The Rise of the CPO

In 'The World Is Flat', Thomas Friedman, explains the flattening of our world today due to various political, technological and business advancements. The global playing field is being reshaped, allowing people in developing countries like India, China to be able to pursist a better life and compete heads-on with people in developed countries like the USA. Individuals have to move on with the waves of innovations or risk becoming obselete.

In his forecoming book, 'Extreme Competition: the 21st Century Business Reformation', Peter Fingar, an expert on business process management (BPM), builds on the foundations laid by Thomas Friedman, and explains the evolution of CIOs into CPOs - Chief Process Officers, an individual who has an overview of the entire company from the enterprise's process standpoint, based on enabling technologies like real-time collobrations, system-to-system realtime data exchanges, the ubiquitious Internet. He also coined the term 'The Real Time Enterprise', an enterprise whose every step of every functional processes, HR, finance, manufactoring, sales & marketing, retail, inventory all can be inspected in real-time; enabling highly informed decision-making at all levels. To corporate behemoths like Dell, Wal-Mart, HP, this level of information sharing cut downs on inefficiencies, and enable them to react and reshape themselves with high agility to changing market trends and demands.

CPO, a new role in the new flat world. this is an important reference for every CIO-wanna-be.

In this article, 'Competition Gets Extreme', we get a preview of what will be covered in this forecoming book. I quote two relevant paragraphs here for tasters:

"In the future, Fingar sees more and more companies emulating the business model of Dell, where design, manufacturer, assembly and even customer support are all outsourced. Operational connectivity under this model is not just about organizations and individuals being able to talk to each other, but about organizations being able to orchestrate the operations of an ever-expanding web of suppliers. That will be the real significance of BPM into the future, Fingar says, and that is why CIOs will inevitably morph into CPOs.

The first thing I would say is that a lot of people who are CIOs today came up through the technical route: they might be Java people at heart. Well, if you want to stay being a Java architect, do what David Chappell suggests: move to Bangalore, because that's where your job is. On the other hand, if you want to do what companies need you to do and work where the budgets are going to grow, you had better get directly involved with process. We've got plenty of applications. You know, we've been doing that for the last 50 years."

So CPO, anyone?