Oracle’s Mark Hurd: What CEOs Want from CIOs

What does the CEO want most from the CIO?

It’s a daunting question. And as technology permeates every facet of business operations and continues to become a more indispensable source of competitive advantage—and as customers and prospects aggressively push the you-need-to-be-social requirement—it’s a question that takes on even greater relevance:

What does the CEO really want—and need—from the CIO?

To help answer that, I sought the advice of Oracle president Mark Hurd, one of the best-known tech-industry executives in the world and a business leader who probably has as many or more discussions with CEOs as well as CIOs as any executive on the planet.

Hurd jumped right into the subject: “It’s really a matter of one big thing: can the CIO help execute the agenda of the business?” Hurd asked. “That’s ultimately what it comes down to. “So from my conversations with CEOs, here’s what they want from their CIOs: a laser focus on optimizing the company’s processes and a desire to identify and weed out the inevitable complexities that find their way into those processes and, ultimately, drive that same heightened level of complexity into the apps. That’s where the problems get really big—at the apps level.

“So CEOs tell me they want the CIO to ruthlessly automate processes that drive competitive differentiation and strategic advantage, and make those processes the best in the world. Along the way, he or she’s got to keep the complexity of the processes and apps as low as possible and relentlessly drive costs out of the business,” Hurd said.

Easy to say but not nearly so easy to do, he added, and here’s why:

“CIOs have to be able to lay out a clear path in concert with the business leader—I used to make the business guy responsible for the apps, and force them to answer the question of why they feel they need non-standard apps when they know that’s how the costs skyrocket,” Hurd said.

“And the CIO has to be able to team up with that business guy and lay out a vision and a strategy together that can be used to create the business model, and then set up the processes under that to support the new business model, and then deploy the apps—the standard apps, not the custom apps—that automate those processes.

“Those kinds of CIOs have to have one foot planted deeply in the business along with having one foot rooted in IT—and that’s a real rarity—it is really hard to find those guys,” Hurd said.

Businesses need to determine the processes where they can drive strategic differentiation and then begin that automation process, Hurd said, adding that those slices of competitive advantage can differ from company to company and industry to industry: sometimes Customer Experience, sometimes procurement, sometimes supply chain or something else.

“For example, in banks, it can be the Customer Experience processes that need to be not just fully automated but coordinated off of a single common platform—and that’s an incredibly complex challenge,” Hurd said.

“You’ve got a mobile-banking platform and somebody’s in charge of that, and a retail-banking platform and somebody else runs that, and your internet-banking service and platform that somebody else runs, and the ATM business and so on—and none of those guys really gives a hoot about the other platforms because they’re not paid to care about them—they’re paid to care about the one platform that they run.

“But for the bank’s customers, well, they care a lot—and that’s why this Customer Experience automation off a single common platform is so complex. And it’s why you need as a CIO a person with one foot deeply in the business so he knows how all those platforms interrelate and come together, and one foot in IT to help consolidate the relevant processes and wrap them around the apps—it’s really, really hard,” Hurd said.

“And it’s even tougher for CIOs because each of those separate platform guys will be saying they need their own separate app, not a common platform, but those apps have to be standard—they can’t be bastardized! And the problem is that because the CIO generally wants to please the business types, they’ve agreed to go with those bastardized apps for years—for years!—and it’s a very hard habit to break.”

In addition to being a business leader and technology visionary—as well as a diplomat, a psychologist, and an end-to-end process expert—the CIO also has to be able to master the currently intense challenge of reshaping how IT budgets are constructed, allocated, and spent, said Hurd.

“On the budget side, it’s really coming to a head: the economics of business today just don’t tolerate big spending in IT,” Hurd said. “There’s tons of pressure. So CIOs have to bring that laser focus to deciding where I want to innovate, and where I need to spend.

“But—they don’t have any extra dollars to apply, so the only way out is for the CIO to say, ‘I need to realign what I’m spending, and what I’m spending it on.’

“And I guarantee you, the bulk of it will be tied up in applications infrastructure—I’ve seen it in a thousand places—and the CEO has to give the CIO the support to really get in there and force through some big changes. Or it just won’t work.”

That kind of transformative thinking—around not just the tech stuff and not just the optimized and automated processes, but also what Hurd called “the economics” of IT—is ultimately what CEOs want from CIOs, Hurd said.

“CIOs have earned a strategic seat at the table, but now they’ve got to hold that seat—and the only way they can do that is to converse in the language of business value and business benefits and business outcomes that all align perfectly with the strategic agenda of the company,” Hurd explained. “And as I said, it’s very, very hard to find guys who can do all that.

“But without that, the CIO will fail.”