 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Welcome back to IBM Interconnect, everybody. We're here at the Mandalay Bay. There's another session going on at the MGM. It's a big conference, about 20,000 people here. Tim Crawford is here as the CIO advisor, strategic advisor to CIO. CIO's a friend of theCUBE, a crowd chat maniac, principal at AVOA. Welcome back, good to see you. Thanks Dave, thanks for having me back on again. Our pleasure, Tim, always great perspectives. You guys did a little crowd chat earlier. I was diving in, we were live on theCUBE. I wanted to, we've been talking a lot about the players. Stu and I in an earlier segment were John, the marketplace, the dynamics, Amazon, Azure, IBM, blah, blah, blah. Let's look at the CIO perspective. We were talking on the crowd chat, is the guys in the corner office, the CEO, sort of guys in the C-suite, want to just outsource the whole thing, get rid of it. And I feel like the CIO is there to save them. And say, well, wait a minute, before you do that, there's some other considerations that you pay me to worry about. What's really going on in the CIO discussion? What are the conversations like around cloud? Yeah, I think there are a couple of dynamics that are kind of flying through this. Number one is the C-level, the C-suite outside of the CIO is struggling to understand the true value of IT. They look at IT as a cost center still, right? I pay for it, it's that necessary evil, I've got to leverage it, but it's not something that I really need for my business growth, it's not something that's going to contribute to revenue growth and opportunities. So how do I start to do that? And this is really the challenge that most CIOs have today, is how do they start to turn that corner and turn that value proposition around so that the rest of the company understands that IT is actually part of the value equation for business growth, not just a cost center. And so there's a cultural shift, there's an organizational shift, but there's also an attitude shift too. And unfortunately, that has to start with the CIO. The problem is, few CIOs understand how that map kind of plays out in the direction they take. So we were talking earlier, I threw out a stat that came from Mark Hurd a while back, said that the average age of the enterprise application is 19 years. So if you have a diverse application portfolio, you're a big company, you got to deal with that as a CIO. That's right. So, and what often happens is, people spin up applications, maybe it's a little skunk works, and then it's like, okay, IT, take this over. And then you maintain it, you put the bodies on it, and if something goes wrong, I'm going to call you. And that just begets this sucking sound of this vortex of cost. How does the CIO get out of that nightmare? Well, the CIO has to get ahead of the wave, not stand behind it. And the problem is, the typical CIO is standing behind it still. They're not ahead of the wave. And until they figure out how to get ahead of the wave and get ahead of that request for demand and be able to supply it, they're always going to be on the receiving end of the equation. There are a couple of things that kind of play out with that, is that the CIO needs to understand the dynamics of the business. And I don't mean that in terms of kind of tongue-in-cheek what the business does, but they need to understand how the company makes money, how the company spends money. Yes, how to get budget. So if I'm the CIO, if I'm tomorrow put in the role of the CMO, what do I do? It's not about technology. And this is the problem is most of the CIOs today, they come up through the rank and file of the IT organization. And over the last 20, 25 years, we've all been technologists. So we have to figure out how to make that shift into talking about it from a business perspective. Right, I've said this many, many times before and I'll say it again. The CIO today needs to be a business leader first that happens to have responsibility for IT. How do we make that change? How do we get into that position? Once we do that, the rest of the pieces will start to fall in place. But that's easier said than done for a lot of these folks. And to some degree it is going to be a bit generational too. So we've been talking about alignment ever since we've been in this business. That's the holy grail of the CIOs. We've got to align. That's essentially what you're talking about here. But you're talking about more than alignment. You're talking about actually having the business savvy to be able to provide services in a way that the business is going to say, I want to go to the CIO for these services because it's going to fit into the edicts of my organization and I'm going to get value. Two things on that. So you're right. We have talked about alignment, but alignment in the past has been, let me understand what the business requires. And we talk about it as us in the business, which is problem number one, right? IT is different than the business. Wrong, wrong, wrong. IT needs to be part of the business. We need to think of ourselves as part of the business, not a separate organization. Number two is instead of thinking of us as, okay, what does the business need? And we will fulfill that requirement of that need. What we need to do is get ahead of that curve. Figure out how do we start to put ourselves in a position to understand if you're the CMO, what is it that you're going to be needing? How do you think about customer engagement? How do you think about social engagement? Where does mobile fit into this? It's beyond the boundaries of just the user within the company and gets to the broader context of the business, the company's users, right? The company's customers. Those are my customers as a CIO now. I have to make that change. So Tim, you talk with a lot of CIOs. Some of the new mega drivers out there, think about big data and mobility. IT either needs to deliver this stuff to the business or I'm going to go stealth IT or outsource or go do it myself. So do you see this as a real forcing function to IT to make those changes and maybe give us an anecdote or two or two? Yeah, I think there are a couple of dynamics that come into play there. They absolutely have to get around being able to supply that. The individual business units can't go off and do it on their own. I mean, there are cost disadvantages as well as just complexities and integration. I mean, it gets to be a real mess if you ended up with each of the different silos within the company starting to build their own analytics and big data solution. I mean, it's bad enough as is, that just makes it worse, right? But I mean, just a point. Remember when you said that the C-suite was buying iPads and iPhones before IT supported it and forced everybody off a BlackBerry and that drove everything down through. That's right, but this goes back to something that Dave said, which is the CIO needs to help keep the business in check too. So it's kind of a, it's a catch-22, right? The CIO needs to get ahead, but the CIO is also the one that understands the broader context for how these pieces come together. It was a really hard job. You always know. We know the CIO has a hard job. So I try to put myself in his or her shoes. What would you do if you're a CIO? Let me just throw some things out and you tell me the practicality of doing them. First thing I would do is get a really good CTO and say, your job is through technology. Because I don't really understand the technology. Go figure that out, you're my go-to person. And then I would sit in every quarterly business review, every P&L meeting, every strategic planning session of all the lines of business. That's very time consuming. And I would try to learn as much about their business as possible. And then contribute. Well, here's the deal. From a technology standpoint, here's the enabler, here's where the challenges are going to be, here's the corporate friction you're going to get. Let's partner and figure out how to get this done. Because otherwise they're just going to go outsource it and it's going to be a mess that's going to fall on my lap. So that sounds good. Great, what I just said. How practical is that in an organization of any reasonable size of a couple hundred million dollars and up to a multi-billion dollar corporation? I think it's very practical, but you've got to have your heart in it and you've got to be wanting to do it. And the problem is, the problem is, Because that's like music to my ears. Like a lot of guys would really love doing that job. But maybe not, maybe they want to go run the P&L though. Well, but see, that's the thing. Because that's where the power is. I mean, IT in some ways has had that control, right? That command and control mentality. I mean, we can use a number of different analogies here, but command and control is dead. We have to think about how to be a team player as part of that executive team. And the conversations that happen at that level are about, like you said, the financials of the organization. So for the CIO, do they know how to read a balance sheet? Right? Do they know how to read an income statement? I mean, do they understand the financials and what is contributing to the different components of that and what they can do to help improve that situation? Or whatever metric matters. Whatever. Whatever. That's the best advice you could give a, you know. But at the end of the day, think about it. The CIO reports up through the CEO. Whether it's to the CFO first, the CMO, the COO, it doesn't matter. Eventually they get to the CEO. Who does the CEO report to? The board of directors. Who does the board of directors report to? Shareholders, right? What are the shareholders interested in? Bottom line, baby. That's right. Stop price. So how do we as CIOs start to understand a few steps ahead and that involves financials and understand how we can help contribute to the solution rather than minimizing our problem of bottom line. And there's only a handful of metrics then. It's revenue, revenue growth, it's EBIT, it's EPS, it's maybe retention, you know. It actually comes back to two. Nine times out of 10, it comes back to two. It comes back to revenue growth and customer engagement. And those are closely tied together. But from an IT perspective today, if we just focused on those two objectives, we would be a lot further ahead than what we are today. Because that's going to fall to the bottom line. And that's going to be, it's somebody else's job to control their costs. It's my job to control IT costs if I'm the CIO. But it also helps contribute to top line too, right? Customer engagement, we know an engaged customer provides greater assets to the top line. So we have to think about how do we contribute to those two pieces? That'll help us get to the next stage. Once we get there, then we can worry about the bigger pieces. What percent of the CIOs in your experience are of that ilk that you just described? I wish I could say a large percentage. I would have to say it's probably maybe 30%. Maybe a third, maybe. It's not bad. I mean, it's not where you want it to be. But think about it, in the bigger context, it's a third, we're here today, we need to evolve. Our competition is already evolving. So how do we as incumbents make that change very, very quickly? So, all right, we got to go. But what's the future of the CIO? Is it a, do they have to choose a technology role? Do they have to choose a business role? Do they have to choose a chief data role? Or is the CIO alive and well? The CIO is alive and well. But let me couch that by saying, and I wrote a piece on this just recently, defining the transformational CIO from the traditional CIO. The traditional CIO is dead. Run the business. The traditional CIO, technology focus. Run the IT business. Run the IT organization. Keep the roles on. That role's dead. The transformational CIO is definitely alive and it is only going to grow. Make some big bucks doing that. That is a business leader. The transformational CIO is a business leader. We need more of those. All right, great. Tim Crawford, thanks very much for stopping by theCUBE. Always a pleasure, man. All right, thanks. Keep right there, everybody back with our next guest. Right after this, we're live from IBM Interconnect from Vegas. This is theCUBE.