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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?

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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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Post tags: broad business understanding, information overload, interpersonal skills, lacking broad management skills, leadership, strategic thinking, synthesis skills

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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?

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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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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: align tech, business executives, business intelligence strategy, chief information officer, chief information officer branch, chief information security officer, chief information technology officer, chief operating officer, cio council, codesign tools, CRM, customer portals, customer relationship management, infrastructure management, intellectual property strategy, it adjustment, it alignment, it alignment definition, it disaster recovery strategy, it governance strategy, it infrastructure strategy, it integration strategy, it sourcing strategy, it strategy, online meetings, portfolio management strategy, sales, social networking, wiki

Worldcom's Bernard Ebbers Would Have Been A Bad Friend For CIOs To Have

The times they are changing. Let’s take a moment and have a talk about one of a CIO’s key survival skills: the ability to successfully negotiate office politics. Specifically, if you could only have one best friend, who should it be: the CEO or the CFO?

Changes In The Workplace

The workplace that a CIO works in looks nothing like it did as little as 10 years ago. The changes that have happened have reshaped the boundaries of power. The CEO used to be the rock star who acted as a visionary leader. Think of Bill Gates, Tom Siebel, and Larry Ellison. However, the corporate scandals that rocked the business world at the start of the new millennium (i.e. Worldcom, Enron, etc.) has created the need for a change at the top.

Philip Tulimieri and Moshe Banai have taken a look at the that changes that have been taking place in the C-suites of major firms. They believe that a new focus on ensuring accountability by the senior executives, especially the CEO, plus the arrival of new regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act have changed who investors want to have running the company.

In the past, CFO were generally in the shadows of the CEOs – simply acting as mangers of the company’s money and trying to make sure that the company didn’t do anything too wild that they couldn’t pay for. This is all changing now.

The Arrival Of Co-Leaders Of A Company

In today’s corporate world, the balance of power is shifting. No longer is the CEO the only person running the show. Instead, the CFO is now playing a larger role – sorta a co-leader if you will.

The roles of a CEO and CFO are still different. A CEO has the responsibility of always being positive and working to move the company forward at all times. The CFO, on the other hand, is responsible for making sure that the company approaches every situation with caution and does its best to minimize the risk that it is being exposed to.

Tulimieri and Banai have made the interesting discovery that the rise of the CFO has meant that the role of the Chief Operating Officer (COO) has started to decline. The CIO is also responsible for this – that automation of much of a firm’s back office operations has reduced the need for the COO.

What’s A CIO To Do?

CIOs need to navigate these new corporate political waters very carefully. Yes, the CEO is still an important ally to have on your side; however, no longer is this enough – now you also have to be on good terms with the CFO.

One of the biggest challenges going forward will be keep both leaders happy. It’s important to realize that there will be disagreements between the CEO and CFO and that’s when the CIO needs to be most careful.

The challenge for any CIO is on which relationship should the most time should be spent. This will be different for every company. However, the CIO has the opportunity to show a great deal of value by facilitating communication between these two executives.

Final Thoughts

A CIO who can provide the information that a CEO needs in order to drive the company forward while at the same time providing the information that the CIO needs in order to measure the risk, will be seen as valuable.

The arrival of the CFO at the top of the company’s decision making structure means that being able to measure the financial value of every IT project will become even more critical. The world changes and CIOs need to make sure that they pick their corporate friends very carefully!

CIOs who can survive in the new world of company leadership and who can find a way to make friends with both the CEO and CFO will be better at finding ways to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you think about someone trying to make off with your company’s private data, what comes to mind? Some wily Russian hacker who sneaks into your company’s network through the backdoor? Perhaps you need to update your thinking. A recent report from Cisco revealed that the real threat is coming from insiders. What’s a CIO to do?

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: align it, business alignment, business it alignment, ceo, CFO, CIO, co-leader, COO, Enron, it alignment, Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Worldcom

Allstate Is Doing Interesting Things To Ride Out The Recession

Awhile ago over at the Wall Street Journal they had a chance to sit down and have a talk with Catherine Brune who is the CIO over at the big insurance company Allstate. Catherine had some interesting things to say about how she is adapting Allstate’s IT operations and strategy to deal with the current recession.

First off, Catherine pointed out that she sees opportunity in the times that we are currently living in. Specifically, she noted that yes, everything will eventually recover, and firms need to make sure that they will be ready to seize the moment when this occurs. IT will play a major role in making sure that any firm is ready to do this.

Allstate is currently in the process of re-prioritizing all of its IT projects (no surprise there, eh?) The way that they are going about doing this is by taking a look at what the project would produce once it was completed. They then ask “is this something that customers are asking for?” If it isn’t, then that project get shelved.

It turns out that this is actually pretty hard to do because every project is related to other projects. That means that that shelving one project may result in a number of other projects also being shelved. The key to doing this right is to take the time up front and map out the dependencies between IT projects.

Allstate’s IT department realizes that they need to support the rest of the business. This means that they find themselves living in both the world of IT and the world of business. They do this by focusing on business processes and how IT can help. The key here, however, is to make sure that they don’t automate a bad business process.

Finally, Allstate has adopted the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) set of best practices in order to run their shop. This basically means that there is a form for just about everything that you’d want to do. This has simplified the routine parts of running the IT department.

Is your IT department currently reprioritizing your current projects? Have you created a dependency map? How involved in automating business processes are you? Does your IT shop use the ITIL practices? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Post tags: Allstate, business, business process, Catherine Brune, dependencies, ILMI, information technology, IT, leadership, prioritizing, strategy

A business stall can hit a company / IT department at any time. There can be many reasons for what causes a stall including having a premium product or abandoning a good market segment too early as a company goes looking for greener grass. If that was all that could happen to a company, that would surly be enough. However, there is one more key contributor that can cause an otherwise successful company to lose forward momentum and go into a tailspin: they run out of talent.

In this day of IT layoffs and downsizings, it doesn’t seem possible that a firm could run out of the IT talent that they need. However, it’s having a lack of IT leaders and their associated staff who have the necessary IT capabilities and interpersonal skills that are so desperately needed in order to execute the company’s strategy.

We’re not talking about not having enough SQL knowledgeable programmers here. Rather what we are discussing is a lack of specific required capabilities that are needed by the firm. These capabilities can include such things as the ability to sell complex IT solutions, or perhaps some special skill in marketing IT solutions to a given market segment. This lack of talent becomes most glaring when it occurs at the executive level within the company.

How Do Talent Shortages Happen? It turns out that most internal shortfalls in skills are a result of a company’s too strict adherance to a “promote from within” policy. What’s interesting about this is that this situation is most often seen in company’s that are lauded for their strong sense of corporate culture. This internal promotion policy serves the company poorly when the company’s business environment presents it with a novel challenge or when their competition suddenly increases.

What Role Does Experience Play? A big one it turns out. Rapidly developing events in a company’s market place require the company to quickly respond by modifying how it does business. Having a narrow set of experiences in the executive suite means that the company’s ability to quickly respond to such changes can be severely limited.

So What’s The Solution? Quick question – does your IT department have any program in place to formally monitor the balance between both company lifers vs. those who have been brought in from the outside both in the executive team and lower on down the management ladder? It’s the outsiders who are going to bring in fresh approaches and perspectives. Even if the firm does bring in outsiders, does it incorporate them into the company? Studies show that between 35%-40% of senior executives don’t make it past their first 18 months. The correct way to solve this problem is to set up a formal IT department policy that states that HR will work to ensure that there is a mix of management. A good suggestion for a mix ratio that seems to work is to ensure that there is between 10% – 30% of management that is from the outside.

Where does your IT department’s management talent come from – inside or outside? Does your company actively hire from the outside? How long do new senior managers seem to last? Why do they leave? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: business, leadership, CEO, CIO, leadership training

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Post tags: business, ceo, CIO, leadership, leadership training

Businesses and IT departments can be going along just fine when all of a sudden, the business goes into what is called a “stall”. Just like being in an airplane that goes into a stall, this is by no means a good thing! When a business goes into a stall, more often than not it won’t recover. The most dangerous part about a stall is that you don’t see them coming – everything is fine until it isn’t. We’ve talked about some different causes of stalls including having a premium product; however, there’s another reason and the IT department plays a big role in this one.

Most companies have a small set of products or markets that they currently serve. If the company is successful, then they are probably doing a good job. The IT department has probably become optimized to support both the products and the teams that are serving these markets. All is good. Then the “… grass is greener on the other side of the fence…” syndrome strikes senior management and they decide to take the company in a new direction in order to pursue more profitable markets. Of course what this means is that you need to abandon the core markets that are currently serving you so well. By doing this you won’t be able to exploit any future growth that occurs in your existing markets.

Now lets be honest here, these kinds of right hand turns made by businesses rarely show up all that dramatically – at first. Instead they have a habit of sneaking in from the sides as purchases of other companies or top down mandated growth initiatives in brand new areas of business that seem to have nothing to do with the company’s current customers, or products, or partners (can anyone say “Ebay buys Skype?”).

If you are looking for proof that this kind of abandonment of successful markets still goes on in today’s modern business environment, just open the paper and see all of the articles that are talking about public companies being bought out by private equity firms. Clearly something went terribly wrong and outsiders were able to step in. In almost every case when this kind of takeover happens, the new owners of the firm will implement a strategy for returning to what originally made the company successful and growing the core again.

Why do companies and their IT departments make these mistakes? There are two primary reasons. The first is that the company mistakenly believes that their core market(s) has become saturated. This belief is due in part to the information that the senior management is receiving from the IT department. It’s the CIO’s responsibility to evaluate the data that his/her department is producing and understand what it is saying. Just because it looks like a market is all tapped out, does not necessarily mean that it is so. Instead, this is when the CIO needs to work closely with the marketing team to find different ways to measure the market.

The second cause of a firm leaving a successful market is because they feel that there are operational impediments in their core business model. This happens when senior management just despairs of being able to solve business problems that are currently confronting the company. Instead of trying to solve them, they instead decide to move to other markets which won’t have the same problems. Once again, the CIO and the IT department play a big role in this decision. There should be no business problems that the IT department can’t help the rest of the company come to grips with. Whether it’s tracking sales and who is buying products more closely or collecting data on how the competition is doing, the IT department can help to create solutions to almost any business problem.

Leaving a successful market is never a good idea. IT staff should be on the alert whenever they start to hear the word “mature” being used to describe the company’s business situation. IT has a role to play in making sure that the company sticks with markets and customers that will serve it for a long time.

Have you ever worked for a firm that left it’s successful market in search of greener pastures? How did this all turn out in the end? Has a IT department in which you worked ever been able to stop a company from making a bad business direction decision? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: leadership, CIO, business, business opportunity, new profit

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: business, business opportunity, CIO, leadership, new profit