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The 5 Secret Characteristics Of A Truly Great CIO

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
Image CreditThere Are Leadership Qualities That All CIO's Must Have...

There Are Leadership Qualities That All CIO's Must Have...

In all honesty, there are a lot of people who become CIO who really should never have been promoted to that position. There are too many IT folks who are only good at ensuring that company IT resources are properly and efficiently used. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, only that this kind of skill set is not what it takes to be a really good CIO. Do you know what it takes to be a good CIO?

Direction

When we start to think about what kind of qualities that a CIO needs to have in order to do his or her job correctly, hopefully the quality of being able to generate and communicate a clear sense of direction to others is one of the first ones that comes to mind.

Businesses never stand still – either they are moving forward or they are falling behind. A CIO does not lead the business, that’s the CEO’s job, but the CIO is responsible for showing the IT department the way that they are going to move forward. This involves creating two important things: goals and a vision.

Inspiration

Just knowing where you want the IT department to go to is not enough. As CIO you are also going to have to be able to get everyone in the department to get off their behinds and start to move in the correct direction.

It turns out that everyone is already moving, it’s just that they are moving in a whole bunch of different directions. A CIO that is able to inspire an IT department will be able to get everyone to line up and work towards making progress in the same direction.

Team Building

A great CIO realizes that although some people can be fantastic individual contributors, that’s not enough for an IT department to be successful. What is needed is for people to stop working by themselves and for them to start working as a team.

Although this may sound rather intuitive, it turns out that it runs counter to what most IT workers want to do. We all want to be recognized for our individual accomplishments and when you are working as part of a team, this can be much harder to do.

A great CIO has the ability to make people want to work as a part of a team because they realize that that is the only way that big challenges can be met. A great CIO will take the time to acknowledge the accomplishments of a team, but at the same time he / she has the ability to look within the team and understand who contributed what to the outcome.

Lead By Example

All too often, what the CIO says is not what he / she ends up doing. If the CIO is still throwing lavish brainstorming sessions for upper management when budgets get tight, then this will not go unnoticed.

A CIO who physically shows up when a big cut-over is being performed, or works a weekend when the rest of the team is struggling to meet a big deadline will earn the respect of the department.

Acceptance

Great CIOs realize that they have been appointed to manage the IT department by a higher authority, but they are not truly a leader until their people accept them as such. This is the kind of acceptance that can’t be commanded, it has to be earned.

In the case of a CIO, it will be a combination of things that cause a department to accept their leadership. Specifically, their staff will be looking for proof that the CIO is up to the job. It will depend on the CIO’s performance during a few fire drills, a demonstration of how the CIO handles a situation in which he / she has clearly made a mistake – do they admit it or do they blame someone else, and finally it will take time.

What All Of This Means To You

Potentially anyone can become a CIO. Only a very few of us can become a great CIO. The difference between the two types of CIOs comes down to one word – leadership.

We all like to talk about just what it takes to be a great leader, but what we all too often forget is that it’s not just about the CIO, but rather about the IT staff – is this a person that they want to be lead by?

A great CIO can be clearly recognized by five distinct characteristics: the ability to provide clear direction, the ability to inspire, the ability to build successful teams, commitment, and finally, being accepted as the leader by the rest of the IT department. Now you know what you have to do, go out and do it.

What do you think the most important characteristic of a great CIO is?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

You know that database that your company relies on? No, not that one, the other one that is really, really important? Yep, that one – it’s going away, are you ready? It turns out that the databases that we’re using today were not designed for what we are asking them to do. All sorts of things like trying to deal with lots and lots of unstructured data is killing them. Looks like it’s time to go find yourself a new database. Are you ready?

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Posted in leadership | 4 Comments »

It Turns Out That CIOs Really Work In Sales

Monday, November 2nd, 2009
Image Credit The CIO Is Actually A Key Part Of The Sales Department...

The CIO Is Actually A Key Part Of The Sales Department...

It turns out that a company’s #1 salesperson is their CIO. They may not go on sales calls, have an assigned quota, or even be up-to-date on the company’s latest product pricing plans, but at the end of the day the CIO is the one who drives (or drives away) the most sales.

Why Software Can Kill A Sale

In our modern times, almost every company has a fancy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application that they use to keep track of who their customers are and what they’ve either sold to them or promised to them. You might be thinking that when you become CIO your only obligation to the sales team will be to keep the CRM application up and running. Turns out you’d be wrong.

Life has changed a great deal over the last few years and the relationship between IT and a company’s sales teams has changed right along with it. This has been necessary because in today’s global economy a company’s customers want to be involved in the creation of your products. Your CRM software is going to be standing in the way of this.

What’s Wrong With The CRM Software That You Are Using

Customers are shrinking the number of vendors that they are willing to do business with in order to make their supply chains more efficient. This means that they are going to want to be able to work with your company in order to see their product suggestion ideas start to show up in your products. In a nutshell, they want you to change to better meet their needs.

Your CRM software is not only not going to be able to do this, but it’s actually going to be standing in your way once you are the CIO. At its core, your CRM software is an internal application that is designed to do one thing and do it well: it helps your salespeople to track their customers and it allows sales managers to track their salespeople. Note the absence of customers in all of this.

CRM software does a great job of managing your internal sales systems. However what you are going to need as CIO is a way to manage your customer relationships – the dialogue that is going on outside of your company’s walls.

All Of Those Other Customer Conversations That Need To Be Managed

The reason that this is now part of what a CIO has to do is because the way that the company’s sales teams interact with their customers is now very heavily dependent on the IT department. Let me count the ways:

  • Social Networking: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, you name it and Sales is probably using it to reach out and connect with their customers.
  • Wikis: Gone are the days of static product documentation, say hello to dynamic documents that can be updated by customers based on their own experience with your product.
  • Product / Customer Portals: who wants to search through a company web site to find the information about just the products that they have bought? The era of customized portals that eliminate the clutter and just provide the information that a customer really wants has arrived.
  • Teleconferencing: sure voice calls were nice, but now we’ve got web-cams and shared whiteboarding tools that turn a dry short meeting into a dynamic interactive session.
  • Co-Design Tools: the old way of designing a new product or service and then taking it to the customer is out the door. Now customers can participate in the design process and what is produced is right the first time.

What All Of This Means For You

All too often CIOs see the Sales department as not being part of the company’s IT infrastructure. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. A much better way to look at things is to think of the CIO as being a key part of the company’s sales team.

When you become CIO you are going to be (partially) responsible for the success of the sales team. One of your most critical tasks will be to find ways to use the company’s IT resources to help the sales teams develop deeper and better relationships with their customers.

The old way of just making sure that the company’s CRM system is up and running will no longer cut it. You are going to have to do some homework and find out the multiple different ways that your salespeople are connecting with their customers. Once you know this, you’ll be better positioned to leverage your IT department to help them become selling machines.

Do you think that it is even possible for a CIO to mange all the ways that Sales will want to interact with their customers?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In all honesty, there are a lot of people who become CIO who really should never have been promoted to that position. There are too many IT folks who are only good at ensuring that company IT resources are properly and efficiently used. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, only that this kind of skill set is not what it takes to be a really good CIO. Do you know what it takes to be a good CIO?

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Posted in sales | 1 Comment »

Pay Up!: How CIOs Get Departments To Pay For Their Share Of IT

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
Image Credit 1-800-Flowers Found A Way To Make Everyone Pay

1-800-Flowers Found A Way To Make Everyone Pay

Everybody wants their IT services for free. When you become the CIO, you’ve got to find an answer to the ugly question of just who’s going to pay you for all of those fancy IT services that your department can provide.

Sometimes there’s a single IT budget for the entire company that everyone draws from. But who gets what? Does everyone get the same amount? Do successful departments get more IT services than other departments? If they don’t, then will they start to set up their own IT department? Looks like another problem that you’re going to have to solve when you are the CIO…

Budget, Budget, Who’s Got The IT Budget?

In most of the civilized world clean drinking water is freely available all the time. Since it’s always available and we don’t really pay very much for it, we use it like there is no tomorrow.

Who cares about leaky faucets? Run the yard sprinklers, fill the pool, etc. – there’s really no cost to being wasteful with the stuff. This is all fine and good until something happens. When there is a sudden scarcity of water, all of a sudden we become much more aware of just how valuable it is.

I live in Florida and when a hurricane (or the threat of one) looms, bottled water is what everyone starts to stock up on. We can go without electricity for days, but not water.

The services provided by IT are the same way – if nobody has to pay for the helpdesk, or the onsite support, or the printer paper, then we all use them like they were free – which they basically are. As a CIO you’ve got a money problem. The internal customers that you serve are going to want you to do more and more for them while at the same time they are going to expect to not have to pay for any of it. Sounds like you’ve got a problem on your hands.

Flower Power

Tim Moran has taken a look at how the company 1-800-Flowers.com has dealt with this very problem. In the case of 1-800-Flowers, they had created a problem by buying other companies who came along with their own IT departments. They centralized the IT services; however, they were left with 14 separate brands and businesses.

Each of these separate businesses uses IT services; however, they didn’t have to pay for them – the IT funding came out of a central budget. This meant that everyone felt free to request as many laptops, Blackberrys, and cell phones as their little hearts desired because they were all, effectively, free to them. You can imagine the CIO headaches that this was causing – there was no financial IT alignment.

Pay To Play Saves The Day

There is a lot of talk about how CIOs need to find ways to innovate within their departments. Over at 1-800-Flowers CIO Steve Bozzo showed some innovation when he decided to solve this problem by starting to charge each of the company’s brands for the IT services that they were using.

It turns out that this isn’t really all that hard to do. There are plenty of good software programs out there that allow you to do this type of item-by-item billing using the Internet to provide online access to the bills. The real challenge is loading all of the data into the system in the first place.

There will be tricky decisions in many areas. Where servers are being used to support applications that are used by multiple departments you are going to have to find ways to divide up the expenses between all parties involved. Bozzo went about transitioning to this new way of doing business in a clever fashion.

Once the internal billing system was set up, he immediately started sending the business heads so-called “mock bills” that showed them what their IT bill would have been if the chargeback process was actually being used. This, of course, caused some shocked business executives to have some hasty discussions with IT.

The new IT billing system went “live” at the start of 1-800-Flowers new fiscal year. Having seen the mock bills and having had time to reduce their IT expenses somewhat allowed each of the business units to request the proper funding for their portion of the annual IT budget. No solution is perfect, but this approach allowed 1-800-Flowers to get a handle on their IT spending.

What This All Means For You

1-800-Flowers is now able to allocate every dollar in their IT budget to a business unit. This includes their entire infrastructure management from servers, security, voice services, to network services.

What this has allowed the company to do is to finally get true insight into just exactly where all of the money that they are spending on IT is going. Although it may not be in your CIO job description, when you become CIO providing this kind of transparency into your IT budget would be a good idea.

Once you are able to convince your firm’s senior management that you are indeed spending wisely the money that they’ve allocated to you, then they’ll be more likely to provide you with additional funding to work on those new projects that you really want to work on.

Do you think that there is any downside to providing so much insight into where the IT dollars are going?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It turns out that a company’s #1 salesperson is their CIO. They may not go on sales calls, have an assigned quota, or even be up-to-date on the company’s latest product pricing plans, but at the end of the day the CIO is the one who drives (or drives away) the most sales.

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Posted in finance | 2 Comments »

The Machines May Be Virtual, But The Security Problem Is Real

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Photo CreditVirtual Machines Pose Real Security Threats

Virtual Machines Pose Real Security Threats

When you become CIO, you already know that IT security is going to be one of your biggest and least rewarding challenges. If you do a great job at it, then nobody will ever know and you’ll get no credit for it. If you do a poor job, then everyone will know and you’ll get all the blame. That just goes with the CIO job.

In the future, CIOs are going to have a whole new set of security issues that come along with the popularity of virtual machines. The rules for how best to secure these boxes that really aren’t boxes have not been established yet. What can you do to make yourself ready to take on this new challenge?

Just What Is A Virtual Machine?

Before we dive in and start talking about security, let’s make sure that we’re all onboard when it comes to just exactly what a virtual machine is. Awhile back, some very smart folks (a lot of who happened to work at a company called Vmware) realized that most companies were deploying one application per server in their data centers. One for email, one for web hosting, etc.

It turns out that as servers got more powerful, this was incredibly ineffective – most of the server’s processing power was not being used. The smart people created what they called a virtual machine (or VM) – software that sat on the server between the actual server hardware and the operating system that was running on the server. You can sorta think of it as a lower level operating system

Once this VM was in place, they discovered that they could run multiple operating systems (and then of course multiple applications on top of those operating systems) on each individual server. When they did this everything was isolated – if one operating system crashed, it didn’t interfere with the other operating systems / applications running on the same box.

As you can well imagine, this has turned out to be an incredibly popular way to reduce the number of servers that have to be deployed and maintained within a data center. However, it has also opened the door to some nasty security problems…

The Problem With Virtualization Security

Oh sure, you THINK that you know how to secure a data center – lock down all of the network ports going in and out, and then take steps to make sure that you know which staff are allowed to enter and leave. Oh oh, when your servers stop being real physical boxes and start to become virtual images, now you’ve going to have a whole new set of problems to deal with.

Cameron Sturdevant has been looking into just how we can go about securing the brave new future of virtual machines and he’s uncovered ten new issues that you are going to have to be able to deal with:

  1. Moving Too Fast: since virtual machines can be set up and put into operation much quicker than a real server can, you’re going to have to set up some sort of review process in order to keep things under control.
  2. Redefine Your Boundaries: it used to be simple to be able to keep the important things inside the data center and the threats outside when everything needed a physical box. Now that things are going virtual, these boundaries are getting more murky and you will have to spend the time to redraw them.
  3. Killed By Quantity: since it’s so easy to set up a new virtual machine, you’re going to be facing an explosion of them. This means that you’re going to have to establish a policy to determine when a new virtual machine needs to be deployed and when it needs to be turned off.
  4. Moving Day Is Everyday: since virtual machines can easily move from box to box, you’re going to have to lay down the law in order to make sure that the new server has the appropriate security policies in place in order to support the applications that will be running on it.
  5. Not The Same As The Old Boss: both the tools and the policies that used to work in the world of “real” servers won’t necessarily work in the new world of virtual servers. You’re going to have to find / make new ones.
  6. Virtual Tools: in order to police your virtual machines, you are going to want your security tools to run on virtual machines also – makes sense, doesn’t it?
  7. Cutting Costs: how many CPU cycles your virtual security tools take up will be a huge deal very quickly. The rule of thumb is for them to take less than 2-3% of the CPU’s cycles.
  8. Policy Update Time: not only will you need fancy new tools, but you are also going to need to update your staff on just how one goes about securing virtual boxes. Can you say special training?
  9. Where To Focus?: the experts suggest that you spend your time securing both the virtual machine and its applications and don’t worry so much about the underlying virtual machines. The thinking is that virtual machines are by design isolated from everything else so they are more secure.
  10. Get Some Relief: look for virtual machine management tools that will allow your staff to automate the processes of configuring and deploying virtual machines as much as possible in order to minimize security slipups.

Final Thoughts

Like it or not, when you become CIO you’re going to be living in a virtual world. All of the clever security tools and policies that we’ve created in an attempt to secure the world of physical servers that we now live in are not going to work in the future.

Your challenge will be to find ways to secure the virtual data center while at the same time keeping your IT staff’s workload at a manageable level. The good news is that this can be done, the bad news is that you’re going to be in uncharted territory. Good luck future CIO…!

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Everybody wants their IT services for free. When you become the CIO, you’ve got to find an answer to the ugly question of just who’s going to pay you for all of those fancy IT services that your department can provide.

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Posted in security | No Comments »

Message From The CIO: Send More Women!

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
Photo CreditCIOs Know That IT Departments Need More Women To Be Successful

CIOs Know That IT Departments Need More Women To Be Successful

Ok all you CIOs wannabes, guess what one of your first problems is going to be once you assume control of the IT department? No, not that innovation thing. Nor will it be finding new ways to cut costs. Somewhat amazingly considering that we are living in the enlightened 21st Century — you will need to find more women.

Your gender doesn’t matter to me – when you are CIO you’re going to have the same staffing problem no matter which restroom you currently use. A bunch of researchers (LeAnne Coder, et. al.) have taken a look at the number of women working in IT and frankly, it’s not looking good (or hadn’t you noticed?). Way back in 1983 women made up 43% of the IT workforce. Since then the number of folks working in IT has doubled, but the number of women in the field has fallen to 26%. Hey CIO, you’ve got a problem!

Why Is This An Issue?

Remember that diversity thing that everyone is always harping about? When you have an IT department that is made up of primarily men, you’ve failed on the diversity front.

IT problems require creative thinking in order to be solved. This creativity stems from having IT professionals on your staff who come from different backgrounds and who have a wide range of experiences. This won’t happen nearly often enough if you just have a bunch of guys working in your department. CIOs need more women.

Where Did All Of The Women Go?

This lack of women in IT issue is not new – it’s been a problem almost since the start of the profession. However, it’s reaching a critical point now and when you become CIO you’re going to have to find a way to solve it. However, before you can do that, you’re going to have to understand why we have a problem in the first place.

It turns out that not all jobs are created equal. For that matter, not all workers have equal interests in what kind of jobs that they want to do. A clever psychological test called the Strong Interest Inventory (SII) has revealed that there are six types of job personalities out there:

  • Realistic: likes working with tools or machines in an explicit or ordered way
  • Investigative: requires creative investigation of issues
  • Artistic: ambiguous, free, non-systematic manipulation of materials to create art or products
  • Social: likes jobs that require you to lead or interact with others
  • Enterprising: wants to work with others to achieve specific business goals
  • Conventional: does explicit, ordered manipulation of data

People choose a career field that best matches their type of job personality. Guess what? Most of today’s IT workers (men) seek Realistic and Investigative types of jobs – the majority of women seem to seek all of the other types.

What Are You Going To Do In Order To Fix This Problem?

When you become CIO you are going to have to find a way to solve this understaffing of women in IT problem. Just having a more booths at job fairs or telling your HR staff to “hire more women” is not going to solve the problem.

At the heart of this problem is the simple fact that most IT jobs are not attractive to most women. This means that no matter how hard you try, you’re not going to be able to get enough qualified women candidates (unless there’s a global recession and even then they won’t stick around once things get better).

As CIO there are two things that you are going to have to do in order find a solution: advertising and redefining. The outside world has little if any understanding of just what IT professionals do – we work in a world of mystery. You’ve got to get the word out and make sure that everyone in the company knows just what an IT job consists of.

Studies have shown that the majority of women working in IT today “fell” into the profession – they were working in a different career and accidentally discovered that they had the talents and interest to work in IT. This means that by telling other working women about IT jobs, you’ve got a good chance that you’ll be able to attract them to come work for you – no more having to rely on college career fairs to attract women candidates.

Finally, you’re going to need to redefine the existing jobs in your IT department in order to make them more attractive to women. This will go a long way in attracting more of them. Adding artistic or social characteristics to an otherwise realistic / investigative IT job would open it up to a more diverse set of potential women candidates.

Final Thoughts

The lack of women in IT is not a problem that just showed up overnight and so it’s not going to go away tomorrow. However, when you become CIO this is an issue that you’re going to have to tackle.

Lifting the veil of secrecy that currently surrounds what an IT job consists of to the rest of the company is a great first step. Following this up by recasting the IT jobs in your department to include characteristics that will make them more attractive to women is the necessary next step. Not only can you solve this problem, as the CIO you must solve it.

Does anyone else in your company have a good idea just what goes on in the IT department?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In the future, CIOs are going to have a whole new set of security issues that come along with the popularity of virtual machines. The rules for how best to secure these boxes that really aren’t boxes have not been established yet. What can you do to make yourself ready to take on this new challenge?

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Posted in staffing | 2 Comments »

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