Those who are skilled at executing a strategy," Sun Tzu wrote, "bend the strategies of others without conflict." This fundamental principle helps to explain why some CIOs are more successful than others at executing strategy. The IT department that once held a monopoly over its company's IT is gone, and with it control-based,IT-centric strategy.Changes in the business environment have rendered such strategies un-executable. With the advent of Web 2.0 and 'shadow IT', CIOs know that their span of control over IT decisions is more limited. Instead, the executives, managers, staff and customers at their companies all have their own de facto strategies for exploiting IT. Faced with this challenge, CIOs are exploring their options, which include abandoning the idea of an IT strategy, sticking with the old way (but often only on paper) or forging a new generation of IT exploitation strategies. Wrapped up in this decision is the ultimate destiny of the CIO role itself.

The CIO's strategic challenge now is to capture and channel the energy of individuals' personal strategies for exploiting IT. Backed by a corporate purpose to maximize total value, innovate, constrain overall cost and mitigate risk, effective CIOs must focus on, as Tzu might say, 'bending' some of these personal strategies toward a better conclusion or - in the case of individuals who are pursuing goals not aligned with the company strategy - into a dead end.

Why IT Strategy Is No More

Two critical inflection points have directed us to where we are today. The first was the switch from dumb-terminal to clientserver computing that started 20-odd years ago and went global with the Internet. The second was the business executive's response to Y2K and the dotcom boom. Business stopped believing the IT techno-speak, suspecting that investments were being driven more by suppliers' stratergies rather than their own. They took control of the IT agenda at the big-picture level and focussed on two things they understand very well: cost and business inovation. These two inflections put IT decision-making in the hands of non-technologists at both operational and stratetig levels. yet formal stratergies for IT have largely remained the provinceof IT departments and vendors. Few non-IT executives and managers have defined their stratergies for investing in and exploiting IT. CIOs can make a choice: either let these de facto stratergies be, rely on an orthodox IT startergy or take the initiative and lead a business-defined stratergy for exploiting technology.

So far, CIOs' responses to this changing environment have been mixed. Some have continued with an orthodox IT strategy. Others have abandoned having a strategy for IT, which is a reasonable proposition if the company is an expert consumer of IT and can bend the de facto strategies that its IT vendors and partners will attempt to impose. Some CIOs have taken the third approach. They are collaborating with their executive colleagues to formulate, ratify and execute a corporate strategy for exploiting IT. This is very different from the traditional IT-centric strategy that consists of tens or hundreds of pages of technically-oriented diagrams and prose and can take months to develop. The business-defined strategy can be formulated in a few days and summarized on one page. It's easy for executives to understand, explore and remember, as well as apply to their everyday decisions.

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