Gregory S. Smith - The New Normal in IT

For the past 30 years, I've had the pleasure of working in the IT industry across a variety of sectors (financial services, Big 5 management and IT consulting, U.S. national security/defense, environmental, public policy, education, and healthcare). During my career, some areas of knowledge and experience have become more important in the strategic role as a chief information officer/chief technology officer (CIO/CTO) than others. Until 2020, the information technology (IT) operational and strategic playbooks for various industries were pretty set and focused around deploying applications, knowledge management systems, technology infrastructure via a mix of cloud and on-premises installations, and security – mostly centered around physical office buildings and data centers where most staff worked. As a result of the global Covid-19 pandemic that originated in early 2020, everything IT related has changed and will likely remain different forever. Companies are moving to full or partial remote workers with more tolerance for broader geographical ranges of resources. In addition, they are shedding corporate office locations or at a minimum, reducing the office footprint significantly to reduce costs. Why? Because the pandemic of 2020–2021 showed how valuable information technology can be to an organization and that we have proven that organizations are more productive working remotely away from expensive corporate office buildings.

The role of the CIO/CTO going forward will change globally forever as a result. The purpose of this book is to share with others my experience and predictions alongside other CIOs across a diverse set of sectors (energy, manufacturing, academia, transportation, consumer products, financial services, and nonprofits) regarding the future strategy deployment of technology post Covid-19. I plan to cover three broad areas. First, what the postpandemic new normal looks like for IT leaders regarding resource sourcing, the office of the future and how collaboration tools will continue to accelerate a hybrid office/remote work force across the globe. Second, I will discuss how risk mitigation and specifically disaster recovery testing and planning will adapt to include worst-case scenarios. Third, my CxO (CIO, CISO, COO, and CEO) panel and I will share how today's CIOs are adapting their IT governance approach to meet the new IT normal and how key performance indicators will likely change as a result.

The Contents takes the reader on a logical path to learning and obtaining the key skills and approaches best-practice IT leaders are adapting as a result of what they've learned from the recent global pandemic. I leverage my own experience, along with a group of CIOs, chief information security officers (CISOs), chief operations officers (COOs), and chief executive officers (CEOs) from a variety of sectors to communicate the best and most helpful approaches used by leading CIOs today. I'll also seek research support from the best IT advisory research firms on the market to support my conclusions and predictions.

The target audience of this text includes IT professionals from middle-management (managers, directors, VPs) to senior management up to and including the roles of the CIO and CTO. As a result, the market opportunity for this book is quite large, given the large-scale audience of middle managers to the top information technology (IT) spot in most organizations – the CIO.

In addition, the audience includes a large number of global undergraduate and graduate technology management or information systems academic programs.

I believe that there is a significant need for a book of this type at this time . First – many organizations that were technically unprepared for the pandemic suffered greatly. This text will serve as a road map for how to move forward with a technology strategy so that prior mistakes are not made twice. Second, I will draw on the expertise of CIOs and other executives across a wide swath of sectors to tell their story on how well they handled the pandemic and what changes they are making going forward. This will reveal the path forward for middle IT management (managers and directors), who I see as a large target market opportunity. Third, since the technology revolution that started in the 1990s through 2019, the world has never seen something as disruptive to companies and organizations as the Covid-19 pandemic. It literally impacted all industrialized and technology advanced nations. This text will provide predictions and strategies based on my experience and my research panel regarding where technology development, adoption, and spending will go post-Covid-19 for one key reason: so organizations across the globe are prepared when another global event happens again, which it will.

A number of folks were instrumental in the development of this book, my fifth. First and foremost – thanks to my wife and family for continuing to support my dreams of academic and publishing excellence. The number of hours it took to research and develop this book were significant, taking time away from my family. Second, I'd like to thank the CIO, CISO, COO, and CEO contributors to this book. Your insights, experiences, lessons learned, and projections going forward will help organizations around the globe better prepare to live with expected future disruptions associated with Covid-19 and other disrupters that will inevitably challenge us all that we simply can't foresee at the moment.

I'd like to thank my supporting research teams. Special thanks to Joseph Poye, Christian Morrison, and Timothy Scannell at IDC. Access to your research and team was invaluable in the development of this book. I'd also like to thank my friend and colleague Rick Pastore at The Hackett Group for access to some of your terrific research studies and reports. They were especially helpful in showing readers the impacts IT planning had on the degree of impact from the pandemic.

I'd also like to thank the wonderful team of professionals who provided compelling endorsements for this book. Thank you Ed Anderson, Rick Pastore, Frederic Lemieux, and Kendra Ketchum.

Lastly, and most importantly, I'd like to thank my team at John Wiley & Sons. It's hard to believe that this is my third book with your esteemed publishing brand. What an honor it is to be backed by Wiley. Special thanks go out to Sheck Cho, executive editor; Susan Cerra, senior managing editor; and Samantha Enders, editorial assistant and lead for the cover design, for all your efforts to make this book a global leader.

Gregory S. Smith is an internationally recognized IT executive with 30 years of experience managing complex IT and business systems. Mr. Smith serves as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for a Washington, DC–area organization. Previously, Mr. Smith served for a total of 17 years as the CIO for various organizations including the Pew Charitable Trusts and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). His for-profit experience combines IT and business acumen from a decade in U.S. national security, U.S. financial services 100, and consulting experience from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Gregory S. Smith is an honoree of several awards including: SmartCEO magazine's Top 10 CIOs in Washington DC, Computer World magazine's Premier 100 IT Leaders , CIO magazine's CIO 100 , and eWeek magazine's Top 100 CIOs . He was also recognized as one of the Top 100 Most Influential CIOs by CIO Insight magazine. In 2017, he received an excellence in teaching award from Georgetown University.

Mr. Smith is the author of CIO 2.0 (in Mandarin), Straight to the Top: CIO Leadership in a Mobile, Social, and Cloud-based World (John Wiley & Sons), How to Protect Your Children on the Internet: A Road Map for Parents and Teachers (Greenwood Publishing), and Straight to the Top: Becoming a World-Class CIO (John Wiley & Sons). He received a BS in computer science from a top-10 national program from the University of Maryland at College Park and an MS in business from the Johns Hopkins University. He served for over 10 years as an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University in the Carey Graduate Business School. Mr. Smith currently serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's graduate programs.