Bad Behavior: Why CIOs Don’t Get Along With The Rest Of The Business

February 3rd, 2010
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A CIOs Personality Often Rubs Other Departments The Wrong Way

A CIOs Personality Often Rubs Other Departments The Wrong Way

Forget the whole alignment thing, is it possible that a CIO’s behavior is the root of the problem that the IT side of the house and the business side of the house have never been able to get along? Could it be that this is the secret as to why there has always been such a gap between these groups?

What Drives CIOs?

You may not be a CIO just yet, but I’m willing to bet that you share all of the bad personality characteristics that your CIO has. Perhaps if we take a moment and uncover just what is holding the IT department back from being all that it can be, we’ll also be able to uncover a way to solve this problem.

IT by its very nature likes to focus on things like technology and processes. However, it’s that “people dimension” that turns out to really be the most important thing. It’s how people interact that either allows IT and the business to align – or keeps them apart.

Studies of CIOs have revealed that they have two personality characteristics that help them be good CIOs, but which are probably dooming their ability to interact well with other departments. Wonder if you share these traits?

What Makes A CIO Good & Bad At The Same Time

A recent personality study of more than 500 CIOs, managers, and IT staffers have uncovered two personality traits that appear to be crucial to doing well in IT while impeding interactions with other departments.

The first of these personality traits is the need to do things right and to do them perfectly. I’m sure that we can all agree that we share this characteristic in some manner. When the CIO has this personality “feature” , it has a habit of being adopted by the entire IT department.

The problem with this trait is that it means that IT can be very slow to change how it does business. CIOs won’t want to make changes until they can be assured that the change has been tested and that it will work correctly in every situation. Needless to say, if the rest of the company is dynamically changing in order to adapt to the market, then IT will come to be seen as a drag on the rest of the company.

The other trait that CIOs share is a deep set need to do things correctly and to find ways to continuously improve what they are doing. We’ve all seen both of these characteristics show up in countless internal IT improvement programs. This is something that can help an IT department get more done, but it’s going to hinder working with other parts of the business.

The problem with this trait is that when other departments show up and ask the CIO to do something quickly or to do a job only partially in order to quickly react to a changing market situation, CIOs often balk.

When the rest of the company encounters resistance to their requests from the CIO, they are not pleased. This kind of internal roadblock is dealt with by the rest of the business by either complaining to the CEO that IT is not being responsive or else (and we’ll all seen this before) the business ends up going around the IT department in order to solve their problem.

How To Fix These Personality Flaws

These personality flaws are a challenge for any CIO to deal with and will remain that way when you become CIO. The issue is that you need to have these personality features when you are performing IT functions, but you need to find a way to deal with them when you are interacting with people from other departments.

Knowing that these two personality traits are a hindrance to aligning the IT department with the rest of the business is the first step in finding a solution to this problem. The next step is to realize that you need to consciously work to “turn them off” when you are working with other departments. This can be done by forcing yourself to step into their shoes and working to see the world the way that they do, not how IT sees it. Not easy, but doable.

What All This Means For You

When you become CIO, there probably still won’t be true alignment between the IT department and the rest of the business. This means that it will fall on your shoulders to finally solve this problem.

Knowing that one of the root causes of this problem lies in the very personality traits that will make you a good CIO is the first step in finding a way to deal with this issue. Your focus then needs to be on finding ways to turn these traits on when you are dealing with IT issues and off when you are dealing with business issues.

You may feel as though this will require you to become sorta of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde type of CIO. Perhaps this is true, but if it allows alignment to happen then go ahead and drink the potion…!

Do you think that you already have these two personality characteristics that could make it difficult to get along with the rest of the business?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you become CIO, vendors will enter your life and they just won’t leave. What this means is that they’ll be a constant pain in your neck, always wanting your time and attention. However, on the flip side, they will be a valuable resource that can provide you and your team with information and guidance that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Don’t do what too many new CIOs do and stop talking with vendors after the deal is signed…

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Posted in alignment | 3 Comments »

Is It Time To Say Goodbye To The CIO?

January 27th, 2010
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Do You Really Know What Position You Ultimately Want To Get Promoted To?

Do You Really Know What Position You Ultimately Want To Get Promoted To?

So you want to be a CIO someday. Great. However, there may be a bit of a problem with your goal — the position of CIO may be going away. In fact, in about 10 years or so (is that when you are planning on seizing the reigns of IT control?) the position may look completely different from how it looks today. Hmm, a moving target. Maybe we should talk with some current CIOs to find out just what’s going on here…

Do CIOs Still Need To Have Business Skills?

Over at CIO Insight magazine they just got done doing their annual survey of CIOs. The results were, to say the least, eye-opening. The answer to the most asked question about the need for CIOs to have business skills is still a definite YES.

Current CIOs report that they are acting as much as business leaders as technology leaders. The days in which a CIO could lost himself / herself in the world of IT and be left alone appear to be long gone.

There is a bit of a double standard going one here however. CIOs are reporting that although they are being asked to implement programs that will result in fundamental business improvements, the position of CIO is still being pushed back to the second tier of senior management.

What Skills Do CIOs Need To Have Today?

With all of this talk of business skills, won’t CIOs need to have solid technical knowledge going forward? The answer appears to be yes, but. CIOs are saying that the job skills that they use most include finance, business process modeling, written and spoken communications, and just a bit of sales and marketing skills. I sure didn’t see servers, bandwidth, application security, or API knowledge anywhere on that list.

In fact, CIOs are reporting that the folks who are currently getting hired into IT positions have, can you believe it, even less business knowledge than people did just two years ago. This is quickly going to cause a problem: there are going to be very few qualified candidates to become CIO over the next few years. Can anyone say “opportunity”?

Skills That CIO-Wanna Bes Need To Be Working On

You might be asking yourself, so what skills do I need to be working on to take advantage of the need for business savvy CIO candidates that will be coming in the future?

The list is actually fairly short. To start with, you need to have very good public speaking skills and the leadership skills that will be required to implement what you talk about. A detailed understanding of the business that you are working for (like how they REALLY make their money) and a solid understanding of corporate finance.

There is, of course, more to this list. Once you’ve mastered the basics, then you’ll have to keep adding skills. Today’s CIOs report that you’ll also need to know how to master the strategic use of information, how to lead enterprise-wide changes, perform business model innovation, and improve business processes.

What All Of This Means For You

The report from today’s CIOs is not all good. It sure looks like CIOs are currently being treated as second-class citizens in the C-suite. However, as we all know, IT is not going away and it sure is not getting any less important. I’m thinking that CIOs are actually going to become more important over time.

CIOs are reporting that although business skills are becoming an even more important part of the set of tools that a CIO needs to have, fewer and fewer IT hires are coming with these skills. Clearly this is opening the door for those who dream of someday becoming the CIO.

Although it looks like you might have a shot at the top spot, it’s not going to be handed to you. You’re going to have to work at it. We’ve laid out the skills that you need to develop. Not go out there and get ready for the day that they call your name to become the firm’s next CIO…!

Do you think that the position of CIO will still exist in 10 years?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Forget the whole alignment thing, is it possible that a CIO’s behavior is the root of the problem that the IT side of the house and the business side of the house have never been able to get along? Could it be that this is the secret as to why there has always been such a gap between these groups?

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Posted in career | 5 Comments »

Five Words That Scare A CIO: I’ll See You In Court!

January 20th, 2010
Image CreditNo CIO Wants To Have To Face Judge Judy

No CIO Wants To Have To Face Judge Judy

When you become CIO, you’ll probably have all of the technical skills that you need to stay on top of today’s cutting edge IT issues such as storage, bandwidth, cloud computing, etc. In fact, I’d guess that you’ve gotten the message and you will have developed your management talents so that you will be well positioned to align the IT department with the rest of the business. However, there is one thing that you may have forgotten to get: a law degree…

Why Discovery Is A Bad Word In IT

For anyone who has not had to live though a legal discovery process, thank your lucky stars! What we’re talking about here are the steps that a company has to go through when they find themselves involved in a lawsuit. Before the case even goes to trial, there is the discovery process.

Take a typical example: someone sues the firm and says that they’ve been harassed while working there. The first step that their lawyer will take will be to serve the company with a legal notice to produce all of the messages that flowed over the company’s network that contained the person’s name or email address. This, of course, includes any nicknames that the person might have been referred to by or even any derogatory names.

Can you imagine what kind of effort that kind of search would take in most companies? Sure there might be some centralized email servers, but you also have to check all of the IM chats and all documents just in case there might be something in them. Now you should be getting a feeling for the scope of work that we’re talking about.

Four Steps A CIO Can Take To Get Ready For Discovery

In any modern company, you can expect to eventually get sued and be required to go through some sort of discovery process. As CIO, your job will be to prepare the company for this eventually before it happens. This means that you are going to have to take the following steps:

  1. Create a Data Map: Sorry about this — it’s a manual process in which you take the time to locate the critical data that your company uses and then dive even deeper and understand how it is used. This will help you to understand where your most important documents are and just exactly what applications were used to create those documents.
  2. Create Clear Data-Retention Policies: you don’t have to discover what you don’t have; however, you had better have a good story for why you don’t have it. This policy has to be all encompassing: it must cover both paper and electronic. It also has to lay out the processes for storing, organizing, and destroying it.
  3. It’s All About The Workflow: …and you need to understand it. In any company, work gets done at a variety of different levels including at the department level as well as at the enterprise level. How work gets done will play a key role in how you can uncover the documents that you are looking for during a discovery.
  4. Electronic Documents Are Not All The Same: we’re not talking about a bunch of PDF files here. Lots of electronic documents that need to be searched and perhaps included in the discovery package may be in specialized forms: CAD drawings, Microsoft Project files, etc. Just finding the data is not enough, you need to print out a document with the right information that can be included in the discovery.

What All Of This Means For You

As CIO you will need to be simultaneously moving the company forward as well as protecting your backside. A single lawsuit against your company can require countless hours of work in order to locate the required documents not to mention the costs involved.

The only way to prevent this from becoming a black mark on your CIO resume will be to prepare for it before it happens. By no means will this be an easy task to do, but it can be well worth the effort.

Nobody ever said that being the CIO was going to be easy, preparing your firm to deal with a legal discovery is one way you can at least make the job look easy!

Do you think that the CIO should be responsible for producing legal discovery documents or is this someone else’s job?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So you want to be a CIO someday. Great. However, there may be a bit of a problem with your goal — the position of CIO may be going away. Maybe we should talk with some current CIOs to find out just what’s going on here…

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6 Reasons That IT / Business Alignment May Be Impossible To Do

January 13th, 2010

A quick quiz for you: what has been the #1 task on every CIO’s to-do list for the better part of the past 20 years? If you guessed “aligning IT with the rest of the business” then you are correct. This has been an IT goal for the past 20 years? What’s up with that? When you become CIO what are you going to do to solve this problem. Can it even be solved?

It’s All About Communication

Why has something that sounds so simple when we talk about it been so hard for CIOs to do? Tony Kontzer over at CIO Insight has taken a look at what’s been holding CIOs back and he’s come up with one answer: communication.

I’m pretty sure that we all know where this one is going. The non-IT business folks like to spend their time talking in business terms and we over on the IT side of the house seem to be only able to communicate using IT jargon. The results of this inability to communicate can be disastrous.

The Tower Of Babel — IT Style

When the business side of the house and the IT side of the house find it hard to communicate, what happens is that they simply stop communicating. When this happens, each side goes off and starts to do its own thing.

I can’t tell you how many firms that I’ve worked for where I’ve seen this happen. When communication breaks down between IT and the rest of the business is when you start to see the multiplying factor start to show up: multiple email systems, multiple ERP applications, etc.

From a CIO perspective, this is the worst thing in the world that can happen. The reason is that every IT system that gets added to the company means that there is one more system that needs to supported forever and that boosts the cost of having the IT department do work that does nothing to help the company’s bottom line.

The Big 6

When you become CIO, how will you be able to measure how well the IT department and the rest of the company are doing in trying to align themselves? Well, you’ll have to fall back on what everyone in IT loves the most: metrics. The trick is knowing what needs to be measured. Here are the top six alignment metrics as recommended by the Society for Information Management (SIM):

  1. Communication Channels: Have effective communications channels been established between the IT department and the other departments in the firm? Are these channels being used?
  2. Metrics: are metrics in place and are they being measured in order to determine where the firm stands in it’s efforts to align how the business processes operate and what the IT department spends its time working on?
  3. Governance: are there processes in place that will ensure that what IT works on lines up with what the company’s true business needs are?
  4. Partnership: is there a partnership between IT and the rest of the departments where each is taking actions to make the other more successful?
  5. HR: does the HR department understand what the company is trying to align and are they taking action to attract and retain the talent that will be needed to make this happen?
  6. Technology: are the right tools in place and available to be used in order to drive the changes that will be needed to transform how business is done once the alignment has occurred?

What All Of This Means To You

For way too long CIOs have been looking for ways to try to align what IT does with what the rest of the business needs. So far they have not been successful.

The primary stumbling block has been the simple fact that there exists an enormous two-way communications gap between the IT department and the rest of the firm. IT communicates using technical terms that nobody else knows about while the rest of the firm communicates using business terms that make no sense to the IT staff.

A first step in finally bridging this gap is to implement the six alignment process metrics that we’ve identified. When you become CIO these will provide you with a way to measure your progress in finally getting the IT department to become a meaningful part of the firm. Nobody ever said that this was going to be easy, but at least now you have a plan for how you can accomplish the impossible.

What do you think is the biggest barrier stopping the IT department from working more effectively with the rest of the company?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you become CIO, you’ll probably have all of the technical skills that you need to stay on top of today’s cutting edge IT issues such as storage, bandwidth, cloud computing, etc.  However, there is one thing that you may have forgotten to get: a law degree…

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Let’s Virtualize Everything! (Including Your Databases?)

January 6th, 2010
Image CreditAfter You've Virtualized The Servers, Why Not Virtualize The Databases Too?

After You

The next time that you are at one of those cocktail parties that they throw for up-and-coming IT staffers who will someday become the CIO (you go to those don’t you?), do me a favor and listen very closely. I suspect that you’ll overhear a number of pretentious CIO-wannabes throwing around the phrase “virtualization”. Don’t worry about these showoffs, I’ve got something bigger and better for you to throw out there: database virtualization.

Have You Caught Vitalization Fever?

Maybe it would be helpful if we took a step back for just a moment and had a quick look at the virtualization landscape. A few years back, IT departments were running into a real estate problem: too many servers, not enough data center room. Any technical problem calls out for a technical solution and this one was solved by a company called VMware.

What VMware (now owned by EMC) did was to create a piece of software that sat between the operating system and the computer hardware. This software allowed multiple (different) operating systems to run on a single server without impacting each other. Ta-da! All of a sudden a mail server and a web server which were on different boxes could now be on a single box. Problem solved!

All of this server virtualization success has led IT folks to start thinking about what else they could virtualize. Right now everyone is thinking about virtualizing the desktop — great for call centers and large enterprises where keeping everything patched and up-to-date is a full-time job for many. This hasn’t hit big time just yet; however, wait a bit and it just may take off.

What nobody is really talking about yet is what will probably be the next really big thing in virtualization: making your databases virtual.

What Is A Virtual Database?

In a nutshell, when you virtualize a database you take the rows and columns of data are currently living in one of your multiple databases and you allow them to be more fluid. They are no long bound to living on a given server, now they can reside almost anywhere.

Why would you even dream of tampering with your company’s crown jewels like this? It turns out that there are three main drivers for considering taking your databases virtual: easier management, higher availability, and better performance.

One key point here: if you are currently using DB2 or SQL Server or some mainstream database, you get to keep using it. Additional software is added to the back end so that you can use a shared-nothing cluster of commodity servers.

The way that we build database systems today is to create a single-purpose system that has an active and a passive side. In essence, we only use 50% of our investment. In a database virtualization deployment all database servers are active at the same time.

You might think that this would require you to purchase additional database licenses. It turns out that you’d be wrong. Database virtualization allows you to decouple the database from the data and from having the data reside on a specific server.

What All Of This Means For You

As CIO you will be under constant pressure to reduce your operating costs. One of the biggest drains on your budget will be supporting all of the databases that your firm uses. Industry reports say that many firms have upwards of 15,000 separate databases that they are using. Additionally, more than 30% of the data in these databases is duplicated because databases can’t talk to each other.

The arrival of database virtualization will provide you with an option. This option will allow you to boost your database performance, reduce your risk of an outage, and reduce your overall IT costs. Sure sounds like database virtualization is something that you should look into.

Two companies that are active in this space are: Xkoto and Xeround.

Do you think the benefits are great enough to risk virtualizing your company’s databases?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

A quick quiz for you: what has been the #1 task on every CIO’s to-do list for the better part of the past 20 years? If you guessed “aligning IT with the rest of the business” then you are correct. This has been an IT goal for the past 20 years? What’s up with that? When you become CIO what are you going to do to solve this problem. Can it even be solved?

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