“The IT org has the right skills and capabilities in place to meet upcoming challenges.” 42% in Gartner CIO survey DISagreed. #gartneriom
— Jay Fry (@jayfry3) June 9, 2014
Ok, here's my problem with the quote. Unless you've mapped out the environment and created a meaningful strategy based upon this and gameplay then how do these companies know what capabilities they'll need?
I more than understand that most strategy is simply 'backward causality' (i.e. copying others) and hence if you produce a list based on this - digital first, agile, big data, cloud, social media etc - then you can come up with a fairly uniform list of missing skills. But this doesn't mean you actually need those capabilities. It's more than likely that any strategy based upon 'what 67% of other generals do' is the wrong strategy.
In fact, I have quite a bit of evidence to point to this and how lack of situational awareness (a key element to strategic gameplay) is correlated with poor market performance (see figure 1)
Figure 1 - Market Cap impact of Strategic Gameplay
So, how exactly do these CIOs know what capability they need? Certainly the list of top ten challenges doesn't give me confidence or maybe I just inhabit a completely different world.
