A Seat at the Table

INTRODUCTION

The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.

—James Joyce, interview

Let these things be believed as resembling the truth.

—Xenophanes, Fragments

As I was writing my last book, The Art of Business Value, something at the back of my mind kept nagging me. It finally made its way onto the page in a chapter I wrote called “The CIO,” where I looked at the role of the CIO in delivering and defining business value. The issue, as I saw it at the time, was that Agile approaches seem to remove the CIO—and the rest of IT leadership—from the value-delivery process.

For example, in Scrum, an Agile software development framework, the delivery team works directly with a product owner, who is generally ...