You Have Too Many Chiefs

Enterprise Tech You Have Too Many Chiefs Steve Andriole Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I help execs optimize digital & educate nextgen technology pros. New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories.

Got it! Aug 22, 2022, 03:12pm EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin There are way too many business-technology Chiefs out there. How many do you have? Do you know what they do all day? No you don’t — no one does. Just reduce the number of Chiefs and get to know the survivors better.

Chiefs, Chiefs, Everywhere getty I’ve been a “Chief” several times in my career and while the title is nice, it often didn’t mean very much to the organizations I’ve led. Of course, this may be attributable to my own skills and competencies, but it may also be attributable to something else: the falsely purposeful need to centralize expertise and authority in someone supremely responsible and accountable for achieving specific results. Put more simply, we love leaders (and especially leadership titles) because we can turn our lonely eyes to someone who can just make us feel better (and someone we can blame when things go wrong).

I’ve recently seen calls for Chief Digital Marketing Officers, Chief Data Officers, Chief Analytics Officers, Chief Social Media Officers, Chief Content Officers, Chief Transformation Officers, Chief Cloud Officers and Chief Digital Strategy Officers, among lots of other chiefs including of course the existing ones, like CIOs, CTOs and CISOs – and their Deputies . Is There Room for All These Chiefs? Who’s authorizing all these empires? Specialization in a converging world is misguided. The number of Chiefs you have explains your level of organizational complexity: the more chiefs, the more complex your business structures, rules and processes.

Chiefs increase organization autonomy, atrophy and dysfunction. The more you have, the more confusion and conflict you will experience. How do you mange the annual budget fight among all your chiefs? MORE FOR YOU The 5 Biggest Technology Trends In 2022 ‘Enthusiastic Entrepreneurs’: Pre-IPO Statements On Profitability Prove To Be Larger Than Real Life The 7 Biggest Artificial Intelligence (AI) Trends In 2022 Lots of Chiefs also challenge your governance structures and processes.

Let’s assume you have ten technology Chiefs with their own missions, teams and budgets. You assume they will coordinate and cooperate, but general incentive structures and competitive instincts make it impossible for Chiefs to love one another – or always stay in their swim lanes. Chief Data Officers will intrude upon Chief Digital Marketing Officers – who both need Chief Cloud Officers – while the CISO tells them all what they can and cannot do (with oversight from the Chief Transformation Officer).

How is organizational power distributed among the Chiefs? And which Chief decides who should be Chief? Chiefdom Best Practices Instead of technology chiefs of one kind or another, you should have fewer Chiefs that operate at a higher level of abstraction. Their missions are broader and therefore less invasive of existing business rules, processes and models. They constitute a smaller number of filters through which change can occur which enables speed and agility.

But even this approach – fewer Chiefs – still assumes the intrinsic value of “Chiefs. ” What if there was another way to optimize digital technology? What if “digital” became a way of life? The less-enterprise-Chiefs approach requires a different kind of investment. At first glance, it appears to take longer and cost more, but compared to multiple dysfunctional enterprise Chiefdoms, it’s much cheaper and more productive.

The first step is a general education across the leadership about the trends and capabilities of digital technology. No single team – or even groups of teams – should exclusively own and dispense this knowledge. It’s not possible or desirable for knowledge that enables business-technology optimization to exist in silos.

It’s the combination of subject matter expertise and digital technology that identifies opportunities. Everyone should understand digital technologies, trends and trajectories, and how business rules, processes and whole business models can be transformed for profitable advantage? The next step is the creation of a knowledge repository run by a corporate “digital librarian,” an internal Google search engine capable of answering questions about the intersection of company and industry processes and models, and digital technology. The third step is the creation of innovation labs in every business unit informed by the general education and the enterprise repository.

Over time, entire business units will become transformation machines. There’s no convoluted governance processes and no turf battles across poorly defined Chiefdoms in this model. It’s a “state’s rights” approach to corporate governance, where business units are the states, and the enterprise is the federal government.

But let’s not go too far with the analogy. The approach does not favor strong governors, just strong mayors. You get the idea: you don’t need any more business-technology Chiefs.

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