape how individuals fit into it. However, senior executives do have influence over how their roles are defined and leader socialization is a much more complex process of mutual adjustment. They also have influence in shaping expectations rather than merely “fitting in”. Messages of relevance for an IT leader are deciphered and their implications outlined.

This chapter focuses on the organizational environment within which the CIO operates. As a CIO takes charge, it is imperative that he/she has a clear understanding of the different elements of the organizational environment that can impact his/her ability to succeed. These can significantly influence what the CIO can and can’t achieve and the speed at which they can initiate changes they might deem necessary to make. Many of these elements are outside the direct control of any CIO; however, they can be in a position to influence them.

This chapter dives into the details of the taking charge process: its phases, key activities and outcomes. Each of these is explained in-depth and illustrated with extensive quotes from CIOs who contributed their experience with us. We demonstrate how each phase builds on the previous phase. The activities within each phase contribute to a different outcome for the CIO as they progress from newcomer to being acknowledged as a strategic business leader within the organization.

This chapter presents the CxO perspective, particularly their insights as to why, from their experience, CIOs derail. These are the views of peers that CIOs will have to work with to shape and accomplish their vision. The research is overwhelming in its findings that success with digital is very much a team sport; galvanizing the leadership team around a digital vision and the actions that will be necessary becomes paramount. Unfortunately, this is often easier said than done.

Do conceptualizations of the information systems (IS) organization reflect findings from research studying requirements for successfully harnessing information, systems and technology to achieve operational and strategic objectives? This paper addresses this question, reporting on an analysis of articles published in leading academic and practitioner journals. It describes how the IS organization is portrayed in these studies and examines the results of this analysis through a sensitizing lens constructed from research that has studied how organizations generate business value from IS. The lens depicts this objective as a quest to harness knowledge that is distributed enterprise wide. The analysis suggests that conceptualisations of the IS organization used by researchers do not reflect the requirements for generating business value from information technology that have been identified in the literature. Whilst highlighting that definitions are vague or more often absent, it challenges the dominant orthodoxy of the IS organization as a separate organizational unit suggesting that it is a more pervasive construct. The implications of this conclusion for practice, research and teaching are considered.

Purpose – Remote monitoring technology (RMT) is widely acknowledged as an important enabler of servitisation however, there is a dearth of understanding about how RMT is used by manufacturing firms to support servitised strategies. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this important yet somewhat ignored topic in servitisation research. It attempts to address the following questions: what has constrained, and what has enabled the exploitation of RMT in the context of servitised strategies? Design/methodology/approach – The research adopts an exploratory multiple-case study design. Four in-depth descriptive case studies of companies operating in aerospace, industrial equipment, marine, and transport sectors were conducted. The collected data were analysed and synthesised, drawing out conclusions. Findings – The study describes how four manufacturers are using RMT and identifies ten factors that have enabled and constrained the realisation of expected outcomes. The enabling factors identified include: skills, experience, and knowledge; support from customers and other complementary data sources, processes, and structures; operations centres; historical data; and presence of in-house knowledge and capabilities. While the constraining factors include: defining benefits of RMT; limitations of RMT; limited understanding about true capabilities of RMT; knowledge management; and lack of alignment between services and manufacturing strategies. Research limitations/implications – While considerable attention and effort have been invested in designing and conducting the research and analysing the data from the case studies, more empirical work is required to validate and enrich findings and conclusions. For this purpose several research questions to guide further theory development in this area are formulated. Originality/value – This paper is an in-depth study examining the role of RMT in supporting servitised strategies. In particular, it explores how this technology is used in practice to support service-oriented value propositions of manufacturers and identifies the factors that are key to successfully executing this strategy. As such it qualifies as one of the first studies of this kind.

With information technology (IT) becoming ever more ubiquitous and pervasive, the resulting deluge of data is driving a wave of digital disruption. No industry, it seems, is immune, and business performance is increasingly dependent on the effective use of IT and investments in technology that generate real business benefits. Yet research continues to report that most of these investments don’t pay off as expected. Blame for such scenarios is normally placed at the feet of the Chief Information Officer (CIO). Some commentators have even suggested that it is now time to replace the CIO role with that of CDO (Chief Digital Officer). This line of thinking ignores the inherent organizational dynamics that lead to the derailment of the executive in charge of IT; merely changing the job title won’t fix the problem. This article uses research conducted over the course of 8 years to illuminate reasons why CIO leaders are derailed, and what they and the CEO can do to avoid this outcome. Causes of derailment are presented in detail, and prescriptive advice is given for CIOs and CEOs alike regarding how to address causes of executive failure in leading the digital transformation of organizations.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the conundrum between the increasingly importance of investments in new information technologies (IT) on marketing practice and marketing scholars continuing to question the profitability of IT-led marketing initiatives. Design/methodology/approach – Systematic reviews of the relevant literature on the financial and market return of customer relationship management (CRM) investments from both Marketing and Information Systems (IS) literature were conducted. Findings – Findings suggest that, while both IS and Marketing scholars try to determine what generates returns on CRM investment, the IS community has a more complete conceptualisation as to how these returns are realised. A broader epistemological framework, better suited to observing how organisations benefit from IT-led management initiatives, enables a more comprehensive assessment of CRM investment. Research limitations/implications – Supplementing the methods used by Marketing scholars with those frequently used in IS research would likely improve the assessment of IT-led Marketing investments and the resultant prescriptions for Marketing practitioners. Practical implications – Failure to assess accurately the return from IT-led Marketing investments hinders managers’ ability to manage them for maximum performance improvements, all the more important now that organisations are preparing for large-scale investments in big data and social media strategies. Originality/value – This paper is the first to illustrate how a combination of Marketing and IS scholarship can assist Marketing research and practice.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine why and how participants co-create value proposals in online community-based idea contests (OCBICs), following an open call by service organisations for participation. More specifically, we explore participant motivations, roles, and behaviours as they co-create service ideas that emerge as value proposals. We present a multiple case study of three OCBICs in the global automotive sector. All three OCBICs studied were developed by the same platform host but were otherwise distinct in design and implementation. The findings reveal three propositions in relation to value proposal co-creation in OCBICs: (1) participants are intrinsically and extrinsically motivated to compete and collaborate to co-create value proposals in OCBICs, (2) participants iteratively adopt a number of diverse and overlapping roles when co-creating value proposals in OCBICs, and (3) participant behaviour in OCBICs involves complex negotiations of the contest rules enforced by the host organisation and the norms and values of the community. In order to optimise open service innovation, we conclude that service organisations need to provide participants in OCBICs with an appropriate combination of monetary and nonmonetary incentives and rewards, based on their motivation and expertise. This is one of the few studies to examine the co-creation of value proposals in the context of OCBICs in the global automotive sector.

The software engineering community has always sought to build great software and continues to seek out ways and approaches for doing this. The UX movement emphasizes the usability of the developed product. Agile approaches like scrum focus on aligning the functionality and features of the final product more closely with user/customer/market requirements. The recent interest in DevOps has brought to the fore the need to address the challenges once software goes into production. Despite this, in an enterprise environment, great software does not necessarily translate into real business benefits; few investments fail because the software didn't work [1], [2]. The overwhelming evidence points to the need to actively manage to achieve the business benefits being sought [3], [4], [5], [6].This keynote presentation introduces the concepts and practices of benefits management and benefits realization that have emerged over the last 25 years. It highlights the issues and challenges in deploying software to deliver expected business outcomes. It suggests that this is a missing perspective in software engineering. Suggestions for how this perspective might be more closely integrated with software engineering are proposed.

The return that organisations derive from investments in information systems and technology continues to disappoint. While there is a very significant body of literature on the factors that should facilitate a successful outcome from systems development, there is growing concern that these prescriptions are not having their desired effect. In this paper, we argue that the success of a systems development project should be measured in terms of its ability to deliver meaningful benefits, rather than the timely delivery of a technical artefact, and therefore organisations should adopt an explicit and proactive benefits realisation approach when investing in IT. Consequently, we sought to explore those actionable factors that might facilitate the effective realisation of benefits from systems development initiatives. Three organisations were identified that claimed to adopt a proactive approach to benefits realisation, and detailed studies of their systems development practices were conducted. Our analysis found that whilst one organisation had been successful in its adoption of a benefits realisation perspective, the other two had not, and this allowed us to identify those factors that helped to explain this difference in outcomes. In short, this paper makes an important contribution by identifying how a subset of traditional systems success factors might be enhanced, to give them a more explicit benefits realisation orientation. Moreover, it presents a coherent set of principles that can be used for deriving other factors and practices.

PurposeThis paper aims to thoroughly review the research literature concerning e‐service in the public sector (2000‐2009) for the purpose of summarising and synthesising the arguments and ideas of the main contributors to the development of e‐service research and explore the different perspectives. In addition, the paper attempts to identify the key characteristics of e‐service; and to gather conceptual perspectives on the nature, scope, and transformation to e‐service.Design/methodology/approachA classification of the relevant publications that are concerned with the theory and application of e‐service is presented together with potential future research areas.FindingsMost of the literature has focused on the underlying perspectives of approaches to e‐service. It clearly acknowledges that contextual issues and factors influence e‐service. However, there is still no standard definition of the concept and vagueness about what exactly e‐service is, creating confusion and comparability issues, and making it difficult for researchers to build on each others' work. In addition, the key underlying theme throughout the literature is that e‐service in the public sector necessitates closer working relationships between government stakeholders.Originality/valueBy reviewing the relevant publications, the paper develops a clear articulation of the concept, nature, boundaries, components, and elements of e‐service which is significant in order to understand the e‐service research better and manage e‐service in the public sector. With a rapid growth in the volume of research output on the topic of e‐service, the paper considers different viewpoints, theories, and methods in e‐service research to date to draw conclusions about current status and possible future directions for e‐service in the public sector.

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for explaining the main barriers and drivers of public e-service development and the relationships among them, especially in developing countries. This framework increases the chance of success of e-service projects in the governments of developing countries and provides a basic context within which the process and practice of e-service can be implemented successfully. This paper accomplishes this task by flowing from the traditional rigid context, which occurs in many developing countries, to full public e-service environment, emphasizing citizen-centric focus and digitalisation. The proposed framework builds on prior literature in the area of e-service development in public organisations and from the efforts undertaken in developing countries, considering e-government lessons learned in developing countries. The framework is flexible enough to be adopted by governments at different levels in developing countries around the world.

Given the crucial role that IT plays in businesses today, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) is seen as having a significant responsibility in ensuring that IT'S value is optimized. However, the history of IT investments has not been glowing and, as a consequence, blame for this situation is usually placed at the feet of the CIO. To explore further the role of the CIO and its link with organizational performance, interviews were conducted with CIOs, CxOs, and commentators. From an analysis of the data, a model linking the CIO role with organizational performance enabled by IT was developed. This model highlights the critical factors contributing to CIO and, ultimately, IT success. Of central importance is the environment within which the CIO operates and, in particular, the pivotal role of the IT savviness of the CEO and the leadership team. It reveals some uncomfortable lessons for CEOs and other c-suite members.

PurposeThis paper aims to present a framework that will help manufacturing firms to configure their internal production and support operations to enable effective and efficient delivery of products and their closely associated services.Design/methodology/approachFirst, the key definitions and literature sources directly associated with servitization of manufacturing are established. Then, a theoretical framework that categorises the key characteristics of a manufacturer's operations strategy is developed and this is populated using both evidence from the extant literature and empirical data.FindingsThe framework captures a set of operations principles, structures and processes that can guide a manufacturer in the delivery of product‐centric servitized offering. These are illustrated and contrasted against operations that deliver purely product (production operations) and those which deliver purely services (services operations).Research limitations/implicationsThe work is based on a review of the literature supported by data collected from an exploratory case study. Whilst it provides an essential platform, further research will be needed to validate the framework.Originality/valueThe principal contribution of this paper is a framework that captures the key characteristics of operations for product‐centric servitized manufacture.

The return that organizations derive from investments in information systems and technology continues to disappoint. While there are many theoretical prescriptions as to how the planned benefits from an information technology (IT) project might best be realized, there is very little empirical evidence, as to whether such advice is being heeded in practice. Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm, a conceptual model of a benefits realization capability is presented and developed. In this model, the benefits realization capability is operationalized through four distinct competences, each of which is underpinned by a variety of socially defined practices. The model was populated by using a thorough review of the literature to identify and categorize those specific practices that have the potential to contribute to the effective achievement of benefits from IT investment projects. These practices are then studied in an empirical examination of 25 IT projects. The analysis finds no evidence of benefits realization practices being adopted in any consistent, comprehensive or coherent manner. Effective benefits realization requires an ongoing commitment to, and focus upon, the benefits, rather than the technology, throughout a system's development, implementation and operation.

A Product-Service System (PSS) is an integrated combination of products and services. This Western concept embraces a service-led competitive strategy, environmental sustainability, and the basis to differentiate from competitors who simply offer lower priced products. This paper aims to report the state-of-the-art of PSS research by presenting a clinical review of literature currently available on this topic. The literature is classified and the major outcomes of each study are addressed and analysed. On this basis, this paper defines the PSS concept, reports on its origin and features, gives examples of applications along with potential benefits and barriers to adoption, summarizes available tools and methodologies, and identifies future research challenges.

This paper presents a robust argument as to why it can be difficult for chief information officers (CIOs) to generate business value from investments that their organizations make in information technology (IT) with contemporary organizational structures, authority patterns, processes and mindsets. This argument is built on the subtle premise that organizations should not seek to merely manage IT but to manage the delivery of business value through IT. It takes the view that this latter quest is knowledge-based and that the knowledge resources to successfully deliver this value are distributed throughout the organization. Crucially, this knowledge is not located solely within the IT function, presenting a challenge for the CIO for its integration and coordination. With the CIO having little or no jurisdiction over all required knowledge, its deployment will therefore be fragmented. The conundrum of IT management is how to generate value through IT without having access and authority over necessary resources. Research and practitioner implications of this analysis are highlighted.

The concept of a value chain has assumed a dominant position in the strategic analysis of industries. However, the value chain is underpinned by a particular value creating logic and its application results in particular strategic postures. Adopting a network perspective provides an alternative perspective that is more suited to New Economy organisations, particularly for those where both the product and supply and demand chain is digitized. This paper introduces the value network concept and illuminates on its value creating logic. It introduces Network Value Analysis (NVA) as a way to analyse competitive ecosystems. To illustrate its application, the provision of mobile services and content is explored to identify potential strategic implications for mobile operators.

Surveys continue to highlight that most senior business executives are dissatisfied with the value they believe their organizations are deriving from investments in information technology. What is often forgotten is that IT in itself has no inherent value. This value must be unlocked, and only business executives and users can do this. While most IT investments are usually accompanied by a technology implementation plan, few organizations ever construct a plan focused on realizing the business benefits. This article explores how organizations can unlock business value from their IT investments by adopting a two-stage view of implementation. This model distinguishes between "problem-based" interventions and "innovation-based" interventions. Unlocking business value from IT investments is a journey not a destination and this journey requires careful planning.

The value derivable from IT continues to be elusive, with most executives disappointed with the return achieved on their IT expenditure. Part of this stems from a lack of understanding of the nature of value creation through the use of IT. In this paper we present an approach that considers the journey from envisioning new uses for IT through to the actual realization of the potential value. This vision-to-value (V2V) vector captures both magnitude and direction, in a mathematical sense, of the journey towards value realization as both must be considered when addressing IT value. It proposes a definition of value, a financial formula, and identifies who should be responsible for securing value from IT investments. The analysis also considers the ongoing costs associated with IT service delivery and the issue of charge-back.

The evolution of information technology (IT) in organizations is often portrayed as following three eras—Data Processing, Management Information Systems, and Strategic Information Systems (SIS)—each displaying distinct characteristics regarding the application of IT and having different objectives. While investments in IT continue to made for both efficiency and effectiveness purposes, the SIS era is premised on management proactively seeking out opportunities for competitive advantage through IT, with approaches to information systems (IS) strategy formulation accommodating the requirement for both alignment of IS/IT investments with corporate strategy and assessing the disruptive impact of technology and the options for its use in shaping business strategy. Frameworks, methodologies and tools have been developed to support the objectives of the SIS era, yet the mechanisms through which organizations achieve repeated and sustained value from IT has received scant attention. Drawing on resource-based theory, this paper proposes a perspective on the management of IT in organizations that specifically considers how organizations can continuously derive and leverage value through IT. The analysis moves beyond a focus on identifying ‘strategic systems’ and develops the concept of an IS capability, suggesting that it heralds the arrival of a new era. The paper presents a model of an IS capability, outlines its core components and illustrates its application.