The only CIO resolution that matters

In many communities, December is a month set aside for reflection. To wit, across nearly every discipline, one finds magnum opuses entitled “Lessons Learned” or “The Year in Review” as the year draws to a close.

Such exercises are valuable but anachronistic. Perhaps in an age when our forebears huddled around campfires waiting for warmer weather annual reviews were the optimal way to accumulate knowledge and empower human agency. Today, not so much.

Instead, at the end of the year, CIOs should be looking forward not backward. In fact, continuous real-time learning must become an IT leadership priority. Here’s what that means and how to achieve it.

A real-time world needs real-time learning

In our hyper-accelerated age, lessons need to be assimilated as they happen. The digital world is locked in a cognitive dogfight — i.e., a multidimensional, high-speed arena where supranormal value is returned to those who understand first and act effectively fastest. US Air Force Colonel John Boyd captured this aviation combat concept through the OODA loop, in which decision-making is a continuous cycle of observe, orient, decide, and act.

CIOs need to own, or at the very least contribute substantively to, the overarching narrative regarding IT’s business context — what is going on, what has gone right, what has gone wrong, which technology developments require action, and so on. Ideally, the office of the CIO would brief the enterprise on a systemic basis on these matters. I am thinking of something similar to the President’s Daily Brief.

Four critical decisions need to be made to establish such a brief: what form should the briefing to take, what subject areas should we keep an eye on, which constituencies need to be briefed, and what time frame should we use. Once those decisions have been made, a systemic program of insight capture must also be instituted for the briefings to be effective. Such a learning process — observe, orient — can’t be left to chance.