This decentralization of information systems gave rise to IT managers throughout the enterprise -- including businesspeople with IT expertise. Are the top people in IT really stars in their field? When he started out as a young CTO in the 1990s, the CIOs he knew were IT operators -- by necessity. Union Plus offers over 20 benefits, including: AT&T discounts This opened the door for some CIOs and their IT departments to become more deeply involved in business strategy. Frances Perkins Committed labor secretary and first woman in a presidential Cabinet position. While mainframe use continued, the period from the 1970s to the 1990s marked the use of minicomputers and the advent of PCs. 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. In 1953, 32.5% of American workers were union members. The digital CIO has arrived, MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, 2016. Peoples World is a voice for progressive change and socialism in the United States. 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. The CEO of a B2B technology-services company found this level of insight so important that he asked the CIO to present periodically to the board on technology-led business models. But today's CIOs must also understand how IT drives business transformation. The builder of the modern AFL-CIO. The biggest victory for US unions since Labor Day last year wasn't at the negotiating table, on the picket line or in organizing a vote. In comparison, in the 2021 State of the CIO survey, only 62% of LOB respondents viewed the CIO role through a digital and innovation lens and only 59% thought CIOs shouldered more of the digital transformation agenda compared to other top-level executives. In 1938, these unions formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations as a rival labor federation. To help technology generate business value, the transformative CIO has to understand business strategy. CIOs can further develop business acumen by taking responsibility for initiatives that generate business impact, such as building an e-commerce business, or by working with a business-unit leader to launch a digital product and then measure success by business-impact key performance indicators (KPIs), not technology KPIs. Copyright 2023 IDG Communications, Inc. 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. Unions have generally grown and then been pushed back at various points since the 1880s. Folk hero and symbol of hope who organized a union of farm workers. But that needs to change, especially around the most crucial capabilities. Change management became a critical part of the job as the pace of technology innovation increased. It involves the integration of digital technologies into an organization's products, processes, partnerships and strategies. According to the Department of Labor, the 2015 union membership rate was 11.1% and the number of workers belonging to unions was 14.8 million. The first unions in the US were focused at the local level representing single crap or trade. 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. 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. Lenovo Late Night I.T. In the past, IT transformations have often proven expensive, time consuming, and short on value, and this has made some companies leery of undertaking them again. 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. Like so many companies coming off a two-year cycle of near-non-stop digitization, USPTO is in a bit of recalibration mode. The CIO of a large consumer company made digital and analytics upskilling one of the companys key strategic priorities, launching an enterprise-wide program, in tandem with HRs learning team. Without a high-level understanding of complex and potentially game-changing technologies, such as blockchain and AI, "you won't have the insights into the opportunities that the technology provides," he said. While the bureaucratic leadership of the AFL was unable to win strikes, three victorious strikes suddenly exploded onto the scene in 1934. Thomas Reilly Donahue We believe, however, that one of the biggest issues is that many CIOs have not accepted the degree to which their role needs to expand beyond cost and performance responsibilities in order to transform IT into a core driver of business value. They invest time with functional and business-unit leaders and managers to gain an in-depth understanding of business realities on the ground and go out of their way to develop a nuanced and detailed understanding of customer issues. Its been years in the making, but the decision for one of Africa's retail giants to move its infrastructure into the cloud was never going to be taken lightly. Those were hard problems to solve," said Sacolick, president and CIO of digital transformation consulting firm StarCIO. One trend that helped turn around the perception of IT as purely a cost center was the adoption of IT chargeback, an accounting strategy that applies the costs of IT services, hardware and software to the business unit in which they are used. Philip Murray CIO president who helped transform the industrial union movement into a stable and powerful organization. The CIO was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the U.S. and Canada from 1935 to 1955. In other words, the potential po. Because of technologys enabling role during the pandemic, IT is now part of every ideation discussion within the Skyworks organization, whether related to security and resiliency or some other form of digital innovation. Some unions featured in this report were voluntarily recognized by employers, and some led campaigns in which the employer provided union organizers with free access to employees.73 But often, when private-sector workers seek to organize and bargain . Make the business implications of tech decisions clear. The CIO is the ship's helmsman and its engineer, in his words. Beth Stackpole is a veteran reporter who has covered the intersection of business and technology issues for more than 20 years. Gallup reports 71% of Americans say they approve of labor unions, the highest number since 1965.. Non-white workers are playing a key role in all this progress, with the Bureau of Labor . 90 Broad . Data processing was centralized and done on IT's timetable. -. Creating ways for cohorts of similar skill sets to get together can be a powerful way to share best practices and foster a sense of community. Developing a deeper well of business knowledge often requires CIOs to extend their networks beyond the organization. This mutual inspiration goes a long way to explain the astonishingly rapid growth of public sector unions during the civil rights era. CIOs do this by continually reviewing customer-satisfaction reports, regularly monitoring customer-care calls, and participating in user forums to hear direct feedback. The builder of the modern AFL-CIO. The CIO was born out of a fundamental dispute within the United States labor movement over whether and how to organize industrial workers. 1791 First strike in building trades by Philadelphia carpenters for a 10-hour day Bill of Rights adopted. Generating support for a transformation among business leaders across the organization requires creating true partnering relationships with them based on common goals, mutual responsibility, and accountability. One of the best ways to do that is by joining the board of another company. The AFL-CIO established the Ethical Practices Committee in its efforts to control corrupt practices and racketeering of its member unions. Eloquent and effective advocate for the rights of workers, women and consumers. 1847 New Hampshire enacts first state 10-hour-day law. They approach planning as a dynamic process rather than something static, which allows transformation teams to better remove roadblocks and to allocate people and spend when and where they are needed. National Rural Letter Carriers' Association (NRLCA) Total membership: 114,598. 1 directive for CIOs this year was to upgrade IT and data security to reduce corporate risk, cited by a third of survey respondents. 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. Henry "has proved totally unable to control the gangs," she said, and his High Transition Council is too limited and maintains all power in his hands without any checks and balances. False. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the country's largest union federation, has 12.5 million members worldwide. To understand the remarkable transformation of the CIO's role, it helps to review IT's top job at some of its major inflection points. Early heads of the IT function came to their positions by being very good at technology -- mainframe data processing, in particular. Unlike years past, he believes the CIO is well situated to weather a back-to-basics IT deployment cycle without undermining status or ceding any leadership ground. To address this issue and build trust, the best CIOs play an active role in educating leaders about technologies and their applications for the business. It provides news and analysis of, by, and for the labor and democratic movements to our readers across the country and around the world. The AFL-CIO Split and the Fight for Workers Power. 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 union staged Texas' first strike that autumn and won a 25 per cent wage increase. Do leaders in the C-suite have a clear understanding of why a tech transformation is important? This was the approach taken in a large global retailers digital and technology transformation. No longer just the overseers of IT operations and services, many CIOs are now acting as key business strategists, working with their C-level peers and the board of directors to create the business models necessary to survive -- and thrive -- in the 21st-century digital economy. False. In 1949 and 1950, the CIO expelled 11 affiliated unions for having communist ties. This active collaboration ensured that the products and services IT developed were adopted. CIOs are once again walking a tightrope between innovation and operational excellencethis time, buoyed by strong LOB alliances and a lingering pandemic glow. Amid the volatile economic and political conditions, CIOs are finding themselves under pressure to be fiscally prudent and to find technology that can support business agility, according to interviews conducted by Lawton on CIO priorities in 2022. 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. This priority is now a requirement. True. 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). A third of the boards of companies within the Fortune 500 today include a former CIO or CTO, and that number continues to increase. 25+ search types; Win/Lin/Mac SDK; hundreds of reviews; full evaluations. Staying razor-focused on business benefits and communicating in a language everyone understands is central to successful IT initiatives, whether the project involves state-of-the-art technology like robotic process automation (RPA) or is a bit more mundane, like upgrading an aging data center. Now, fresh off a pandemic-fueled cycle of accelerated innovation, Holcombe is channeling his vaunted sales skills to drive an upcoming IT agenda centered on foundational areas like optimization, security, and enterprise resiliency. Among the 2022 State of the CIO respondents, 46% are advancing efforts to increase operational efficiency compared to only 34% in the prior years survey. Everyone realizes that technology is significantweve earned the seat at the table and have everyones ear, he explains. 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. Photo: 900 15th Street NW, Washington, D.C.-The CIOs second headquarters was an office on the third floor of this, the United Mine Workers headquarters. The efforts to bolster employee experience and engagement will help to elevate the Digital groups role and keep technology central to all conversations related to business transformation, Walk says. Feb 28, 2023. Make sure you talk to colleagues in business terms so they understand how youre delivering for them.. Building trusted relationships with the C-suite, line-of-business leaders and even the board of directors became a vital part of the job. For Anita Klopfenstein, a culture built on service, accountability, and innovation is key in delivering business value from difficult IT journeys. 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. Almost half of survey respondents (49%) cited increasing cybersecurity protections as the top business initiative driving IT investments, up dramatically from 34% in 2021. 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