Posts Tagged ‘ceo’

« Older Entries

CIOs In Crisis: Do We Have A Problem Here?

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
Image Credit
What Is It Going To Save The Role Of The CIO?

What Is It Going To Save The Role Of The CIO?

What’s Happening To All Of The CIOs?

You and I both know that a well run IT department is what can make one company more successful than its competitors. That must mean that the IT department is important, and therefore the CIO must also be important, right? If that’s true, then why are some of the really big companies like News Corp, Harrah’s, ConocoPhillips, etc. getting rid of their CIO and then choosing to not replace him / her? What are they thinking?

What’s The Problem Here?

If firms feel comfortable getting rid of their head of IT (the CIO) and not replacing that person, then clearly there must be a crisis here. It sure looks like today’s CIOs have not done a good job of advertising just how valuable they are to the rest of the company’s executive leadership team.

This is pretty easy to understand. However, there’s a problem with this explanation. You would think that all of the upper management positions would be faced with this same challenge of conveying their value to the company. However, it seems like the CIO is the only position that companies feel comfortable leaving either open or in the hands of a less senior member of staff. You can’t say the same for operations, finance, human resources, etc.

What Could We Do To Solve This Problem?

Arthur Langer has been researching this issue and he believes that the problem that IT has is that we’re lacking support. If we worked in accounting, then we’d all be CPAs and everyone would agree on the way that things needed to be done.

IT has no equivalent accreditation system. Langer points out that the field of IT is lacking any sort of professional body that could provide its stamp of approval for how an IT department is run or what goals it chooses to focus on. Although such an organization may be a long way off, in the near term IT at least needs to do a better job of getting the message across to the CIO about IT actually does.

Langer makes a good point when he states that he believes that there is no question that CEOs value what an IT department does. It’s just that what we do is so far removed from what he understands, that CEOs really have no clear idea how to manage their IT resources.

Ultimately, this is what is currently missing: an IT best practices organization that can provide CEOs with this kind of management guidance. Sure we’ve got the ITIL standards, but those are far too detailed. What’s missing is that top-level “here’s how you run an IT department” type of guidance.

What All Of This Means For You

Even though you may not yet be a CIO, you need to start thinking about how you are going to effectively deal with this issue. The last thing that you want to have happen is for you to finally become the CIO only to lose your job because the job itself was seen as being not all that important.

As CIO what you are going to have to do is 1) do a good job of running your IT department, and 2) do a good job of educating your CEO on how to manage his / her IT assets. This means that you’re going to have to do a lot of different tasks: create IT best practices for your company, collect industry research and show it to your CEO, create management guides to instruct your CEO on what you need him / her to do for IT. Congratulations – when you become CIO, you also become a teacher!

Although this may seem like it would take up a lot of your precious CIO time that could be spent forging strategy and harnessing new technology, think again. Teaching your CEO how to manage the CIO and showing how to use IT to make the company more successful just might be the best thing that you’ve ever done – it could even save your job!

Do you think that at your company the CIO is necessary or do you think that someone lower down could do all the same things?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

At the end of the day, an IT department is simply a collection of projects. Some of these projects are short lived (“we’ve got an outage!”) and some are much longer (“let’s install a new ERP solution”). However, it turns out that today’s CIOs have been taking the wrong approach when it comes to scheduling these IT projects and it shows…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in career | No Comments »

Who Should A CIO’s BFF Be: The CEO or The CFO?

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
Worldcom's Bernard Ebbers Would Have Been A Bad Friend For CIOs To Have

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.

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

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?

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in leadership | No Comments »

A Mentor Network Is What You Need To Become A CIO

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
CIOs Need Mentors To Be Successful (c) - 2008

CIOs Need Mentors To Be Successful (c) - 2008

I’ve got a quick question for you: what is the next step in your career? What do you want to get promoted to? In fact, as long as we are talking about that, what comes after THAT promotion? If you want to become a CIO, then career ladder generally goes: IT worker, manager, director, executive director, CIO. Got a plan on how you are going to get to that next step?

The Problem With Career Mentors

It used to be that what you needed in order to climb out of an IT postition was a mentor - someone who would take you under their wing and guide you during your career. Bad news – those days are long gone.

It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the old way, it’s just that the world started to move faster. Nowadays nobody stays in a given position long enough to act as a mentor to you for any reasonable length of time. Even if they did, they are probably too busy to spend enough time with you keeping your career on track.

The old way of picking a mentor and having them work with you over time to shape and guide your career is gone – things move too fast and change too often to allow this to work any more. Instead, you need to discover how to create networks of mentors that they can use to provide the career guidance that you will need over the years.

If you thought the old way was tough, just wait until you try to figure out how to do things using the new way!

The New Way Of Managing Your Career

Dr. Dawn Chandler (CA Polytech State University), Dr. Douglas Hall (Boston University) and Dr. Kathy Kram (Boston University) have spent some time looking into this problem with the modern workplace and they’ve got some ideas about how we can fix things.

Since there is really no way for you to get a single individual to agree to act as your mentor for the 40-45 years that your IT career is going to last, instead you are going to have take a different approach. You are going to have to create a network of mentors that you can use to accomplish what you need to get done.

Oh, there is one small problem with this clever solution: most of us are not all that good at creating a mentor network like this let alone trying to maintain it. It looks like you are going to need some suggestions on how best to do this.

Building And Maintaining A Mentor Network

One of the first things that you are going to have to realize about building your mentor network is that the people that you are going to ask to be a part of your network will not all be the same. This means that you are going to have develop a special set of skills in order to be able to (1) find them, and (2) create relationships with them that will make them want to mentor you.

Here is what you are going to have to do in order to create a mentoring network that will help your IT career move to the next level:

  • Talk, Talk,Talk - you are going to have to be willing to take the initiative and reach out to those people that you want to be a part of your mentoring network – they aren’t going to contact you. Once you’ve contacted them the first time, then you are going to have to work at maintaining contact with them so that they don’t forget about you.
  • Be Sensitive – Not everyone that you talk to is going to want to be your mentor. It’s going to be up to you to take the time to pick up on the message that they are sending your way. Few people will actually come out and say “no”, so it’s up to you to detect those folks who would like to decline the opportunity.
  • It’s The Takeoff That Counts – when you’ve found someone who is willing to be a member of your mentor network, then you’ve got to be willing to make an extra effort to make sure that your initial interactions with that person go very well. They will set tone for the rest of your relationship. Show up early for meetings, follow up quickly on actions, and pay attention when they are talking.
  • Be Prepared – make sure that you get ready for every meeting with someone who is in your mentor network. Research what you want to ask them, make sure that you can show that you are making progress in your career, and come prepared to ask questions about challenges that you are currently facing.
  • Information Is The Key – you need to be willing to share information with your mentoring network. This does not mean that you have to tell them all the details about what you had for breakfast today, but rather that you be willing to lay out your current challenges and failures that you’ve had – you know, stuff that can be hard to talk about.
  • It’s A Two-Way Street – if someone agrees to be a part of your mentoring network, then you have agreed to do your best to help them out also. This means that you have a responsibility to help your mentors out whenever you have an opportunity to do so. This can be as simple as passing on information that you run across to actually doing work for them.
  • Be A Nice Person – Nobody want to work with a jerk and they certainly don’t want to mentor one. No matter what kind of day you’ve had, always be on your best behavior when you interact with a member of your mentor network.
  • Be Positive – how you choose to view the world is a key part of how others see you. If you have a positive attitude you will naturally attract people to your mentor network and you’ll be able to keep them there. If you’ve got a negative attitude, then nobody is going to want to lend you a helping hand.

Final Thoughts

As a member of an IT department, you are undoubtedly busy. However, it turns out that you have yet another job on top of your “day job” – managing your career. You can’t do this by yourself and so you’re going to need to have someone guide you – a mentor network.

Creating and maintaining a mentor network is no easy task. However, if you go about doing it in the right way it can become a powerful force that will cause your career to shoot ahead and make sure that you don’t get left behind.

CIOs (and those who want to become a CIO) who are able to build and maintain a good network of mentors will boost their careers and by doing so will have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Why did you decide to go to work in the IT field? I can really only speak for myself, but there was a bit of glamour to the IT field when I entered it. Everything seemed to be so shiny and new and change was happening so fast that you just knew that this was going to be “the place” to be in order to have a great career. Is that still true or has something fundamental changed about our profession?

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in career | No Comments »

New Name For CIOs: Strategic Execution Officer

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
CIOs Need To Learn To Manage Wild IT Projects<p>(c) - 2007</p>

CIOs Need To Learn To Manage Wild IT Projects(c) - 2007

In order to complete in a global economy that is moving faster every day, more and more firms are committing to implementing those really BIG process digitization projects. More often than not the CIO will find himself / herself in charge of not only the implementation of the new software application, but also the overall success of the project. How do you go about doing that?

What Goes Wrong With Big IT Projects

We all know the statistics – most big IT projects are not successful. However, the key question is why? It turns out that all too often the issue is not with the new process automation technology that is being implemented, but rather with the management challenge that comes along with a project like this.

The reason that managing a large transformational IT project is so hard is because the CIO also needs to be finding ways to drive the new business process changes that will be required once the new systems have been installed. It turns out that nobody likes change!

What Doesn’t Work?

It seems as though IT departments have been trying since the beginning of time to find a way to tackle this two-headed IT project beast. One approach has been to give responsibility for the success of the project to an executive governance committee. It turns out that this type of committee does an excellent job of defining the strategy for implementing the changes that will be needed, but does a lousy job of executing it.

Another approach has been to create an IT task force to implement this type of change. They generally do a good job of getting the new application up and running, but they lack the wide-ranging authority to cause other parts of the company to change how they are doing their jobs.

What Does An IT Strategic Execution Officer Do?

If the CIO is willing to step up and tackle leading both sides of a major IT process automation project, just what do they have to do? There are three fundamental tasks that they will need to deal with:

  • The implementation of the process automation application(s).
  • Making sure that the new technology gets adopted by the rest of the company.
  • Making sure that the new processes that the project has implemented start to get used by everyone.

Ultimately, the CIO will be filling the management / leadership gap that exists between coming up with the process automation plan and actually changing the company to use the project once its been implemented.

Final Thoughts

No CIO wants to take on more work – there’s not enough time in the day to get everything done as it is. However, ensuring that big IT projects get implemented correctly and that the company transforms its processes in order to use the new tool is the key to the company’s long term success.

This is a clear example of where a CIO gets to practice for his / her next job: becoming CEO. Nobody else will be as well positioned to implement cross-company changes. CIOs who can pull this off will have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The basic job of a CIO is to ensure that a company’s IT infrastructure operates smoothly and allows the company to conduct business. On Monday, August 3, 2009, PayPal’s CIO failed at this most basic of jobs…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in product managment | 4 Comments »

Data Protection Secrets: CIOs Know That It Starts At The Endpoint

Monday, August 17th, 2009

CIOs Know That Managing Endpoints Is The Key To Securing Company Data <br> <div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/john/47544223/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href=
Just imagine this scenario: you’ve just been made CIO of your firm when all of a sudden one of your competitors suffers a massive data loss because of outside hackers. Your CEO storms into your brand-new office and demands to know what you are doing to secure your firm’s data. What would you say?

The Old Way Of Doing Things

Good CIOs realize that a firm’s IT infrastructure can’t just be thought of “those boxes”. Instead, an IT infrastructure consists of three layers of devices: core servers and perhaps mainframes, a set of network connectivity devices such as routers and hubs, and then endpoints – the PCs and laptops that you and I use every day.

IT Networks Consist Of 3 Separate Levels Of Equipment

IT Networks Consist Of 3 Separate Levels Of Equipment

Since there are more endpoints than any other type of equipment in most corporate networks, CIOs realize that this is where must of their company data loss efforts must be focused.

In the past, securing network endpoints often meant that all one had to do was to load up some anti-virus software on every laptop and you could check this off of your CIO to-do list. Sorry – that no longer works.

Welcome To The Real World

As we enter the brave new world of policy management, we are seeing a shift to policy-based enforcement being used to control company data that is being used on enterprise network endpoints.

Using policy-base management of endpoints allows multiple areas to be managed. These areas include:

  • Configuration
  • Patch
  • Access
  • Application
  • Anti-virus

The Case For Using Policy-Based Management of Endpoints

Let’s face it – we are all have too much to do and too little time in which to get it all done. Establishing corporate IT polices allows a set of rules to be laid down that tell everyone what is and is not permitted. When you extend these polices to cover how you manage the endpoints of the company’s network, then all of a sudden you’ve made your life that much easier.

Policies allow you to prioritize the company information that you want to protect. Once you identify this information, you’ll then be able to realize just how much of it is being stored on the endpoints!

This new understanding then allows you to set up a systems security approach to making your PCs and laptops safe. By doing this you’ll be able to ensure that your network endpoints are now secure places to house that valuable corporate data.

Final Thoughts

There’s no way that any one person in an IT department can make sure that all of your PCs and laptops are secure all the time – even if you are the CIO. Yesterday’s piecemeal approach of placing an anti-virus application on each PC and then considering the job done was a poor solution.

Using a system’s approach and establishing company policies for how management of endpoints should be done sets up a much simpler way of ensuring that all endpoints are secure. CIOs that do this will have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It’s a battle out there: hackers and organized crime groups vs. your company. Whereas you have to worry about keeping the company successful and lowering costs, all they have to worry about is finding ways to break into your network. Doesn’t seem very fair, does it? There is some good news for CIOs: application whitelisting has arrived.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in security | No Comments »

« Older Entries