Managing IT right starts with rightsizing IT for value

Concerned that my job as a CIO Whisperer is under threat from an AI chat interface, I decided to get some non-algorithmic direct evidence. I asked a group of executives to complete the following sentence, “CIOs should be managing…” Then I posed what I thought might be a clarifying question, “What are CIOs accountable for?”

The always practical and down-to-earth Cheryl Smith, former CIO at McKesson (Fortune 7) and West Jet (2nd largest airline in Canada), author of The Day Before Digital Transformation: Unlocking digital transformation for business leaders,and guest lecturer on Digital Transformation Execution for the IT Masters Degree courses at George Mason University in Virginia, believes that in situ CIOs can save their organizations millions of dollars by doing the basics of IT right.

In the late 1990s — when Smith was in charge of internal systems at Verizon, reporting to CIO Ralph Szygenda, who later went on to become CIO at General Motors — she instructed her people, “Don’t print out any reports. Stop printing out any reports.”

Back then there was nothing online. When an executive came in and yelled, “Where’s my report?” the team would figure out what the application was and who was the person in charge. “We discovered tons of stuff nobody cared about,” Smith says.

This experience, she adds, underscores one of the richest sources of low-hanging IT value: shutting down unnecessary applications. Organizations have too much software.

While we may never have a universally accepted IT metric, we can, as a starting point, stop spending money on IT we don’t need.