Transformed

CHAPTER 44Objections from the CIO

“I come from the school of thought where technology exists to serve the business. In fact, I pride myself on my ability to deliver on the needs of the business. I'm not sure where this move leaves me.”

Moving to the product model is essentially about changing from viewing technology as a cost center to viewing technology as a profit center.

We have worked with many CIOs who have expanded their skills to serve in this broader role (sometimes titled as a combined CTO/CIO). But these are the people who were eager to make this change—in fact, in several cases, they were ones who drove the move to the product model.

It's important to point out that the product model is not just concerned with the technology that your customers interact with directly. There is usually a substantial amount of engineering work on technology behind the scenes—either in platform services or customer-enabling tools or internal tools.

We realize there are some CIOs who do not wish to change. In this case, they would stay with the “true IT” vendor management and systems that run the business, and someone else is brought in to lead the broader product engineering.

There are of course several similarities between the old model and the new model when it comes to technology, but there are also some important differences:

A product engineering organization is primarily there to build, while a true IT organization is usually more about integrating vendor-supplied systems (