Involved that my job as a CIO Whisperer is underneath menace from an AI chat interface, I made a decision to get some non-algorithmic direct proof. I requested a gaggle of executives to finish the next sentence, “CIOs must be managing…” Then I posed what I believed is likely to be a clarifying query, “What are CIOs accountable for?”

The all the time sensible and down-to-earth Cheryl Smith, former CIO at McKesson (Fortune 7) and West Jet (2nd largest airline in Canada), writer of The Day Earlier than Digital Transformation: Unlocking digital transformation for enterprise leaders,and visitor lecturer on Digital Transformation Execution for the IT Masters Diploma programs at George Mason College in Virginia, believes that in situ CIOs can save their organizations hundreds of thousands of {dollars} by doing the fundamentals of IT proper.

Within the late Nineteen Nineties — when Smith was in control of inner techniques at Verizon, reporting to CIO Ralph Szygenda, who later went on to develop into CIO at Common Motors — she instructed her folks, “Don’t print out any studies. Cease printing out any studies.”

Again then there was nothing on-line. When an government got here in and yelled, “The place’s my report?” the crew would determine what the appliance was and who was the individual in cost. “We found tons of stuff no person cared about,” Smith says.

This expertise, she provides, underscores one of many richest sources of low-hanging IT worth: shutting down pointless functions. Organizations have an excessive amount of software program.

Whereas we could by no means have a universally accepted IT metric, we will, as a place to begin, cease spending cash on IT we don’t want.