Admittedly, the last few days may well have been a bit out of the norm at the BBC, but CIO UK has a couple of interesting articles about the priorities of Tiffany Hall, BBC CIO.

The first article is a brief ‘day in the life‘ – the kind of piece that’s always worth bearing in mind in planning techniques that could realistically fit within a decision-maker’s daily routine. It’s interesting to see further proof of our own research into the challenges of persuading senior contacts to attend events. We found that senior decision-makers receive an average of one invite every day but only attend 5 in a whole year – meaning that the content, topic and invitation process has to be spot-on. Tiffany seems to be at around the average for invitations but above average for attendance!

“Evening I have been invited to more work dinners since I started this job than the entire rest of my career. I could be dining out every night of the week.”

The second, longer, article goes into more details around current BBC IT challenges and priorities. It discusses some of 2010’s headline issues of information management, standardisation and consumerisation of IT, and also references some of the ‘day to day’ projects that seem to be rising up CIO agendas this year:

“We have reached the stage in the lifecycle of our legacy business systems when we are having a good, long, hard look at that and seeing whether now is the time to divert some of our priorities back into the business systems infrastructure…This hasn’t been a great focus for my predecessors over the last few years, simply because of where the BBC’s priorities were. I am getting a very clear steer from my stakeholders out there in the BBC business that, much as they want to put the money into costume dramas and all the rest of it, we do need some better back-office functions. Traditional back-office stuff around Outlook, when are we going to Windows 7… all of that stuff is very much on the radar.”

CIO UK has released an updated list of the 100 top spenders on IT in the UK – available here. The DWP, MOD, Shell, Tesco and the Department of Health top the list, while RBS has slipped out of the top 5 and Lloyds out of the top 10.

It’s hard to draw significant suprising trends from the list – public sector largely moving up the list, banks still near the top but slightly down, sectors like construction and retail taking a hit…

Where the list is particularly interesting is in the detailed profiles of each organisation’s IT strategy/performance/existing infrastructure. There are also some specific examples of popular projects for the year:

“Many were considering overhauling their communications networks to support either voice over IP or unified communications. Upgrading Microsoft Office and operating systems was also high on the list of tasks, as were improvements to e-commerce and customer management systems.”

It’s valuable information; now the question becomes how you best use this insight to support decisions/activities focused on these organisations. (You might also ask, assuming all the compeition will be targeting the top 100, how you get hold of the names of the organisations that came 100-150 on the table…)

IBM has released a research piece “The Evolving Role of the CIO” alongside its transcripts of interviews with leading UK CIOs, which I mentioned in yesterday’s post. Some useful trends are highlighted by the white paper. Two of the major areas of interest are the changing nature of the role’s reporting line: the majority of CIOs – 42% of them - report to the CEO, with only 14% now reporting to the CFO. And the longevity of the average CIO is pointing up their increasing role in long-term planning: it is normal for CIOs to remain in their post for 6 years (research by Allan Alter, April 06), which is twice as long as the average CEO.

However, when looking to communicate with, and ultimately build relationships with, this particular beast a few points made in the white paper really resonated:

“The CIO is an idea position to take increasing business responsibility and control.”

“It’s one of the most dynamic and creative roles in a modern company.”

“CIOs are on the way to becoming tomorrow’s CEO”

“Key skills of today’s CIO include the ability to translate Board requirements into solutions. He needs to talk the language of the Board and the investors.”

“All innovation in our industry will be technology-led or technology facilitated.”

All of the above suggest that while the CIO no longer has to “sell the IT philosophy”, he or she is expected to be able to lead people, lead technologically and have acute business acumen. As Acergy’s CIO says in the report “tomorrow’s CIO must have the proficiency to be heir apparent to any senior executive position.” It stands to reason therefore, that the CIO of now and the future will want access to people and content that will satisfy their needs to contribute at the boardroom table.

The white paper suggests that the CIO will need to “understand the possibilities of the future” – any communications programme aiming to paint that picture more clearly for the CIO is at a distinct advantage.

To supplement its recent white paper on the evolving role of the CIO, IBM has just launched a series of downloadable CIO interviews as PDFs. As it’s a feature of  their UK site all these interviews are with UK based CIOs; certainly in my experience, it’s fairly rare to get UK information this freely available, as many previous CIO series are largely US-based.

Interviews are, among others, with the CIOs/CTOs of Waitrose, Wincanton, Network Rail, Dundee City Council, O2 and HSBC. They are downloadable as separate PDFs and provide good insight into the challenges in each of these accounts. We’ll be commenting on the umbrella “Evolving Role of the CIO” report in our next post.

Recent research by ITSMA (the IT Services Marketing Assoc.) has looked into the C-suite’s use of social media and been surprised by the findings.

Writing on his blog, ITSMA spokesman Chris Koch said that ITSMA’s annual survey of buyers of complex IT solutions (entitled How Customers Choose Solution Providers, 2009: The Importance of Personalization, Epiphanies, and Social Media), “shows that the door to the C-suite is opening up”. You can download a free summary of the research here but the full piece costs.

The research Chris quotes found that usage of social media among IT and business buyers of technology rose 50% over last year. Now 55% of respondents said they use social media as part of the technology buying process in 2009 versus just 37% in 2008.

The research also found that C-suite executives used social media more than their lower-level buying peers. Just 15% of CEOs and directors said they did not use any form of social media at all, while 34% of manager/directors and 26% of VPs/Assistant vice presidents said they do not use it.

Commenting on these findings, Chris says “This has big implications for marketers. It means that social media is taking hold within your biggest, most valuable accounts at the highest levels. Sounds like a business case for investment to me.”

My stance on this would be that any social media strategy has to be woven into a wider business case for C-level contact.

Are C-suite execs using LinkedIn or Facebook to keep in touch with peers and ask for advice – yes, they are. Are they making decisions solely on the basis of this information? Our experience suggests that’s simply not the case. Designing a business case for social media investment on a standalone basis is pretty risky – you are in danger of embarking on a non-integrated programme that very likely cannot survive without supporting communications. Think instead, what do you want to say to these execs, and how can social media be used to best effect in the series of communications you’re going create over the long-term.

IBM has just released its first global CIO study, free to download from their website. It covers the findings of over 2500 interviews with CIOs from across the world.

For those marketing to CIOs, the study points to contined unpredictable conditions  – 90% of the CIOs interviewed believe that there’s moderate or substantial change ahead for them. The top 3 factors driving this belief were agreed to be business model changes, budgets and macroeconomic factors.

Other major findings are that CIOs split their time between 3 main activities – making innovation real, raising the ROI of IT and expanding business impact. The levels to which they spend time on these depend very much on whether those CIOs work for high, medium or low growth organisations. 10 minutes spent reviewing the numbers in detail is worthwhile as there are some useful nuggets – the heavy usage of collaboration tools in the high growth environments is one. Another is the fact that all CIOs are seeing that IT is “key to making business models unique and difficult to imitate.” The relentless march of SaaS is obviously not causing a “utility” situation to arise just yet!

CIOs are spending their time now and in the medium term on plans that enhance competitiveness (83%) and virtualisation (76%). They are also highly focused on “making the data sing” – interrogating data to support decision making – especially around new ways to meet customer need. The unpredictability to the customer in the recession has clearly put a lot of pressure on IT to use data to reveal what they might do next.

For many marketers, one of the study’s most interesting findings is the conflict that’s increasingly inherent in the CIO’s role. Many of the verbatims and case studies draw this out… “I need to introduce new services without disrupting existing ones”… “I need to reduce costs and improve services”. It strikes me that acknowledging this in marketing material, and offering ways that these dichotomies could be resolved, might be one way to strike a chord with CIOs.

You will often hear an IT company saying, ‘buyers don’t understand the cloud’, and using that as a justification for either (a) not saying anything about it, or (b) launching into a grand programme to define the cloud for CIOs.

But in the background, buyers are creating specific plans for the elements of the cloud they want to use now. What vendors really need are some focused examples of problems their solutions can solve, not high level positioning of where they fit amongst SaaS, IaaS, PaaS…

Perhaps more significantly, all this talk of ‘as a service’ is starting to extend to non-cloud conversations and contracts. The FT’s recent article, Outsourcing begins to blur into services, shares a range of views on providing more flexible pricing and resourcing models on wider IT Services contracts. In an interesting section 3/4 of the way through the article, there are some good CIO viewpoints:

Simon Post, CTO at Carphone Warehouse: “Flexibility is vital to us, not just in the infrastructure space, with IBM, but also for applications. Retailers have shorter buying cycles than other businesses, so we do need to gear up and gear down quickly.” According to the article, “Buying IT services on a pay-per-use basis is certainly on the agenda at Carphone Warehouse”.

Richard Boynet, CIO at Electrocomponents: “when our current data centre contract runs out, we are looking at multiple options from virtualisation, to taking some of that [capacity] as a service. We might, for example, use a vendor such as Amazon to stress-test the next release of our main IT systems.”

So to summarise, by the start of 2010, if you have a cloud offering you will need the specific examples of where people can use it (which may sound obvious, but is currently surprisingly thin on the ground). And even if you are keeping your head above the cloud (sorry), you will still be coming up against competitors for traditional services who have developed some model for ‘pay as you go’ pricing that could be opening doors for them in your client base.

Until now, there has tended to be agreement that pricing is more of a hygiene factor than a compelling component of a proposition (with clients more interested in any existing relationship, proof of past delivery, or promises of helping them to achieve large savings). But is the rise of cloud propositions making the pricing strategy of traditional services a more decisive issue? How can suppliers build more flexibility (not just performance-related elements) into their offerings?

Computer Weekly’s excellent video interview with Corus’s CIO, Bruno Laquet, gives an up-to-date view on what it feels like to be a CIO facing a recession. It also shines a light on the debate about whether suppliers should be putting more effort into influencing decision-makers outside of IT, with Bruno’s experiences of doing exactly that.

The video is well worth a look – available here (and it gets to the best bits after about 2 minutes in) – but these are our conclusions/highlights:

Selling with the CIO, not to them

There was a move a few years ago for many IT companies to believe they should stop talking to IT and start talking to the business. It sounds very black and white, but for some companies it really was that simple.

But for every IT supplier bypassing IT and trying to build a case with the business, there’s an IT department that wants to do exactly the same thing. Perhaps if they worked together, they might both stand more of a chance?

Someone like Bruno should be a supplier’s ideal route into the business – and they would certainly appreciate the proof and angles that suppliers have to share. We’ve shared some of his tips for influencing the business at the end of this post.

But it will take quite a shift in mindset for many suppliers to get their marketing approaches ready to help a CIO like Bruno.

Real-life Corus project examples

Take Bruno’s story of a recent million-pound telepresence project. Of course, he had all the vendor benefits to hand (like reductions in travel expenses), but he knew the struggle he would have getting stakeholders to cut their budgets to fund ‘his’ IT project. Instead, he had to find a way to make telepresence fit with a key part of the corporate agenda – fortunately, CO2 reduction was a main objective of the steel company. (Of course, once telepresence was live, travel budget reductions followed swiftly…)

How many suppliers are adjusting their propositions based on the individual situations of the key accounts? And how many are sophisticated enough not to sell ‘to’ the CIO but sell with them? Every communication, every event, every meeting could be an opportunity to help the CIO engage with the business.

The example of a current Corus supply chain project shows just how strong the CIOs desire to play an integral role in the business is

“This supply chain project, without going into too much detail, the way we have been organised in the company is in business units which operate as silos, and there is a limit to how much we could optimise each silo. So we are looking at activities that could bring the business together. So this supply chain project, which IT is key to, is about breaking the barriers between business unit silos. I’m really proud of that, because it is business transformation powered by IT.”

Lessons from the CIO about selling a proposition into the business

How would Bruno suggest going about selling a proposition into the business?

Some of it is fairly obvious:

“Understand what their main agenda, business priorities, KPIs – make sure that my proposition and what I am trying to influence three months on match with this agenda. I’m looking to see if there is anything for him in that proposition.”

Although it does raise the question of how many IT/Services suppliers are really digging into these issues (think CO2 reduction rather than cutting travel expenses – and how for a different company these two could be the other way around).

But there are some important techniques, like the one Bruno describes as “trying not to finish the job”:

“What I do is try not to finish the job – I try to come with propositions that are open so they can put their own ideas into the proposition so that they feel they own it. So there are 2 areas – being prepared, but developing together the solution. Let’s make a proposal – and let them finish the job.”

There’s a fine line between crafting a proposition that has enough detail to spark interest (whether we’re communicating to IT or the business) but which the client can take on and own for themselves.

What does the recession mean for IT’s role and IT spend?

At a tangent to the main discussion, Bruno Laquet’s views on the recession’s impact on the IT department is also very interesting. The clarity of vision and clear purpose come across particularly strongly, as does the importance of showing how well aligned IT is with the 2 main business programmes (one focused on cost reduction, the other on business transformation to support growth in the future):

“We have two big programmes running at the moment [...] the first one is about eliminating costs – and we in IT do a lot to contribute to this. All my IT Supply team is focusing on moving cost out by innovative ideas – we’re not talking about reducing by 5% or 10%; we’re looking at ideas to cut spend by half. So that’s the kind of project we are doing at the moment, fully aligned with this business priority.

“The second programme is about [...] working with the business to help transform the company. We’re very active at the moment in supporting projects for business like creating shared services or the supply chain programme I mentioned.”

Once again, these focus areas give any supplier to Corus a clear idea of how to frame up their offerings for the next year.

But there is definitely a wider point here: How well do you understand your key clients? Do you work with or work around the CIO? How well do you shape propositions for them? Do you have the evidence you need to share with them? How about the initial points of interest that tell them you have something they need to know?

Will the next generation of CIOs be more focused on the customer experience than ever before? Starbucks’ new CIO thinks so in this interview with CIO Magazine.  The interview highlights how Stephen Gillett is facing the challenge to take technology and use it to connect with Starbucks’ customers in whole new ways.

Why was the 32 year old hired? “What fascinated the leadership team was Stephen’s knowledge of where and how these consumers lived, and how he was technologically engaged with them. While he did not have the traditional retail IT experience, we wanted someone who was leading edge, who knew where the technology was evolving.” said Starbucks’ management team recruiter.

As retailers becoming increasingly focused on netting customers and keeping them faithful, can we expect to see the retail CIO out there supporting the marketers?

If recent experience is anything to go by, maybe we can – real-life examples of this are popping up all over the place. At a large department store in Manchester this week I was asked for detailed information for the first time, which was entered into a brand new terminal branded “CRM” at the top (subtle, but points for trying). Similarly the hotel I stayed at seemed extremely interested in understanding useful preferences and keeping in touch. If you are targeting retailers, take a look at this recent post highlighting their top 5 priorities.

A final point to note – the CIO magazine interview links to Gillett’s LinkedIn profile, where he has more than 500+ contacts listed, as well as groups he’s a member of, places he used to work and a link to his blog. If you’re building an account-based marketing campaign to reach him, you can start with a multitude of information that will give you a much greater chance of success. Not only does he list out his technological musings and leanings, but he’s a serious player of World of WarCraft, likes Seth Godin and his birthday is Jan 20th. How’s that for a starter for 10?

Understanding how your audience will read and interact with your thought-leadership content is crucial in developing senior relationships and building reputation. A recent study into IT decision-makers’ reading habits highlighted a couple of useful points, and our thoughts on how to exploit them:

95% of people pass on interesting content to colleagues. 91% claimed to read more online now than 2 years ago. Package up information appropriately for the medium – keep online information tip- and list-based and use this as teaser content to lead your audience to longer downloads or to request hard copies of pieces with a longer narrative. The beauty of the teaser information is that it can be resused in myriad ways, all leading back to your central content: circulated throughout the IT online sites using comments fields, forming part of email communications, linked from LinkedIn profiles and group discussions etc.

Only 13% do work-related reading at work. The other 87% do it at home and when commuting (61% at home) Online information consumption is typically in small units, different from offline ”compendium style” reading. Whilst CD drive guides and mp3 downloads for commuters are worth considering – Marc Bresseel of Microsoft mentions on his blog what he’s taking to read on the plane on the way to his hols for example – why not send key contacts novel-sized collections of your best thought-leadership or top 5 most popular downloads.

Clearly the content needs to be compelling in the first place for these tips to work. But extra effort thinking through the content’s hazardous journey through the audience jungle will be well rewarded.

The full research findings are available from Vanson Bourne. A final point to note: a massive 99% of respondents include online sources when looking for information needed to support an IT decision (with 61% only doing a Google search for it)  See this earlier post about the importance of your organic search strategy and how buyers find you