Brampton Factor: CIO ideology

CIOs and IT directors are typically concerned with how an organisation carries out its business goals - not in debating whether those aims are worthwhile. Martin Brampton asks: is this really the way it should be?

For some time now, I've been puzzling over the ideology of the CIO. Ideology is the thinking that is presented as common sense yet from sufficient distance turns out to be geared to particular interests. Gartner, among others, has consistently promoted the view that the CIO should aspire to an ideology in line with that of the CEO. But is this ideology really working against the interests of society?

As an aside, I would prefer not to use terms like CIO and CEO. They seem to be yet another part of the apparently irresistible Americanisation that sweeps over us. More than that, they actually obscure the legal distinction that exists between someone who is a director of a company and someone who is not. This is a pity, not merely for clarity but also because people's precise roles are significant for an understanding of their interests.

There has always been an ideology of computing. While I have argued for IT being significantly creative, its outlook is still more akin to science than the arts. And one of the great weaknesses of the scientific ideology is its insistence on the absolute separation of means and ends. Science, it is claimed, is 'value neutral' because it is merely a means that can be employed for different ends. Only the ends can be judged good or bad. That is a dangerous dogma.

Another tendency of the ideology of computing is a belief in intrinsic excellence. Given an IT problem, often divorced from any consideration of everyday life, there are good and bad solutions. Many IT people have had a strong belief in the value of finding good solutions. Unfortunately it proves immensely difficult communicating what is good or bad about computing solutions to people who are not expert, or even people who happen to see things in a different way.

So for example there is a sizeable group of people, myself included, which believes the best principles of object orientation lead to superior solutions in most cases. Computing is about building models of problems we want to solve, and creating problem-oriented objects is a creative way to explore those problems. Yet values of this kind are exactly the sort of thing pundits urge CIOs to eschew.

Analyst house Gartner has pointed to companies such as Wal-Mart as being among the few which use IT to differentiate their business. The reference to Wal-Mart should alarm us. It seems the argument is that the ideal CIO is one who is able to align IT to the objectives of such a company.

Now a great deal has been published, including scholarly papers, on the negative impact Wal-Mart has had in many aspects of its operations. Perhaps the most damning is the evidence that Wal-Mart stores suck wealth out of the areas around them. There is an acknowledged benefit in low prices but this is outweighed by Wal-Mart's impact on wage levels and its removal of value from the locality.

It appears, therefore, that the ideal CIO is someone who organises IT facilities in such a way as to do damage to groups whose interests fall outside the organisation's sphere of concern. If that were the only objective, it would evidently be perverse. So we need to consider whose interests are being served by such actions. The only reliable way to do that is to ask who is being most rewarded by the contemporary organisation of businesses. And the answer to that question is quite evidently company directors or 'executives' as the Americans like to call them.

Year on year, they are the group that most consistently increases its proportion of national income by a substantial amount. There has been much talk of corporate stakeholders, such as employees, customers, shareholders or the local community.

The talk has not come to fruition. Employees are, in the mass, reduced in status and wealth, especially by any company that emulates Wal-Mart. Customers are writing to newspapers in unprecedented numbers about the derisive level of service they are receiving.

So-called superstores have been shown to be damaging to local economies. And the general run of shareholders has received limited benefit, as witnessed by shortfalls in pension funds and endowment policies.

It is impossible to believe that all these effects have come about by accident. We have to suppose they are the outcome of policies adopted by company boards. CIO ideology no longer seems so much like common sense as upholding the special interests of a privileged group of people. This may be a sound strategy for the ambitious IT manager but it is hard to see that it should be the aim of everyone in IT.

Unfortunately there is no easy way out of this. It is impossible to simply argue that IT should avoid aligning itself with the objectives of the organisation. Such quandaries are characteristic of ideology. It disguises a situation of conflict by creating an apparently commonsensical picture by disguising the interests that are at stake.

For the average citizen, the situation is made worse by current government thinking. In order to attain its goals, business has to be reasonably effective in practical matters. But this is true of any organisation, and there is nothing about the aim of enriching a powerful group that uniquely enables practical action.

Indeed the traditional aspiration of computer people to intrinsic excellence is at least as sound a basis for achievement. Yet government insists, despite a complete absence of evidence, that business has an in-built advantage in handling practical matters.

The outcome is that almost the whole of society is tending to an increased emphasis on means rather than ends, along with evasiveness in respect of what ends are truly being served. The notion of public service is abandoned in favour of turning us from citizens to customers in every situation. Results are unimpressive, as might have been expected, yet politicians claim the only solution is to apply yet more of the failed methods. Genuine political debate is largely irrelevant.

So it seems the purportedly neutral pronouncements of analysts and consultants are actually politically loaded. Means are rarely value-neutral, since they inevitably favour particular ends, and we need far more discussion of what our organisations - both government and business - are aiming to do. Tinkering with the mechanics is a self-indulgent pastime for the amusement of apologists for the rich and powerful.