And the pandemic, now in its third year, complicates matters with regional flareups," Moore wrote. They started to press the AFL to change its policies in this area. AFL-CIO, in full American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations, American federation of autonomous labour unions formed in 1955 by the merger of the AFL (founded 1886), which originally organized workers in craft unions, and the CIO (founded 1935), which organized workers by industries. There are over a dozen unions represented by the Actors Equity Association, Utility Workers Union of America, and others. What about distributed ledger technology, or blockchain? Legal strategist for the union movement and former secretary of labor. The calls came from the same phone number (929-279-5975 . 1791 First strike in building trades by Philadelphia carpenters for a 10-hour day Bill of Rights adopted. Do the questions about technology that leaders in the C-suite ask reflect a true understanding of the impact of tech decisions? Former AFL president whomoved the federation toward "social reform unionism.". When they wrote the book, Gruber was an assistant professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Synnott the head of management information systems at Bank of Boston. 03:28. As one large financial institution set out to build its digital products, the business and technology teams jointly led user listening and feedback panels early and often throughout the development process. Nelson Hale Cruikshank The US Bureau of Labor Statistics most recent survey indicates that union membership in the US has risen to 12.4% of all workers, from 12.1% in 2007. Brilliant theorist, tactician and organizer and first head of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. This complex balancing act has had a big impact on business perceptions of IT leaders. The looming metaverse will certainly bring more business disruption. Member of the AFL-CIO? Folk hero and symbol of hope who organized a union of farm workers. Eloquent and effective advocate for the rights of workers, women and consumers. The lesson here: labor can draw real strength from alliances with other . In other words, the potential po. According to the NLRB, more than 2,000 petitions to form a union were filed in the U.S. last year, the most since 2015. This mutual inspiration goes a long way to explain the astonishingly rapid growth of public sector unions during the civil rights era. "All the successful CIOs I know are deeply technical," said Benjamin Rehberg, managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group. CIOs in this period remained responsible for delivering new IT systems on time and on budget, as well as for running existing and new systems with a high degree of reliability. Frances Perkins Legitimate factors are delaying progress, from the scale of the change to the mind-boggling complexity of legacy systems. Recent examples include enlisting machine learning to predict purchase order shortages, leveraging RPAto automate a previously manual past due purchase order review process, and employing chatbots to streamline common helpdesk interactions. In 1933, the number of labor union members was around 3 million, compared to 5 million a decade before. Helped create Social Security and Medicare. CIOs do this by continually reviewing customer-satisfaction reports, regularly monitoring customer-care calls, and participating in user forums to hear direct feedback. Walter Reuther 1847 New Hampshire enacts first state 10-hour-day law. Many tech decisions dont get sufficient business scrutiny beyond cost and high-level strategy discussions. The stage is set for CIOs both to lead a successful technology transformation and to influence business strategy. To actively manage this process, such CIOs also put in place a war room, a dedicated team that ensures transformation initiatives are delivering value by actively tracking progress and helping to break through root-cause issues. Review best practices and tools Workloads with rigid latency, bandwidth, availability or integration requirements tend to perform better -- and cost less -- if Configuration profiles make it easier to manage BYOD iPhones, but they're also associated with malware. The modern use of the term digital transformation refers to what companies must do today to compete in an environment where the way people work and live is increasingly mediated through digital technologies. The gray line between business and IT is basically gone, says Jayadev, citing as an example a recent interchange with a third-party consultant who couldnt tell where to direct questions about technology and tools. False. For years, executives have stressed the need for CIOs to move beyond simply managing IT to leveraging technology to create value for the business. Cookie Preferences Philip Murray Transformative CIOs dont settle for that kind of interaction, articulating instead how a proposed solution solves the underlying business problem, what alternative approaches exist, and the pros and cons of each. In practice, CIOs can enable collaboration if theyre willing to relinquish some control. In the mainframe era, IT's top professionals were the specialized programmers, systems operators and analysts hired to operate the massive machines that gave the era its name. 29. Are your top engineers happy with their work? The CIO supported Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal Coalition, and was open to African Americans. Here are a few things CEOs can do: Gaining support for a transformation requires that stakeholders understand that true change will come only from tackling all three transformation vectors in a strategic, interlinked manner. The pandemic radically changed that mindset. Are the top people in IT really stars in their field? Pay matters, of course, but top people want to go where theyre valued. True. establish a strategic role for the technology function, elevate the CIO to report directly to the CEO, rebalance technology investments and track their business value, prioritize the development of a world-class tech workforce. Now the product owners are the actual business units, not the IT staff. Transformation of existing business processes, including automation and integration, was a top imperative for 41% of respondents while improving customer experience (42%) as well as employee productivity (27%) ranked high on the CIO agenda. "Tenure fights are a huge part of what people are talking about right now, almost everywhere . As technology writer Mary Pratt reported in an article on the role of the CIO in 2022, the job "is being shaped by a constellation of new technologies and the business's burning need to use them for competitive advantage." 1843 Lowell Female Labor Reform Association begins public petitioning for 10-hour day. became a recurring theme, as the pundit class debated whether the CIO should be replaced by another IT expert like the chief data officer or chief digital officer -- or if, in fact, a business executive should become the enterprise's next czar of technology. CIOs are once again walking a tightrope between innovation and operational excellencethis time, buoyed by strong LOB alliances and a lingering pandemic glow. George Meany 1
Effective CIOs acted as technology evangelists who focused on the why of technology, not the nuts and bolts of IT implementations. It was not until the first decade of the new millennium -- with the rise of social media, smartphones, the world's largest search engine and the world's largest e-commerce company -- that companies grasped how integral IT was to business strategy and fully appreciated the importance of IT-business alignment. For the remainder of the twentieth century, the AFL-CIO remained the largest union organization in the United States. In just 18 months, one CIO at a transportation-and-logistics company radically reshaped its talent profile. According to a McKinsey survey on business technology, in fact, the companies in which IT plays a partner role in digital initiatives are further along in both implementation and achieving business impact. The evolution of the CIO job from technology expert to a business strategist with deep technical expertise has arguably been more dramatic than any other C-level role transition. Frances Perkins Committed labor secretary and first woman in a presidential Cabinet position. By. Despite this pressing need, of the organizations that have pursued digitization, 79 percent of them are still in the early stages of their technology transformation, according to McKinseys 2018 IT strategy survey. Two solutions have proven effective. The formation of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) was fundamental in the labor movement, as it was the first union group to recognize the need to organize unskilled labor. Findings from our 2018 IT strategy survey reveal that companies with top IT organizations are much more likely than others to have the CIO very involved with shaping the business strategy and agenda, and strong performance on core IT tasks enables faster progress against a companys digital goals. Social reformer dedicated to workers' rights and racial justice. ", The job is not about technology transformation per se but about how to "create and lead a movement across the organization -- about how you find your coalitions of the willing," Corbin said. 1835 General strike for 10-hour day in Philadelphia. The AFL-CIO established the Ethical Practices Committee in its efforts to control corrupt practices and racketeering of its member unions. Put simply, it's an organization of people committed to protecting and improving the interests of its members. The CIO of a B2B technology-services company, meanwhile, meets customers on a regular basis to get firsthand feedback on both products and the customers experience of doing business with the company. Early heads of the IT function came to their positions by being very good at technology -- mainframe data processing, in particular. The AFL did not, however, promise to allow those unions to maintain a separate identity indefinitely. False. Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, speaks at the National Press Club on Jan. 11, 2010. Today, this has reversed: 36 percent of public workers and 7 percent of those in the private sector are union members. Nearly half of respondents to McKinseys 2018 IT strategy survey cite skill gaps on traditional teams as the top obstacle to a successful digital transformation. Industrial unionism became even more necessary in the 1930s, when the Great Depression caused large membership drops in some unions, such as the United Mine Workers and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. 2. Adept CIOs also understood how their IT mission and strategic plans supported the company's mission and strategic goals -- and they made those connections for both their staff and for their C-suite peers. The union had to report the data to the OLMS in order to be considered for this list, thus some unions are not listed. In 1986, the AFL-CIO created Union Privilege to offer Union Plus benefits to union members and their families. Today, the Union also represents health care workers, truck drivers, manufacturing workers and public employees in the United States and Canada. How often do you publicly celebrate success and support noble failures? True. Lenovo Late Night I.T. This consumerization of IT marked the turning point for CIOs from overseers of centralized computing to overseers of an enterprise's digital business strategy. So, what exactly is a CIO and how do you get to be one? Can I clearly articulate the businesss goals? 2. The CIO of a software company established various community-building and knowledge-sharing effortshackathons, dev days, tech spotlights, brown-bag luncheswhere product managers, developers, data engineers, and architects could meet on a weekly basis to share details about their projects and bring up ideas or issues for discussion. The creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was announced 80 years ago on this day, November 9, 1935by eight international unions belonging to the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Holcombe, CIO for the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), is not the least bit concerned that this years focus on the practical, not the trend-setting, will cause any setback to ITs standing in the business. "The working people of . preparing for next-generation technology services; using the cloud for core business applications; building a digital collaboration culture; and. Retraining the existing tech workforce also needs to be an important element of this platform. These skills are the tools that enable a CIOs ability to transform IT. Many of the great technology companies, like Yahoo and Microsoft, use their lead customers to help create new products and test them. Figure 13.1: Union membership as a percentage of total employment, 1930-2015. interim CIO (interim chief information officer): An interim CIO, also known as a contract CIO, is a qualified chief information officer who serves a company on a temporary basis. At the same time, decentralization highlighted the need for an executive-level technology leader to oversee a function that now touched every part of the enterprise, directly affected how businesses made money and increasingly dictated how employees did their jobs. Do you rely exclusively on HR to find your talent? Subscribe today and get a yearlong print . Bayard Rustin "Nationalism," the new issue of Jacobin is out now. Protective labor legislation of the 1930s, such as the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, did not extend to agricultural workers, although 31.8 percent of the African American population in 1940 was employed in agriculture (40.4 percent in the South). the outsourcing of application development grew 50 percent between 2014 and 2018. This opened the door for some CIOs and their IT departments to become more deeply involved in business strategy. The fundamentals are key, but not at the expense of innovation. The CIO challenge: Modern business needs a new kind of tech leader, Author Talks: The worlds longest study of adult development finds the key to happy living, The executives guide to new-business building, Generative AI is here: How tools like ChatGPT could change your business. As part of a digital transformation, for instance, the CIO at a large financial institution committed to developing digital products to help the business scale its presence in a new market. Lucy Randolph Mason While mainframe use continued, the period from the 1970s to the 1990s marked the use of minicomputers and the advent of PCs. Shortly after the AFLs convention in Atlantic City in 1935, John L. Lewis called together the leaders of the International Typographical Union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, the ILGWU, the United Textile Workers, the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union, the Oil Workers Union and the Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers to discuss the formation of a new group within the AFL to carry on the fight for industrial organizing. Like so many companies coming off a two-year cycle of near-non-stop digitization, USPTO is in a bit of recalibration mode. Working in customized, cooled rooms and garbed in white lab coats, IT experts were as remote from the day-to-day business as the powerful machines they operated. Recent history has shown that effective CIOs possess the personal skills required to drive large-scale change, such as digital transformation and the adoption of new ways of working. The Tipping Point - The Path from CIO to CEO Becomes Clearer. You lose it by talking geek speak or focusing on pet projects that have nothing to do with the business mission. By the end of 1936, the UE had organized the General Electric plant at Schenectady, N.Y., and went on to organize 358 more local unions with contracts covering over 600,000 workers in 1375 plants. Lewis continued to denounce the AFLs policies, while the CIO offered organizing support to workers in the rubber industry who went on strike in 1936 and formed the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), in defiance of all of the craft divisions that the AFL had required in past organizing efforts. The potential security risks and integration problems posed by unauthorized, ad hoc technology decisions -- referred to as shadow IT -- highlighted another skill required of effective CIOs. In the 1940s, 10 percent of public workers and 34 percent of those in the private sector belonged to unions. On September 10, 1936, the AFL suspended all ten CIO unions (two more had joined in the previous year). These technologies include the now widely adopted stalwarts of digital transformation -- cloud, mobile, social media and analytics -- but also a torrent of emergent technologies, including artificial intelligence, IoT, robotic process transformation, digital twins and the so-called immersive technologies: augmented and virtual reality. But there was little evidence of unionism for another generation - until . In 1949 and 1950, the CIO expelled 11 affiliated unions for having communist ties. Change management became a critical part of the job as the pace of technology innovation increased. 2
Eighty-six percent of CIOs say their role is more digital and innovation focused, down slightly from 92% last year, while 85% say they are more involved in leading digital transformation initiatives compared to their business counterparts, (down from 89% in 2021. We cant take our eye off the ball or lose an opportunity to seize on the acceleration we are driving every day with our digital-first experiences and modernization.. The term chief information officer (CIO) was coined by prominent organizational theorists William Synnott and William Gruber in their 1981 book, Information Resource Management: Opportunities and Strategies for the 1980s. 2017). The digital CIO has arrived, MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, 2016. A project management approach wasnt giving enough business valuethere were too many starts and stops, and procurement was unwieldy, he explains. Moreover, CIOs are increasingly seen as a changemaker, taking the lead on business and technology initiativesa view shared by the lions share of CIOs (84%) and LOB (75%) respondents. LOB respondents, who oftentimes are at odds with the CIO perspective of the role, were also firmly in that camp: More than three quarters (78%) expect CIOs elevated status to continue regardless of cyclical shifts in IT focus. Truly outstanding CIOs used IT to fundamentally transform the businesses they worked for, as explained in the classic study of "renaissance CIOs" by researchers James Spitze and Judith Lee. Since the CIO role's inception, all high-performing CIOs have needed to be able to inspire and lead their IT organizations. Building on its solid foundation of hybrid cloud, open APIs, and microservices, Synchrony is embracing a product mindset for technology deployment that will transcend multiple retail and commerce partners. Sustained trade union . AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, one of the nation's most powerful labor leaders, has died, Democratic officials announced Thursday. Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America founder whoinvented trade unionism as we know it today. Driving a transformation around the three vectors we laid out earlier (reimagining the role of technology, reinventing technology delivery, and future-proofing the foundation) starts with a CIO mind-set that both acknowledges the need for transformative change and commits to a multiyear journey. By hiring the best tech people, weve seen companies reduce their technology costs by as much as 30 percent while maintaining or improving their productivity. To help technology generate business value, the transformative CIO has to understand business strategy. Created by John L. Lewis, it was originally called the Committee for Industrial Organization, but changed its name in 1938 when it broke away from the AFL. These included . "If you look at the CIO role today, it is all about relationships, culture, application development and innovation.". Unlike last year when business strategy took precedence for 67% of respondents, only 60% of 2022 State of the CIO respondents spent time on activities such as driving business innovation, developing strategy, or identifying opportunities for competitive differentiation. [2] However, that trend has since reversed. The massive shift to remote work spurred by the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 only underscored the vital role CIOs and the IT assets they're responsible for play in the success of today's enterprises. Architecting modular platforms needs revamped approaches to hiring in order to get top-flight engineers. Not all employers oppose unions. If theres one thing Jamie Holcombe has learned from his decades-long career as a public and private sector IT leader, its how to be a good salesman. This was the approach taken in a large global retailers digital and technology transformation. John L. Lewis Never miss an insight. This is often in the form of negotiating and improving pay, pension, working conditions, and other workplace benefits. The top CEO priorities for IT leadership also revealed a growing desire to align years of technology investment with operational excellence while ensuring digital initiatives are running on all cylinders and delivering the proper business outcomes. CIO pickets, Georgia, 1941. Make sure you talk to colleagues in business terms so they understand how youre delivering for them.. 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