Dr. Jim Anderson looks into why so many high-profile CIOs have been getting fired lately — could it be because they weren’t great CIOs?
Dr. Anderson identifies the 5 different things that every CIO needs to do in order to become a great CIO.
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I’ve got some bad news for all of you CIOs out there: it turns out that 25% of the best workers in the IT department are planning on leaving within the next 12 months. Not to depress you even more, but it turns out that those internal job change programs that you have perhaps created that are intended to develop the next generation of IT leaders don’t seem to be working – 40% of the internal rotations that are made by IT “high-pots” (high potential) employees end up in failure. Let’s take a look at what problems you need to solve …
Jean Martin and Conrad Schmidt are researchers who have been looking into what makes leadership transitions successful. What they have discovered is basically bad news for CIOs.
In order for a CIO to grow their star talent, CIOs need to be able to first identify who this talent is and then they need to find ways to put them in positions of increasing responsibility in order to get them ready to lead the company. All too often this isn’t happening.
The people in the IT department who are best able to initially identify high potential candidates are the front-line managers and directors who are supervising the majority of the IT workers. If developing the best and the brightest talent is left to these members of the IT department, it’s just not going to happen.
Instead, what needs to happen is that you as CIO need to actively participate in the process. This means that you need to work with frontline manager so that when potential star talent is identified, they can be slotted into development programs. Make sure that you reward managers for finding high-quality talent so that they’ll be motivated to share their best with you and won’t be tempted to hoard those workers that they believe can make their lives easier.
Once you’ve identified your star IT talent and you’ve got them enrolled in your talent development program, you really don’t want them to fail. Or do you?
All too often what CIOs do is to hand pick the assignments that are given to up-and-coming IT managers. The goal is to find positions where they will be challenged, but not too much. Since you’ve already invested time and energy in getting them this far (and since there are a limited number of stars), you really don’t want them to fall flat on their face. This means that you don’t want to place them in a position where they might fail.
This is the wrong thinking. Although yes, you really don’t want to put anyone in a situation where they can’t win, at the same time you do want to put your best performers in difficult situations so that they can have a chance to become “battle hardened”. The military does this all the time – you have to have seen actual combat if you want to eventually become a General someday.
Only by coming face-to-face with a truly difficult IT / business situation will your talent be able to prove their mettle. Yes, some will fold under the pressure, but you’d rather find it out now than later on when you’ve invested even more in them. Place your best talent in situations where they can prove that they really are the best that the IT department has to offer.
Nobody ever said that growing the next round of IT leaders was going to be easy, but who knew that it was going to be this tough? Ensuring that the firm has a deep bench of future talent is one of a CIO’s key jobs.
Mistakes that a CIO needs to avoid when developing talent include allowing top talent to be discovered and managed by lower-level IT department staff. These individuals are too important to be left to chance within the small world of a given department. The other mistake is for CIOs to work too hard to shield their star talent from failures. Talent needs to be exposed to challenging circumstances in order to be given the ability to fully develop.
CIOs need to understand that they can’t put their best and brightest staff in a closet with the hopes that they can bring them out when the need arises. Instead, they need to spend time every day working to ensure that the talent is growing and getting ready for the positions that they’ll eventually fill.
- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
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Question For You: What do you think that a CIO should do if a star talent is put into a position in which they fail?
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I won’t let the CIOs that I work with make a mistake. When they start to go off in the wrong direction, I grab them by the collar and yank them back on the path to IT glory. Lately I’ve been doing a whole lot of yanking and the reason is that for some odd reason CIOs just don’t seem to understand how to manage their star talent…
Hmm, let me try and remember how this is supposed to go: the IT department exists to serve the rest of the company. If the department is doing its job, then the company should be able to operate smoothly and be able to outperform its competition, right? Over at Wachovia (purchased by Wells Fargo awhile ago) the IT systems are dropping the ball and people are in danger of losing their homes. Sounds like Avid Modjtabai, Executive Vice President, Technology and Operations, for Wells Fargo & Company, has got some explaining to do…
This tale of woe starts back in the go-go days of the 1990′s when Wachovia, like just about every other bank, started handing out home loans like candy. They offered them to just about anyone who asked for them no matter if they could really afford them or not.
A lot of folks opted to get what are called Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) . These little babies are great when interest rates are low; however, when there is a global recession and interest rates start to go up, those monthly loan payments can quickly get out of hand. The Obama administration has realized that a lot people are in a bad way, and they’ve made a lot of cash available to banks so that they can convert ARMs to fixed rate mortgages (with a non-changing monthly payment).
If you want to change your loan, all you should have to do is go to your bank and work out a deal with them. Unless your loan is with Wachovia – then things get a bit more complicated.
Marchall Exkblad over at the Wall Street Journal has discovered that a computer glitch in Wachovia’s IT systems is preventing people from being able to modify their ARM loans. Avid Modjtabai, I think that you may have a problem on your hands.
It turns out that Wachovia has been forced to “recode” its computer system. They are saying that this is because of “some of the tweaks to the program” that the U.S. government made. What’s interesting about this excuse is that Wachovia customers have been attempting to get their loans adjusted since June (that’s roughly four months if you’re counting).
In Wachovia’s defense, they are saying that it’s hard to modify existing loans under the government’s guidelines for the $75B foreclosure-prevention plan. Umm, I’m cool with that, but the now-parent company Wells Fargo has been able to modify 11% of their loans in the time that Wachovia has been able to modify only 2% of theirs. What gives?
Once again, let’s review: the IT department and its systems exist to help the company do more and do it quicker. Over at Wachovia, that clearly is not happening right now. What should have been done?
Let’s assume that Ms. Modjtabai got handed a bill of goods back in October of 2008 when Wells Fargo agreed to buy Wachovia. She probably had no way of knowing what state Wachovia’s loan processing software was in when the purchase went down.
The problem comes after that deal was closed. A CIO in this situation needs to eliminate as many unknowns as possible. This means that the first thing that should have been done was a top to bottom audit of Wachovia’s systems: what did they have and what did each system do?
We all know that every unique system that you have to support is going to end up costing you a lot of IT budget that could be better spent on something else. That means that Wells Fargo should have used the results of the audit to create a plan for moving the Wachovia business activities over to Wells Fargo’s existing systems.
I’m not naïve enough to think that this would be easy to do, but in the end that is the job of the CIO – to simplify IT and create a path to move forward. The evidence seems to show that the Wells Fargo and Wachoiva mortgage processing systems are still separate. Whether due to poor design or financial neglect, Wachovia’s systems have not been able to keep up with changes in the market. At the end of the day, that’s the CIO’s job to solve.
When you become CIO, you need to realize that “the company” is a very fluid thing indeed. What the company looks like one day is not what it will be looking like down the road.
When your company purchases another company you will suddenly be responsible for the IT systems and staff that come along with that company. What you don’t know can kill your IT career.
The moment that the purchase deal closes, you need to be jumping in there with your IT team and turning over every rock in order to find out what you are now in charge of. This has to lead to a plan to merge the IT systems of both companies. You don’t necessarily have to keep the systems that the buying company is using, but you do need to minimize the number of systems that you will be left with.
Nobody ever said that being a CIO was going to be easy – the Wachovia loan processing software bug is just another example that a CIO’s job is never done.
Do you think that the Wachovia loan processing problem is the fault of the Wells Fargo CIO?
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We all dream of the day that we will get the nod to become CIO — finally we will have arrived. Or will we have? When you are CIO, things are going be different and that’s because you won’t just be the CIO, you’ll also be the company’s Strategic Execution Officer.
So this story should probably be filed in the “it should have never happened” drawer: Microsoft has lost the information that T-Mobile users of the Sidekick mobile phone entrusted them to store for them. Wait a minute, isn’t this the grand and glorious 21st Century in which data loss like this is never supposed to happen any more? How did Microsoft’s CIO let the ball get dropped like this?
Before we spend too much time going after Tony Scott, let’s take a moment and do what they do on CSI: take a look at the crime scene.
For the better part of a week T-Mobile subscribers who use the Sidekick mobile device have been having problems, lots of problems. Specifically, they have been having trouble getting access to their personal information. This has included contact lists, calendar data, photos, etc. Where was all of this data being stored? Why on Microsoft servers of course.
T-Mobile is now reporting that they have been able to restore the ability of the Sidekick to go online, they are also telling their users that they may not be able to recover their personal data. The exact phrase that was used was that the data “almost certainly” had been lost.
At the end of the day, the ultimate responsibility for this lost of countless users’ personal data has to rest of the shoulders of Microsoft’s CIO, Tony Scott. I suspect that that job is a great job until something like this happens. Microsoft got into the business of hosting T-Mobile Sidekick user’s personal data when they bought the company Danger, Inc. back in early 2008.
Microsoft has broken the unwritten rule that hosted data must never be lost or destroyed – when we store things in the cloud, we are trusting the firm doing the storing to make sure that nothing bad happens.
First off, if you use T-Mobile’s Sidekick device I’d suggest that you start backing up your personal data locally. Secondly, it’s pretty clear that the Danger, Inc. servers that Microsoft took ownership somehow got overlooked in the grand scheme of things.
Every CIO has to have a program in place that lays out step-by-step what the firm needs to do when they purchase another firm – the best example of a company that does this very well is Cisco. I can understand that the Danger, Inc. purchase happened before Tony Scott came on board; however, that is no excuse.
A CIO has to realize that he / she probably doesn’t have everything under control when they take the helm of the IT department. This means that a full audit of all servers being managed and just who is using them has to be one of the first things that a new CIO does.
Yes, Tony will probably survive this data loss disaster and yes, T-Mobile Sidekick users will probably continue to use the devices. However, there could be trust ramifications for the Cloud computing service called Azure that Microsoft is starting up – would you trust them with your data now?
In all fairness to Microsoft, I must report that on Friday, 10/16/09, Microsoft reported that they had been able to recover some of the lost Sidekick data. I can just imagine the mad scramble and expensive disk recovery resources that were involved in making this happen.
Congratulations to Microsoft for doing the right thing after the fact. Even given this “save”, it’s the CIO’s responsibility to make sure that things like this never happen in the first place.
What is the first thing that Microsoft’s CIO should have done when he realized that they had lost T-Mobile user’s data?
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Over at Wachovia (purchased by Wells Fargo awhile ago) the IT systems are dropping the ball and people are in danger of losing their homes. Sounds like Avid Modjtabai, Executive Vice President, Technology and Operations, for Wells Fargo & Company, has got some explaining to do…
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?
When you become CIO you are very quickly going to discover that on top of all of the cost cutting, uptime boosting, and IT team building that you have to do, you have yet another job. This is the job of chief technology visionary. The rest of the company (non-IT parts) are going to be looking at you to be all knowing and predict the (technology) future.
This means that you are going to be constantly learning. You’ll have to keep your fingers in a whole bunch of different pots so that when your CEO boss comes to you and says “I just read something about cloud computing, what does this mean for us?” you’ll have a smart and snappy comeback.
As an example of the type of information that you are going to have to be staying on top of, let’s take a moment and talk about databases. They are the workhorses of the modern IT department. We set them up, pound them with requests, and desperately try to keep their contents secure.
However, we are at a critical junction with databases right now and things are getting ready to change. Are you going to be ready to tell your management and peers why things have to change and how they are going to turn out? If not, then read on.
Back in May of 2008 out at the Claremont Resort in Berkeley, CA, Rakesh Agrawal and 26 other prominent database researchers got together to talk about this very issue. What came out of this meeting is what you need to know.
Databases have to change. There are a number of reasons why they need to change and how they need to change. Here are some of the reasons that the brightest minds in the database world think that changes are coming:
“Great!” I can hear you saying, so things are going to change. How are they going to change – what will the future look like? The answer is … I don’t know. However, with the help of those smart database researchers we can predict what areas you are going to see the most change in (and thus are where you should be watching):
When you become CIO, you are going to instantly be thrust into a spotlight where the rest of the company is going to be looking to you to understand and translate all of the changes that are occurring in IT technology. This will be a new role and in order to do it, you are going to have to start spending time researching what is going to be happening next in IT.
Your database systems are going to be a big part of the IT technology change. The reason that database systems are going to have to change range from the arrival of massive datasets, real-time processing demands, the arrival of unstructured data, and the emergence of cloud computing.
As a CIO you are going to have to be able to determine what changes in the database field you are going to have to watch because they will determine how the databases that you’ll be using tomorrow will operate. The key areas that will require your attention will include database engine changes, programmer productivity, data harmony, and support for mobile applications.
Spending your limited time watching these specific areas will provide you with the key insights that you will need in order to predict the future of database technology. Once you start doing this, you will have become the technology visionary that your firm wants in their CIO.
What function do you hope to add to your databases in the future?
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So this story should probably be filed in the “it should have never happened” drawer: Microsoft has lost the information that T-Mobile users of the Sidekick mobile phone entrusted them to store for them. Wait a minute, isn’t this the grand and glorious 21st Century in which data loss like this is never supposed to happen any more? How did Microsoft’s CIO let the ball get dropped like this?
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