Archive for September, 2010

5 Ways For CIOs To Become (Much) More Important

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
Image Credit It's Not Easy To Get To The Top Of IT!

It's Not Easy To Get To The Top Of IT!

Once you become the CIO you’d think that you’ve have it made. Now that you are living at the top of the IT pyramid, life should be grand – the long, hard struggle to reach this position is now over. Actually, the job is just beginning. What you need to do now is to find ways to make sure that the CIO becomes a (more) important part of your company’s success. Here are some suggestions for how you can make this happen.

It’s All About The Cloud

Just as much as the next guy, I hate to jump on the “what’s trendy in IT” bandwagon; however, it’s really starting to look as though this cloud computing thing is here to stay. Looks like you’re going to have to come up with ways to work it into your IT department’s strategy.

The key thing for you to do is to understand why it’s so important. Cloud computing offers the CIO the ability to kill two birds with one stone: you have the ability to reduce your IT costs while at the same time allowing the company to expand its IT footprint. Opportunities like this don’t come along often enough and so you had better jump on it while it’s available to you.

Flipping the 80/20 Rule

When you become the CIO, one of the first things that you’re going to discover is just how little money you have to spend. Oh, your IT budget might be huge and it may be growing larger every year, but the size of the funds that are actually available to you to spend on new projects and new initiatives is probably quite small by comparison.

So where’s all the money going? In a nutshell, most of your IT budget is going to be spent just keeping the lights on – maintenance on all of those embedded applications that run the company today. This has got to change.

As CIO you are going to have to get your sharp budget knife out and start making cuts. Any IT support functions that don’t contribute to moving the company forward need to be moved from the inside to the outside. Free up more IT budget for transformation projects and everyone will view you as the best CIO ever.

Growing The Business / Growing The Customer

Although you don’t often hear about the CIO being talked about in the same sentence that revenue growth is mentioned, this is what you need to make happen. The reason the business exists is to generate more money, the IT department has to play a role in this or it becomes unnecessary.

Make sure that you don’t do what some CIOs have done and go out and start selling your own products. The role of IT is to support what the company does. IT’s contribution to the company’s top line revenue should be a result of how it helps other departments become more efficient.

Following Business Processes From End-To-End

The role of CIO is unique in the company: you actually have very few restrictions on what you are permitted to do. This is a fantastic gift that you need to take advantage of.

With the ability to follow a process from where it starts in the company to where it ends, a CIO can find things that nobody else can: waste, miscommunications, opportunities for automation, etc.

Introducing Business Intelligence

Most businesses do a good job of collecting lots of data on how the business is running. Very few businesses do a good job of using the data that they’ve collected.

The CIO has an opportunity to implement business intelligence solutions that can provide the rest of the company with new insights. This type of value add is exactly what the rest of the company needs their CIO to do for them.

What All Of This Means For You

When you become CIO, the real work is just starting. You are going to have to be constantly looking for ways to add value to the rest of the company.

There are many ways for you to do this. Some rely on technology such as how best to use cloud computing or implementing business intelligence solutions. However, more of them have to do with the business side of IT: maximizing your IT budget and improving the company’s end-to-end business processes.

CIOs that focus on improving the company’s revenues will be spending their time wisely. By doing so, they’ll create an opportunity to hang around and do even greater things in the future…

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

Question For You: How do you think that a CIO can discover what the company’s end-to-end business processes are?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The time has never been better to make an impact in the success of your company as the CIO. However, there are a lot of different things that can conspire to distract you from tacking the tasks that really need your attention. Here’s a list of 5 items that should be on every CIO’s to-do list…

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Posted in leadership training | 1 Comment »

CIOs Really Need Robots In Order To Make Good Decisions

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010
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Robots Are What CIOs Need In Order To Make Better Decisions

Robots Are What CIOs Need In Order To Make Better Decisions

If you had to sit back for just a moment and come up with an answer to the question: what are CIOs doing wrong, what would that answer be? I think that the answer would be that we are spending too much time trying to solve problems in ways that really don’t help the rest of the company that much. What we’re missing is how to make life simpler for everyone, not more complicated.

Simple Is Better

A good case in point would be the area of decision support systems. On the surface, creating a decision support system would appear to be a perfect fit for a CIO’s IT department. Take a lot of collected company data, run it through some algorithms in order to predict the future, and ta-da! However, CIOs have a way of mucking this up.

What happens is that the CIOs let their engineering nature take over. Since the questions that the CEO or other business leaders might be asking a decision support system are unknown, the CIO often has the IT department create a solution that can handle any input. This means that you’ve got to give it a lot of data just to get the beast started. When a solution gets that complicated, nobody ends up using it.

Why Robots Are Good

What is needed is a simple solution to a complex problem. Instead of having the IT department create a big, heavy all encompassing decision support tool, the CIO should have them create a lightweight tool that is easy to use by all.

John Parkinson has spent some time thinking about this issue and he believes that a new class of applications that he calls “thinking support” apps are needed. These tools that the CIO would create and maintain for the business side of the company would have the following characteristics:

  • What If: they would truly allow the user to think up “what-if” scenarios and allow them to quickly and easily model them. No large amounts of data would have to be entered in order to check out a given scenario.
  • What A Pretty Pattern: since the one thing that we humans do well is to spot patterns, a thinking support tool will show how it created its answers and allow business leaders to spot patterns in the data that was used and produced.
  • Become A Time Traveler: the user should be able to run a simulation forward and backwards in time in order to see what the eventual outcome is. This should allow ideas that are great in the short term, but not so hot in the long run to be spotted and killed early on.
  • Measure Impacts: doing something will always impact other parts of the business. The tool should allow this impact to be measured so that a truly informed decision can be made.

What All Of This Means For You

When you become CIO, you’ll have a lot of requests sitting on your desk from the rest of the business. Resist the urge to create the “killer app” that will solve the rest of the company’s problems – you can’t do it and if you try, then they won’t use it.

Instead, focus on creating simpler thinking support applications. These apps should be able to be used by everyone who needs them and they should allow simulations to be quickly tried out and impacts measured.

Sure a big fancy decision support tool is what every CIO dreams of – using lots of data you can accurately predict the future. However, this is too hard to do. Focus on creating simple solutions to today’s problems and you’ll have won both the hearts and minds of the rest of the business.

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

Question For You: How simple do you think a thinking support tool would have to be in order to get the rest of the company to use it?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Once you become the CIO you’d think that you’ve have it made. Now that you are living at the top of the IT pyramid, life should be grand – the long, hard struggle to reach this position is now over. Actually, the job is just beginning. What you need to do now is to find ways to make sure that the CIO becomes a (more) important part of your company’s success. Here are some suggestions for how you can make this happen.

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Posted in decisions | 2 Comments »

How CIOs Can Get What They Don’t Have (But Really Need)

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
Image Credit CIO's Have To Take The Time To Learn What They Don't Know

CIO's Have To Take The Time To Learn What They Don't Know

Not being invited to sit at the company’s strategy table is a problem that has plagued CIOs since the position was invented. Instead of just talking about the problem, it’s high time we did something to turn things around. But what should we do?

Skill Building

The reason that CIOs aren’t being invited asked to contribute in a significant way to the types of decisions that go into running the company as a whole is because the rest of the senior management team doesn’t believe that the CIO has the skills that are needed to contribute to this process in a meaningful way. Unfortunately they are correct more often than not.

Sure, your average CIO has the technical skill set that got him / her into the position that they now hold; however, that’s not enough to get them invited to participate in running the company in a meaningful way. What they are viewed as missing are critical skills such as finance, marketing, R&D, etc.

Coming Up With A Plan

In an ideal world, a newly minted CIO would be able to sign up for a specialized course (or set of courses) that would teach the very skills that he / she is missing. We’re not talking about college courses here, these would have to be very specialized.

What the CIO would want to (really have to) learn is exactly what the role of IT needs to be in order to help each of the other parts of the company. The focus wouldn’t be on technology, but rather it would be on just exactly how IT could be used to maximize the performance of each of the pieces that make up the company. An emphasis on how things are in the real-world instead of in dry textbooks would also be a key to successful leaning.

How To Do This In The Real World

Sadly, I don’t think that such a set of courses currently exists. Don’t give up hope, it just means that when you become CIO you’re going to have to take a different path. Your home-brew educational program is going to have to consist of three main steps:

  1. every company has a set of educational programs that they offer. Generally these are designed to teach workers about what the company does and just exactly how it does it. These courses are often taught by other workers who have years of experience. CIOs need to sign up and show up for these classes – the information that they’ll cover is like gold to a CIO.

  2. Eat Lunch With Different People Every Day: CIOs need to introduce themselves to as many managers throughout the company as possible. This is how they are going to learn how the different departments work and what challenges they are facing. This isn’t exactly a classroom, but rather it’s like getting a complete education one conversation at a time.

  3. Forget About Technology: While a CIO is learning about the different parts that make up the company and just exactly what they do, issues of technology need to be left behind. Once an understanding of how the company runs has been achieved, then the technology discussions can start, but while the learning is going on the CIO needs to shut up and fit in.

What All Of This Means For You

CIOs don’t know what they don’t know. This is what is keeping them from being invited by the rest of a company’s senior management to participate in the business of plotting out the company’s strategic direction. CIO’s need to get the training that will provide them with the skills that they are missing.

Although specialized training would be the best way to do get this information, CIOs are going to have to build their own training program. This will include signing up for internal company courses, talking with managers from other departments, and leaving technology behind for awhile.

In the end, a CIO is the one person in the company who is best positioned to find ways to use technology to solve the problems that the company is facing. However, before they can do that, they’ve got to go back to school and do some more learning…

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

Question For You: Which department do you think is the most important for the CIO to find out more about first?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you had to sit back for just a moment and come up with an answer to the question: what are CIOs doing wrong, what would that answer be? I think that the answer would be that we are spending too much time trying to solve problems in ways that really don’t help the rest of the company that much…

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Posted in soft skills | 1 Comment »

Why Do None Of The Other Kids Want To Play With The CIO?

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010
Image Credit
Why So Sad Mr. / Ms. CIO?

Why So Sad Mr. / Ms. CIO?

Just imagine that amazing moment in the future when you finally become the CIO! Now imagine yourself all alone – none of the other “C” level executives want to play with you. What’s going on here?

Not An Equal Among Peers

Something is seriously wrong in the world of CIOs. In most companies they are not being treated as a member of the senior management team. Instead, they are viewed as being simply viewed as technical specialists. Dang, what’s gone wrong here?

If you take a moment and talk with the other senior managers who are actually running the company you’ll start to hear the same things over and over again. CIOs just aren’t seen as having enough of the general management skills that it takes to participate in the process of running a company of any significant size. Other managers view the CIO as more often than not lacking both the strategic vision as well as the basic interpersonal skills that it takes to be a true leader.

What makes this a bit of a double whammy for a CIO is that the very skills that got you to this top spot in IT may be the ones that are holding you back now. Although this doesn’t really seem fair, there is good news here.

It turns out that the skills that a CIO needs in order to succeed can be learned (have I mentioned that Blue Elephant Consulting can help in this area?). The key is to understand just exactly what skills you will need.

That Leadership Thing

A classic CIO is someone who waits around to be told what to do instead of taking the lead. This skill is the way that most projects are run within the IT department – we get requirements from the customers / end users and then we apply our IT knowledge to solving their issues.

However, in the real world of business things don’t work that way. The CIO needs to be out in front showing true leadership. He / she needs to be uncovering the issues that are holding the company back and then showing the rest of the company what parts of solving that problem can be handled by IT and how the rest of the company has to lend a hand.

Are You Thinking Strategically?

Since the world of IT is often insulated from the world outside of the company, most CIOs have never had to think about how their actions (and now the IT department’s actions) impact the company’s competitive posture.

For that matter, most CIOs probably don’t know what the company’s current strategy is. It never mattered before. Once you become the CIO these things start to become very important. The key question that the CIO needs to be able to answer (every day) is what is the IT department doing to implement the company’s strategy right now?

It’s Not About Information, It’s All About Knowledge

As though staying on top of everything that is going on in the world of IT wasn’t enough, CIOs also have to be aware of what’s going on the rest of the company as well as in its marketplace. Needless to say, it can be easy to become overwhelmed with lots and lots of raw information.

In order to be able to contribute to the management of the company, CIOs need to be able to take all of this information in and process it. The ability to synthesis lots and lots of inputs and then make solid well-thought out decisions is what the rest of the management team is expecting the CIO to be able to do.

What All Of This Means For You

Gone are the days when a CIO could afford to be a wallflower in the executive boardroom. IT is too critical to how every company hopes to succeed to allow the CIO to not be a vital part of the company’s management team.

In order to make this happen when you become CIO, you’re going to need to make sure that you have the skills that the other senior managers are going to be expecting you to have. This will include the ability to lead, to think strategically, and to process large amounts of information.

Although this may all strike you as being just a bit scary, don’t be put off. Everything is doable and now that you know what will be expected of you, you can get a head start on learning what you need to know…

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

Question For You: What do you think the #1 skill that a CIO must have is?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’m not sure if this is going to make you feel any better, but it turns out that most CIOs are showing up for work only partially dressed when you consider what skills they are missing. Maybe we’d better have a talk about this…

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Posted in leadership | 1 Comment »