Good information has three principal qualities. First, information needs to be relevant to the task at hand. That means it targets precisely the strategic and tactical problems of an organization. Second, it must be objective. Ideally, objectivity should come from third parties that have no interest in the sale of solutions. Lastly, it must be sufficiently in-depth to permit a CIO to understand the risks, the traps, and the possible side effects of implementation along with all of the proposed benefits. It is this last need that most consultants fail to address.

The major difficulty in gathering relevant, objective intelligence is gray noise. In contrast to the white variety, gray noise disturbs, distracts, and de-tracts. CIOs often complain about the curse of the in-flight magazine. This is the phenomenon in which the CIOs boss is on a plane ride and comes across an article about some new technological cure. It also can happen on a golf course, when the trusted vendor rep whispers into the bosss ear. Or when a trade magazine runs a cover story about a competitors miraculous new software application. You can just hear the question: Why dont we have this?

Some unique factors make this phenomenon more harmful to the CIO than to other executives: The first is the hyper-pace and breadth of new technology developments. Youve faced it yourself: Last years PC is obsolete. A two-year-old $50 million implementation already is a legacy. A 10-month-old research report already is outdated.

The second factor is the fundamental gap between the business and technology worlds. Business deals with products, customers, revenues, and profits. Technology deals with servers, networks, applications, and databases. Solutions to a CIOs problems must bridge that gap.

Gathering the intelligence to help bridge such a gap can be time-consuming, expensive, and risky. Confoundingly, the CIO doesnt seem to lack for re-sources. Quite a few people make their living by helping technology captains navigate the seas of indecision: vendors, consultants, technology analysts, sponsored-research firms, and the media. This is the Advice Industry. Lets take a closer look at its members.

Vendors have no particular res-ponsibility to tell the (whole) truth. Thats not an accusation. Its a marketing reality. Its the job of vendors to present the winning rhetoric that will allow them to beat competitors to contracts.
Consulting firms traditionally help midmarket companies choose software and hardware solutions. They also pose another dilemma for the midmarket CIO: In large enterprises, it is entirely justifiable to spend 0.5 to 1 percent of a projects cost on technology research. But with most midmarket project budgets falling in the $10 million to $20 million range, such research expenditures become prohibitive. Furthermore, most consulting organizations fail the strict objectivity test, i.e., they have agendas connected to follow-up work. After all, a system integration or implementation contract may bring revenue 10 times the size of consulting fees.
Since most consultants tend to shy away from due diligence on vendors, they typically recommend those that have strong balance sheets, long-term technological strategies, and sizeable talent pools. It is simply in the best interest of consultants to favor vendors that constitute safe, albeit expensive, bets. But safe bets need not equate to good fitsespecially since midmarket companies tend to select from different vendors than do their larger counterparts.
Having ruled out vendors and consultants as sources of research data, the CIO scrapes his budget barrel and turns to the only affordable source: the technology analyst. This is not necessarily a bad choice, as long as it is properly used. The key is to understand the limitations of the analysts business model.
Their coverage in this particular context is a mile wide and an inch deep by necessity. Most of them dont have the time, the resources, or the strategic scope to research multiple vendors for a single client. Since their objective, most often, is to guide the client (Whats going to happen? Where should I be?), analysts are not as interested in conducting research as in making predictions based on trends, empiricism, and the predictions of other analysts. But what if our CIOs want a relevant, objective, in-depth assessment of the best claims-management application for their P&C insurance business, based entirely on all the circumstantial needs of their company? If that assessment doesnt already exist, the analyst wont have it.
Sponsored-research firms offer the benefits of neither sponsorship nor objective research. When sponsors benefit only by underwriting the cost of a researchers product in exchange for the opportunity to slant the researchers instruments toward desired outcomesand when research subjects also are granted the opportunity to edit research instruments toward their own desired outcomesthats not research. Rather, its some combination of constituent-pandering and editorial prestidigitation. In any case, while the results of this kind of sponsored research often attract publicity, they do not represent the kind of data on which CIOs can base fiscal, operational, or technological decisions.
And what if the CIOs pockets are empty? Well, the trade media will be standing by. But a reality check is in order for CIOs and the media:
For CIOs, that check is caveat emptor. Media stories often are not original-research studies. They are not intended to be. They can deliver information about new products and services. They can deliver case studies, technical descriptions, and user profiles. But they cant determine the functional applicability of any particular technological product or service to any particular CIOs needs, circumstances, or budgets.
For the media, that check is, Sell space! This is nothing more than commercial reality: No advertising dollarsno publication (unless, of course, were talking about a membership publication, or one with a handsome subscription rate). So, the media must present news. Trade media will move neither copies nor advertising space by running stories about DOS platforms, code-based applications, dial-up connections, or other ancient history. If its not news, it wont sellon the street or in the editorial department. And neither CIOs nor the media interpret that news as the sole research on which IT decisions should be made.
So, whats the beleaguered midmarket CIO to do?

1. Make sure your problem is explicitly known to your boss and the organization, since its in everyones best interest to optimize critical IT decisions.

2. Solicit consensus on the idea that a modest budget for relevant, impartial intelligence is a necessary investment. Target one to two percent of project budgets.

3. Whatever intelligence you buy, check it three ways: a) Is it relevant to your problem? b) Is it objective? c) Is it in-depth?

For midmarket CIOs, the demand for speed in strategic systems implementations can be balanced against the need for appropriate analysis, diligence, planning, and rigor. In every sense of the term, the bottom line is that CIOs must maximize ROI. In doing so, they must remember that research will provide meaningful ROI only if it is relevant to the task, objective in its evaluation, and deep in its expertise. That way, ROI ensures ROI.

Marek Jakubik, a former CIO of Zurich Financial and Pitney Bowes, is a co-founder and managing director of the Insurance Technology Group. He can be reached at 416-214-3445 or at [email protected].

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The content of CIO Chronicles is the responsibility of the author. The views and opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Tech Decisions.