IT needs to lead – not just align with – business

Dr James Cash of Harvard Business School had a great talk last week at the Oracle Industry Connect event. Among other things he said IT should be involved in strategic planning at companies,  not just try to be “aligned with business”. He said he was surprised so many retailers do not list Amazon as one of their primary competitors, still  focused on their brick and mortar peers.

A CIO recently told me “with the primacy of tech as business driver, the traditional biz skillsets are increasingly irrelevant.  I've been arguing for years that CIOs should be tapped to replace CEOs.”

Fighting words but good to see a feisty, more strategic CIO

Dr, Cash added he categorized IT spend as “that which allows companies to stay in business” versus “that which assumes we will continue to stay in business”

I think my colleagues in analyst/media world need to increasingly focus on that distinction. Most of us are focused on the latter and even worse take  a tiny segment of that – storage, accounting software, BPO etc – and hype it up with Magic Quadrants and talk about doom and gloom if companies don’t have the latest and greatest in that narrow category. Seriously, each of us needs to use Dr Cash’s filter for systems “which allows companies to stay in business”