A farewell to 'seamless': how CIOs can lead enterprises into a new era of agility

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1 Introduction

Google the word 'seamless' and you'll find no fewer than 31 million entries. Some are about fashion, some are about metallurgy, some - perhaps significantly - are about our hopes of better government services. But most are about IT.

That's a worry. After all, everyone now recognises that the role of the CIO is maturing. There remains a need for technological expertise and insight; but there's a more urgent need for CIOs to lead organisations into the kind of agility that a new century now demands. ¹  So how grown-up is it, in 2007, for CIOs to boast that their empires work seamlessly? To assume their new responsibilities, they need to be more serious than that.

Not long ago, one IT supplier insisted on illustrating its claim to seamlessness with a back view of a woman's legs, complete with an appropriate pair of stockings. Indeed, computer science has a formal definition of 'seamless integration': 'the addition of a routine or program that works smoothly with an existing system and can be activated and used as if it had been built into the system when the system was put together'. ² Yet in fact the whole idea of seamlessness is bogus. After all, very few of the world's tailors have ever made a seamless suit, whether for men or for women.

With a legacy of different voice and computer systems, plus new equipment and software to accommodate as well, CIOs should be sceptical of vendor claims that no telecoms 'seams' will ever show up. Yet few really stop to interrogate the concept of seamlessness. The fact that such an idea has been allowed to pass unquestioned for years in the world of IT reveals a lot about the business acumen - or rather the lack of it - possessed by the world's IT departments.

As enterprise IT matures, operational matters certainly don't get any simpler. Nevertheless, the task of the savvy CIO is not just to master new and tricky technical problems, but also to rise above them. The urgent need now is to identify just where and how computing and telecoms can deliver new heights of profitability, market share, customer loyalty and general innovation.

It's time that CIOs buttressed technological competence with a board-level reputation for commercial creativity - and for commercial toughness, too. And it's time to bid farewell to the old utopia of seamlessness.

1 For a discussion of the historical and business significance of the term 'agility', see James Woudhuysen, The globalisation of UK manufacturing and services, 2004-24: toward the agile economy, UK Trade & Investment, 2004, on www.invest.uktradeinvest.gov.uk/media/feature_articles.cfm?action=viewArt&artID=109
2 Dictionary of scientific and technical terms, McGraw-Hill, 2003.

2 A 'Year Zero' approach to IT - and an alternative to it

We've all heard the arguments from telecoms vendors. It's rightly observed that there's a proliferation of hardware devices - especially in mobile. It's also rightly noted that, left to themselves, legacy systems tend to slow organisations up.

But then, far too often, there's some sleight of hand. Vendors go on to suggest that Open Standards provide only 'lowest common denominator' functionality and that integrating a range of best-in-class IT hardware products and software programs can be expensive.

Both arguments are disingenuous. Open Standards for networking are sophisticated and well defined; those for applications are always advancing - not least, due to the efforts of their vendor critics, who fully cooperate in their development!

Nevertheless, vendors frequently plunge on to suggest an oh-so-surprising alternative to Open Standards: that customers buy their own, fully controllable and seamless suite of IT hardware and software - one that has all the interfaces between its different components already sorted out.

This is a 'Year Zero' approach in IT. One wipes the historical slate clean, and starts again. But for an IT vendor to offer a truly seamless, if proprietary, package of IT, it would do best to have no seams at all between any of its different interfaces - and no seams, either, between its different operations or geographical units.

In today's world of mergers and acquisitions - worth nearly $4 trillion in 2006 and probably more by the end of 2007 - few IT vendors are structured so simply as that. Like most organisations, IT vendors are rarely free of that dreaded ailment, silos.

Even more important, IT purchasers committing themselves to a single, proprietary IT system may be ill prepared to make acquisitions themselves.

As in the domain of fashion, seams are reality in the world of IT today. It's unlikely that company A taking over company B will do so seamlessly. Like it or not, enterprises live in a multi-vendor environment, where single-sourcing is rarely wise.

Seamlessness is the wrong objective. It makes sense to work with IT that is specially tailored to the ugly reality of an enterprise's existing installed base of IT investments. At the same time, and balanced against that special tailoring, considerations of cost make it wise to migrate enterprise telecommunications over to Open Standards - especially as many enterprises are already committed to these.

With Open Standards the focus is not upon wishing seams away. It's upon ensuring that seams that are strong, simple, robust and secure.

3 The promise of Open Standards

The key merit of Open Standards is more social than technical. To be sure, Open Standards such as Session Initiation Protocol, by now the acknowledged means for implementing multimedia real-time communications, are largely technical in nature. ³ A number of evolving Open Standards ways of running applications - SALT, SIMPLE, standards for Web services and for Service-Oriented Architecture - also exist; and, while they make life simpler, they are largely technical in nature too.

Open technologies are one thing, and Siemens Enterprise Communications has a rather open way, too, of fielding them to its customers. However, the general promise of Open Standards lies in the social practices they promote. They offer CIOs their best chance yet to gain that board-level reputation for commercial creativity and commercial toughness we have talked about.

Open Standards don't just make for great efficiency in the short term. They provide the enterprise with a flexible communications environment that, for a low overhead cost and over the long term, can really accommodate major changes in its business. They give CIOs the chance to effect more control over their organisations - not least, by having a wider choice of IT vendors, and more power over them.

Above all, Open Standards give the CIO the opening to be pro-active and so drive the enterprise in conscious directions. They allow more media-orientated, and more global;

1. collaboration among teams charged with introducing major innovations,
2. management of physical assets and human factors,
3. methods of working that are informal,
4. methods of working that accommodate remoteness,
5. management of balance sheets and of brands.

In later Siemens newsletters, I'll write more on these five aspects of IT-led enterprise agility. But already they suggest a quite specific advantage of Open Standards for CIOs.

Because they are based on seams that are strong, simple, robust and secure, software and services based on Open Standards provide the ambitious CIO with the opportunity to move up, professionally. CIOs can raise their game beyond both day-to-day remedies and five-year budget outlays. They can use today's open communications to bring real agility to the way their enterprises operate.

At last, CIOs have an opening fully to lead organisations: lead them to anticipate, sense and respond to developments with unprecedented speed, discrimination, firmness and geographical reach. For Chief Information Officer, read Chief Agility Officer.

3 For a discussion, see Internet Engineering Task Force, on http://www.ietf.org
4 In 2006, HiPath won a Technology of the Year award from InfoWorld. In tests runs by the magazine, HiPath 'set the standard' for SIP support. See PJ Connolly, 'Traffic optimization takes center stage in networking show', InfoWorld, 2 January 2006, on http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/01/02/72990_01FEtoynet_1.html

4 Conclusion

A straitjacket may have no seams, but it does not make for agility. In retrospect, the whole prospect of seamless IT looks sillier and sillier. What IT now has to do for organisations is build them a new suppleness and sinuousness. Seams based on Open Standards, not seamlessness, are the way to get that.

CIOs can use today's enterprise communications to develop a whole new way for their companies to operate. Choice of the right systems now will speed board-level readiness for and decisions about tomorrow's mergers and acquisitions. It will speed the work of global project teams charged with bringing out innovations.

The moment is right for CIOs to cultivate a reputation for thought leadership. They must go out of the office to look, first-hand, at how basic business processes can be made smoother and more prescient. They must know what to propose, in both and IT and beyond it, so that qualitatively better versions of those business processes can be introduced in a flexible, controlled manner - one that allows for pilots, experiments and new lessons, as well as for reasonable estimates of future scale and cost.

Why is the moment right for CIOs to take on a much more proactive role in the management of corporations? As with Open Standards, the key aspect to grasp here is social rather than technical. Yes, the advent of Open Standards does allow IT to confer new levels of agility upon organisations. But there is a development on the demand side, rather than that of technology supply, that creates an even bigger call for CIOs to exert leadership.

Many enterprises today are rich in cash, but poor in their sense of corporate direction. In particular, they often lack a clear strategy for innovation. The rhetoric of innovation is pretty loud, but the reality of it is often beset by feelings of uncertainty, risk and conceptual chaos. ⁵

Acting as Chief Agility Officer, however, the CIO of tomorrow can step beyond IT and fly a forward flag for clarity about direction and innovation. Using Open Standards to sort out the form of internal and external communications, he or she can now lead enterprise employees into fresh, rich and rapid dialogues about the content of corporate strategy and innovation. It's time for IT, as a medium, to take a back seat to content-laden news signals, discussion with customers, and action. In 1967, a Canadian professor of English named Marshall McLuhan published one of the 20th century's most important books - The medium is the message. ⁶ In it he insisted that the advent of what he called 'electric technology' would change human sensibility forever: in this respect, what you said (the message) was less important than how you said it (the medium). For McLuhan, the medium was the message. His message, novel in his day, was that media were the only game in town.

In alerting mankind to the importance of IT and of media, McLuhan performed an important service. But, since his time, the doctrine that telecoms pipes and bandwidths make IT chiefs important has gone too far.

What IT chiefs now need to do is uphold the significance of content, content, content to the future of the corporation and its innovative effort.

If they now take up cudgels for content, CIOs will go on to dominate the 21st century corporation.

5 For an early, if pessimistic exposition of this point, see Nathan Rosenberg, 'Innovation's uncertain terrain', McKinsey Quarterly, No 3, 1995.
6 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects, Random House, 1967

Written by James Woudhuysen, January 2007

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