Global CIO: Why CEOs Must Tie CIO Pay To Customers And GrowthGlobal CIO: Why CEOs Must Tie CIO Pay To Customers And Growth

Isn't that the precise priority IT vendors and partners should have: "the impact that had on your customers"? If not, then the "supply chain" concept Harte described would have weak or missing links, and the entire effort is compromised and the transformational opportunity is diluted at best or lost at worst.

Conversely, Harte and Commbank aren't compromising on anything as they work to remake their culture—not to mention their compensation models—to try to prevent another June 30-type disaster from happening. For example, the most likely cause of the June 30 outage is a malicious denial-of-service attack. So Harte and others could have made the case that the outage wasn't their fault, that it was a malicious attack, that there was nothing they could do about it—and, therefore, they shouldn't suffer any compensation penalty because of it.

But they didn't. Instead, their focus transcended the technical details and went right to the single overriding question of the quality of customer experience: were customers adversely affected? The answer was unequivocally yes. So the pay-penalties had to kick in, no matter what the ultimate technical cause turned out to be.

That might seem harsh now, but it's exactly the type of disciplined approach that will allow Commbank to build the momentum it needs toward having an IT organization that's focused on customer excellence via technology execution, rather than on the often-misguided technical details buried deep inside SLAs that have little or nothing to do with customer experience.

CIOs who push back on this idea by saying that, hey, I didn't sign on to be judged by what happens to customers are are positioning themselves as old-school, detached, back-office cost centers. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but show me how it's not true: today's 21st century global economy does not offer much slack for companies to carve out big chunks of their budgets for inflexible, inward-looking, customer-avoiding back-office operations and executives.

Instead, those types of groups or teams are getting tossed overboard in favor of outsourcers or other alternative models that provide more flexibility. And as more and more of those IT partners begin to take on customer accountability along the lines of what Commbank has set up with its strategic vendors, there will be less and less cover for CIOs and IT organizations that are unwilling to hitch their evaluations and their compensations to customer experiences.

So CIOs should get out in front of this inevitable trend and initiate conversations with their CEOs to recalibrate compensation packages across the IT organization around business results and customer engagement and happiness. The old way of doing things is rapidly and permanently disappearing, and today is a great day for CIOs to seize the initiative in moving significantly higher up the business-value chain.