Posts Tagged ‘communications’

CIO’s Overestimate How Good Of A Manager They Are

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
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How Do You Think That You Measure Up As A Boss…?

How Do You Think That You Measure Up As A Boss…?

With a little luck, every CIO realizes that they are only as good as the people that they have working for them. What this means is that they need to be a good boss if they want to be successful. This leads to a critical question: how good of a boss are you? It turns out that most of us seem to think that we’re a better boss than we probably really are…

The Survey

The good folks over at the consulting firm Development Dimensions International, Inc. have just completed a study of 1,100 front-line managers (you know, the folks that CIOs eventually get chosen from). The results are not what you’d hope for.

What would you hope for? Well, you’d like this collection of mangers to realized that they don’t know it all. You’d want to hear some self-doubt and you’d especially like to hear that they realize that they’ve got a ways to go in order to become truly effective managers. That’s not what DDI found.

Instead, what their survey showed was that most managers, and CIOs, tend to over-estimate their management skills. On top of this, they seem to have very little self-doubt. Hey, I’m all for self confidence, but it sure looks like the CIO pool is just a little bit too confidant.

Two of the questions that DDI asked in their survey really drove this too much self-confidence issue home. One question asked if during their first year the mangers ever regretted being promoted – a very natural feeling. A whopping 74% said no. The next question asked if during the first year the new manager ever questioned their ability to lead others. Once again, 72% said no. Ouch! We seem to be just a little bit too full of ourselves here.

What Makes Someone A Good CIO?

It’s the rest of DDI’s survey that really provides the interesting information for CIOs. DDI has broken the job of being a CIO down into 10 different skill sets. As you take a look at this list, you’ll be able to see how each one of them is a critical CIO skill:

  • Setting work standards

  • Planning and organizing

  • Decision making

  • Communication

  • Technical and professional skills

  • Initiating action

  • Adaptability

  • Coaching

  • Gaining commitment

  • Delegating

The survey showed that CIOs and managers believe that they do a good job of setting work standards along with planning and organizing. Although they think that they do a good job here, it doesn’t always show. It would have been interesting if the survey had included feedback from the staff that is being managed!

Somewhat not surprising, the areas that CIOs feel that they need to work on the most include many of the soft skill areas. These include such management tasks as delegating and getting commitment from their teams. CIOs have their technical skills down, it’s the people skills that still need the most work.

What All Of This Means For You

What the results of this survey show us is that most of us have an over inflated view of our ability to manage an IT department. It appears as though this belief is with us when we first become CIO and it doesn’t seem to leave as we advance in our career.

It turns out that there are 10 different skill sets that we need to have as a CIO if we want to do a good job of leading our department. We believe that we do the best job of setting work standards and we need the most assistance in the area of delegating.

This information is critical for us as CIOs to study and understand. None of us are perfect; however, by understanding where we are weakest we can focus our efforts to become better.

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

Question For You: What do you think CIOs should do during their first year to become better managers?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Ok, admit it – cloud computing is here to stay. If you haven’t already signed up for a cloud then you will be doing so shortly. However, before you start writing the check, you really should know what you are buying. Everyone likes to talk about how good / bad cloud computing is; however, before now nobody has ever taken the time to talk about what you should be looking for when you go cloud shopping…

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Posted in management | 1 Comment »

6 Reasons That IT / Business Alignment May Be Impossible To Do

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

A quick quiz for you: what has been the #1 task on every CIO’s to-do list for the better part of the past 20 years? If you guessed “aligning IT with the rest of the business” then you are correct. This has been an IT goal for the past 20 years? What’s up with that? When you become CIO what are you going to do to solve this problem. Can it even be solved?

It’s All About Communication

Why has something that sounds so simple when we talk about it been so hard for CIOs to do? Tony Kontzer over at CIO Insight has taken a look at what’s been holding CIOs back and he’s come up with one answer: communication.

I’m pretty sure that we all know where this one is going. The non-IT business folks like to spend their time talking in business terms and we over on the IT side of the house seem to be only able to communicate using IT jargon. The results of this inability to communicate can be disastrous.

The Tower Of Babel — IT Style

When the business side of the house and the IT side of the house find it hard to communicate, what happens is that they simply stop communicating. When this happens, each side goes off and starts to do its own thing.

I can’t tell you how many firms that I’ve worked for where I’ve seen this happen. When communication breaks down between IT and the rest of the business is when you start to see the multiplying factor start to show up: multiple email systems, multiple ERP applications, etc.

From a CIO perspective, this is the worst thing in the world that can happen. The reason is that every IT system that gets added to the company means that there is one more system that needs to supported forever and that boosts the cost of having the IT department do work that does nothing to help the company’s bottom line.

The Big 6

When you become CIO, how will you be able to measure how well the IT department and the rest of the company are doing in trying to align themselves? Well, you’ll have to fall back on what everyone in IT loves the most: metrics. The trick is knowing what needs to be measured. Here are the top six alignment metrics as recommended by the Society for Information Management (SIM):

  1. Communication Channels: Have effective communications channels been established between the IT department and the other departments in the firm? Are these channels being used?
  2. Metrics: are metrics in place and are they being measured in order to determine where the firm stands in it’s efforts to align how the business processes operate and what the IT department spends its time working on?
  3. Governance: are there processes in place that will ensure that what IT works on lines up with what the company’s true business needs are?
  4. Partnership: is there a partnership between IT and the rest of the departments where each is taking actions to make the other more successful?
  5. HR: does the HR department understand what the company is trying to align and are they taking action to attract and retain the talent that will be needed to make this happen?
  6. Technology: are the right tools in place and available to be used in order to drive the changes that will be needed to transform how business is done once the alignment has occurred?

What All Of This Means To You

For way too long CIOs have been looking for ways to try to align what IT does with what the rest of the business needs. So far they have not been successful.

The primary stumbling block has been the simple fact that there exists an enormous two-way communications gap between the IT department and the rest of the firm. IT communicates using technical terms that nobody else knows about while the rest of the firm communicates using business terms that make no sense to the IT staff.

A first step in finally bridging this gap is to implement the six alignment process metrics that we’ve identified. When you become CIO these will provide you with a way to measure your progress in finally getting the IT department to become a meaningful part of the firm. Nobody ever said that this was going to be easy, but at least now you have a plan for how you can accomplish the impossible.

What do you think is the biggest barrier stopping the IT department from working more effectively with the rest of the company?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you become CIO, you’ll probably have all of the technical skills that you need to stay on top of today’s cutting edge IT issues such as storage, bandwidth, cloud computing, etc.  However, there is one thing that you may have forgotten to get: a law degree…

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Posted in alignment | 6 Comments »