Archive for May, 2010

Is Life Easier If You Are A CIO Who Works For The U.S. Government?

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
Image Credit Federal CIOs Have The Same Issues That Everyone Else Has

Federal CIOs Have The Same Issues That Everyone Else Has

You want to become a CIO. You probably want to become a CIO in the private sector – you know, those companies that have owners or stockholders that they always have to work to keep happy. Why haven’t you spent any time thinking about becoming a CIO who works for the biggest employer out there: the U.S. Federal government?

Big Changes Coming

The U.S. Federal government (the one that runs the country, not the states) employs over 300 CIOs that manage all of the different parts of the operation. You would think that federal CIOs would have it easier: I mean they don’t really have to worry about keeping shareholders happy or anything like that, do they?

You need to keep in mind that although a federal CIO doesn’t have to worry about the same things as a private sector CIO, they have a whole bunch of different issues that occupy their time. One big issue is that every four years they may have a completely new boss what with the presidential elections and all that.

As the U.S. experiences the effects of the global recession just like everyone else, federal CIOs are feeling the pressure to show that their IT departments can deliver a solid return on investment (ROI) .

It’s becoming pretty clear that there is a lot of IT funding for the things that you would expect a federal CIO to be working on: things like wireless projects and public safety projects. However, this doesn’t leave a lot left over for all the other things that an IT department is supposed to be working on,

What Are A Federal CIO’s Biggest Priorities?

One of the key ways to tell if being a federal CIO is any different from being a private sector CIO is by taking a look at what’s on their list of projects. Federal CIOs always have to be nimble enough to adjust to a new administration’s priorities which may differ from the last administration’s. This can cause a big change in what the IT department spends their time working on.

Right now the federal CIOs are reporting that the key programs that their departments are working on include:

How Are They Going To Be Successful?

So if you were a federal CIO right now, how would you go about pulling off all of these initiatives while dealing with the tightest budgets in years? As you might be able to guess, there is no one magic answer to this question.

In a survey done by InformationWeek magazine, 21% of federal CIOs said that they were using Lean Six Sigma. 29% reported that they were using ITIL. Even within the military there was no one way to go: the U.S. Army is using Lean Six Sigma while the Navy is planning on using ITIL.

What All Of This Means For You

In your future, there is actually a good chance that you might at some time become a federal CIO – there sure are a lot of them out there. You might have thought that this was an easy route to take – no pressure from owners / shareholders. Think again.

Federal CIOs have to deal with a great deal of upheaval in their upper management structure on a cyclic basis. On top of that even during difficult economic times they need to find ways to push forward on important IT programs that will transform their organizations.

If you do become a federal CIO, I sure hope that you like change. You’ll have your own set of issues to worry about, but at least things won’t be boring!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: Do you think that it would be easier or harder to be a Federal CIO than being a private sector CIO?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I hope that you wore your good clothes to work today, because there’s a pretty fair chance that you might end up on video sometime during the day. The arrival of low-cost video cameras and high quality video processing software has effectively made it ridiculously easy to create multimedia content. This has got to affect what a CIO does, but how?

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What Can A CIO Do To Prevent Fraud?

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
Image Credit The IT Department Is Uniquely Positioned To Uncover Fraud

The IT Department Is Uniquely Positioned To Uncover Fraud

When you become CIO, it turns out that you’re going to have a lot more on your mind than just how to use the latest and greatest technology to help the company run faster. You’ve got a problem that starts with “F” and rhymes with “Baud” and that stands for Fraud…

Bad Times Make Fraud More Likely

When things get tough at a company, people start to feel the pressure to deliver results no matter what. Some recent studies by behavioral psychologists have revealed a trait that all of us have called “reframing” . This occurs when in order to get away with cheating, we adjust the definition of cheating so that it excludes our actions. Neat trick, eh?

What this means for you soon-to-be-CIOs is that just about anyone working for the company is capable of committing fraud. Hard times brought on by, oh say, a global recession, can boost the chances that someone will cross that line that should never be crossed.

The Fraud Triangle

Look, you’re going to become the company’s CIO and unfortunately that’s not going to suddenly equip you with magical mind-reading abilities. Instead you are going to have to be aware of what is called the “fraud triangle” and keep you eyes open both within and without the IT department.

The fraud triangle has (of course) 3 sides to it: pressure, opportunity, and that ability to rationalize your actions that we’ve already talked about. Any one of these by itself probably isn’t enough to push one of your staff to do something that the entire company might regret, but put all three of them together and you’ve got the makings of a serious problem.

3 Categories Of Fraud

So how big is this fraud thing? Well first you need to understand that study after study have shown that people will cheat if they think that they can get away with it. What makes this even more amazing is that they will cheat no matter what their background is (Ivy Leaguers do it too) and they’ll cheat even if they really don’t have all that much to gain by cheating.

This is a big deal for companies. A 2007-2008 survey that was done by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) revealed that companies may be losing up to 7% of their annual revenues due to employee fraud. Now that’s a big number!

There’s lots of ways that IT staff along with the rest of the business can commit fraud. However, if we had to group them together, they’d all fall into one of three different buckets. These groupings are: asset misappropriation, corruption, and financial statement fraud. It turns out that asset misappropriation is the most common and averages roughly $150,000 per event. On the other end of the spectrum, financial statement fraud is the least common but the most expensive – it costs the company $2M on average every time it occurs.

How To Stop Fraud

So how does the CIO fit into all of this you may be asking yourself? The answer is actually very simple: good leadership. The goal of every CIO should be to prevent IT staff from making bad judgement calls before they become fraud. A CIO who establishes clear standards for the IT department to follow has gone a long way in preventing fraud from occurring in the first place.

Of course, we’re talking about the IT department here and so there has to be a second level of effort – fraud detection. The CIO has access to the entire company’s data and it’s electronic tools. He / she is best suited to working with the CEO and CFO to implement the IT sensors that will alert them if something unusual starts to happen.

What All Of This Means For You

Fraud is, unfortunately, all too common in modern companies. A CIO has a key role to play in both preventing fraud from occurring within the IT department and detecting it when it happens in other parts of the business.

Understanding that anyone can end up committing fraud given the right set of circumstances is the key to preventing it. CIOs need to establish clear standards that make sure that everyone knows what is and is not acceptable behavior within the company.

In the end, it’s the tone set by the CIO that will be communicated down to the rest of the IT staff. Preventing fraud is something that a CIO can do by leading by example.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: What do you think the is #1 thing that a CIO can do to prevent fraud from happening 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

You want to become a CIO. You probably want to become a CIO in the private sector – you know, those companies that have owners or stockholders that they always have to work to keep happy. Why haven’t you spent any time thinking about becoming a CIO who works for the biggest employer out there: the U.S. Federal government?

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Posted in finance | 1 Comment »

Does A CIO Need To Have An MBA Or Is There Another Way?

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010
Image Credit CIO’s Who Really Want An MBA But Don’t Have The Time Have Another Way…

CIO’s Who Really Want An MBA But Don’t Have The Time Have Another Way…

If you want to be a CIOs, then there’s no need for me to tell you that we are living in troubling times We are always trying to do two things: hold on to our jobs and find ways to move up the corporate ladder. One of the best ways to do both of these, or so we have been told, is to go out and get an MBA. Well that’s all great and fine if you’ve got four or five years to burn, don’t need to do anything else at night, oh and have a big chunk of cash sitting around that you had no other plans for. Maybe it’s time to look for a better way to accomplish what we’re trying to do…

Say Hello To The Alternative To The MBA

Before you decide to either quit your current job and go back to school in order to get an MBA (really, really expensive) or start going to night school to get an MBA (just really expensive), maybe you should take a moment and consider all of your options. Maybe what you really want is a specialized Master’s degree.

Yeah, yeah – I know what you are thinking. We’ve all been drinking the “get an MBA” Kool-Aid for so long that it’s hard to imagine doing anything else. However, depending on what you want to do with your life, this might actually be a better solution for you.

If having spent time in your job has gotten you interested in the business side of the company, then getting an advanced business degree of some sort is probably a good idea. However, one of the things that keeps us from doing this is often the time involved to get the degree.

The Appeal Of Specializing

Business schools are starting to get the message. They are beginning to offer more and more specialized business programs that are only 12 months long. In the 2008-2009 school year there were 645 programs offered. This is up from the 614 programs that had been offered just two years earlier.

What these types of degrees offer are parts of the typical MBA curriculum, but they are often more technical in nature and generally spend less time on general management skills.

Here in lies the rub: these types of specialty business degrees are not designed to get you promoted to eventually become the CIO. Rather what they are designed to do is to sharpen your business skills in a narrow area and make you more valuable to the company in that niche.

This type of continuing education especially appeals to new IT mangers: those who don’t have the five years of work experience that most MBA programs require for entrance. No matter if this is your case, or if you’ve just found some part of the business job that you are really drawn to, a narrowly focused master’s degree might be just the ticket for you.

What To Do With Your New Degree

Ok, so let’s say that you bite the bullet and run off and skip the MBA and instead get a very focused master’s degree in marketing, finance, or some other business discipline. What then?

It turns out that taking this path, might feel like the right thing for you to do, but as they like to say on TV, your results may vary. Since specialty master’s degrees are not as well known as MBA’s you’re going to have to deal with some lack of recognition issues.

Although it may change in the future, right now MBA students still seem to get the best deal when it comes to getting the economic benefits from going through the effort of getting an advanced degree. The people who design the GMAT test that everyone takes to get admitted to graduate programs are reporting that MBA students are saying that they get a 73% increase in salary after graduating while students with specialty master’s degrees are only reporting a 26% increase.

What All Of This Means For You

In the end the decision rests with you. We all know that continuing our education is an important thing for every up-and-coming member of the IT department to do. Going back to school almost seems like a no-brainer until you realize that you need to spend some time thinking about just what you want to get out of doing so.

A specialty master’s degree offers IT workers who have been working for less than five years or who found one particular part of the job most interesting with a new option. By investing 12 months of study, they can walk away with both another degree as well as a deep understanding of one area of business.

The value of taking this educational route will really depend on the career that you want for yourself. If you believe that when you become CIO that you’ll need to be able to have a detailed understanding of how your business works, then a specialty master’s degree might be the right way to go for you!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: Do you think that specialty master’s degree will become more or less valuable in the future?

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, it turns out that you’re going to have a lot more on your mind than just how to use the latest and greatest technology to help the company run faster. You’ve got a problem that starts with “F” and rhymes with “Baud” and that stands for Fraud…

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Posted in career | 2 Comments »

Will The Web 2.0 Be Your Downfall When You Are CIO?

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010
Image Credit Web 2.0 Is All The Rage, But Will It Help You Be A Better CIO?

Web 2.0 Is All The Rage, But Will It Help You Be A Better CIO?

Just What Is This Web 2.0 Thing & Why Should You Care?

Just when you think that you’ve got this Internet thing figured out, it goes and changes on you. When you become CIO the Internet is going to be both your best friend (always on connectivity) and your worst enemy (security). However, just like everything else in life the Internet keeps changing – now we’re using the Web 2.0. There are some fantastic tools out there for you, but will you know what to do with them when you are the CIO?

It’s Not Going Away, Now What Are You Going To Do?

Now I know that you’re bright and smart because you are reading this article. However, let’s take just a quick moment and make sure that we’re all on the same page here. When the Internet first showed up, it was all about allowing you to “get somewhere”. You could go to AOL, CNN, Yahoo, etc. and see what content they had for you. This was all and good and businesses all opened up their own web sites and everyone pretty much knew what was going on.

Well apparently that wasn’t good enough. Things moved on and a whole new set of tools were invented that built on the original Internet and made it even more user friendly – say hello to the Web 2.0. The tools that make up the Web 2.0 ecosystem are all about allowing people who are using the Web to connect with each other – it’s all about “connectedness”.

When you become CIO this is going to matter because everyone is now expecting more from your company. It’s no longer enough to be a destination, now you are going to have to work with your IT department to make sure that you are a player in the Web 2.0 world.

Why Doing Nothing Is Not An Option

Guess what – even if when you became CIO you put your foot down and said “Balderdash, we’re not going to get involved with this Web 2.0 foolishness” it wouldn’t work. The world is becoming filled with blogs (including one very popular one called The Accidental Successful CIO), wikis, mashups, and so on. Your employees will be using them even if you chose not to do so.

Instead of being a stuck-in-the-mud CIO, you will have an opportunity to do more and move faster than the CIOs who came before you. That is because the Web 2.0 tools are changing the way that corporate software applications are developed. Instead of being these big stand-alone application, now they are becoming sleeker Web Services that use what’s already on the Internet to perform functions as well as playing nicely with other applications.

If you turn out to be a really clever CIO, you’ll have one of those break-through moments that can define a career. What you’ll realize is that what the Web 2.0 tools really allow your IT department to do is to enable the company’s customers to do a lot work for themselves. Things that used to require somebody in the company to do (selecting product options, checking on the status of an order, paying a bill) can now be done online and with Web 2.0 tools they can be done much easier than ever before.

The clever CIO will be able to reduce the company’s required headcount while at the same time improving customer satisfaction. What’s even better is that you’ll be able to do this with the IT department that you currently have – you won’t need lots of additional staff.

What All Of This Means For You

The Web 2.0 has arrived and you need to be ready to deal with it when you become CIO. It has the potential to both help and hinder the tasks that you will need to do as CIO.

The Web 2.0 is a set of tools that transforms the web from a set of places that we go to a way to connect with other people. You will need to work with your IT department in order to harness these tools. Your goal should be to harness the power of the new tools and create ways for your company’s customers to do more by themselves.

If you can figure out how to do this, then you’ll end up saving your company both time and money. You had better hurry up, the Web 3.0 can’t be that far away…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: Of all the different Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, Ajax, etc.) which do you think is the most valuable to a CIO?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you want to be a CIOs, then there’s no need for me to tell you that we are living in troubling times We are always trying to do two things: hold on to our jobs and find ways to move up the corporate ladder. One of the best ways to do both of these, or so we have been told, is to go out and get an MBA. Maybe it’s time to look for a better way to accomplish what we’re trying to do…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in modular software | No Comments »