Posts Tagged ‘decision making’

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Women In IT: What’s The Current Score?

Monday, May 18th, 2009

Women Are Making Progress In IT, But There Is Still Work To Be Done

Women Are Making Progress In IT, But There Is Still Work To Be Done

How many women work in your IT department? Is your CIO a woman? The answer to the first question is probably “not that many“, and the answer to the second is all too often “no“. We’ve been aware that this is an issue for awhile, how are we doing on addressing it?

How Do Women Feel About Working In IT?

One of the best places to start when we are trying to figure out where things currently stand, is to ask the women who are currently working in IT how it’s going. Rob Preston over at InformationWeek did some data collection and he discovered a study on this topic that was released by a women’s professional organization called Catalyst.

The study revealed that women working in the IT field were basically satisfied with both their jobs and where they worked. However, there are still big issues when it comes to how they interact with their bosses, how fair they think decision making is, and how much of an opportunity they have to participate in planning.

How Many Female CIOs Do We Have?

We’ve got more today than we had 5 years ago; however, there are only about 75 female CIOs in InformationWeek’s top 500 companies (that comes out to be about 15%). This list includes:

  • Kathy Owen – Unum
  • Marina Levinson – NetApp
  • Beth Perlman – Constellation Energy
  • Leslie Jones – Motorola

There’s been improvement, but there is still a long way to go.

What Tech Companies Do A Good Job Of Promoting Women?

This is where the rubber meets the road. Any company can talk a good line about how much they support diversity; however, promoting someone into the senior management ranks means that you think that they have the best chance of driving revenue. Here’s how the familiar tech names stack up:

  • HP – 21% of senior executives are women
  • Oracle – 18%
  • IBM – 13%
  • Google – 13%
  • Cisco – 11%
  • Microsoft – 11%
  • Dell – 0%

Oh my – did you see that Dell number? There is no excuse for that – women make up too much of the total IT workforce today for any company to be that unbalanced.

The Next Steps

So should IT departments start to institute mandatory gender based promotions so that 51% of their senior staff are female? No, that’s not the correct solution. In the end, what we all want is the best people leading the company independent of gender.

IT may always be just a bit “male heavy” because of the nature of the beast. However, for any company to succeed, you need to make sure that everyone has a chance at the top spots and you need to make sure that you have a bench of capable employees that is made up of all genders. That’s the secret to real long-term success.

Does your IT department have a balanced number of men and women leading it? Do you feel that women have an equal shot at senior management positions? What does your firm do to prepare workers to become senior managers? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in career | 1 Comment »

Who Gets To Make Decisions In Your IT Shop?

Monday, February 23rd, 2009
Where IT Decisions Get Made And Who Makes Them Is Very Important

Where IT Decisions Get Made And Who Makes Them Is Very Important

A recent study of 89 senior IT executives in a wide range of industries was done in order to get the answer to a seemingly simple question: who’s in charge here?

In these days of reigned in IT spending, decisions about how much to spend and what to spend it on seem to have migrated even farther up the command ladder. It turns out that this is causing an IT credibility gap: others are making decisions that we then have to deliver on. Is this any way to run a company?

I’m hoping that we can all agree that having IT work hand-in-hand with the rest of the company has never been more important. This means that getting decision rights and accountability right is now critical to an IT department’s success.

If you boil it down, IT departments are responsible for not only hardware and software assets, but also for all customer and supplier data along with many automated business  processes. This means that if IT decision making is not properly placed, the impacts will be felt company wide.

There are two ways to get decision making wrong. The first is called a techocentric gap and this is when IT is in charge of all decisions. We’ve all see what this can do. The other is called a business gap – this is when all decision making is done outside of the IT department. Neither of these solutions is the right way to go.

In the end, there are really three types of IT decisions that need to be made. Technical decisions around IT infrastructure and architecture probably need to reside primarily within IT. IT investment and strategic decisions need to be made jointly by IT management and business top management. Finally, once again IT top management and business top management need to work together to make outsourcing decisions.

Where do IT decisions get made in your IT department? Is there a gap between IT and the business? Does IT get held responsible for decisions that they played no role in making? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in decisions | 1 Comment »

Getting & Keeping IT Top Management’s Attention

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Getting Senior Management To Stay Involved In A Project Can Be Hard To Do

Getting Senior Management To Stay Involved In A Project Can Be Hard To Do

In my humble opinion, one of the key contributors to why so many IT projects fail is because of simple neglect. I guess the best analogy is if you were starting to drive down a highway road. When you started driving, you’d keep your hands on the steering wheel and make sure that the car was going in the correct direction and that it stayed on the road. However, if later on you took both of your hands off of the wheel, then the car would start to drift and would eventually plunge off of the road.

IT projects seem to follow this same path: when they are kicked off, everyone, including senior IT management, seems to have their hands on the steering wheel. However, as the days, weeks, months go on it sure seems like nobody is holding on to the wheel any more and the project tends to start to drift. All too often, more people are then thrown at the project or, worse yet, the schedule is reduced which causes the project to speed up. This just makes the eventual crash all that more spectacular.

So none of this discussion is news to us IT folks – we’ve seen it over and over again. What we need to find is a way to stop this from happening. Jesper Simonsen is a European professor who has spent some time studying this problem. He’s come up with some suggestions as to how we can go about fixing it.

Simonsen believes that the key to getting senior IT management involved in a project is to use participatory design so that they feel that they have contributed to the solution. The specific technique that he believes can be used to make this happen is called “problem mapping“.

Too many IT staffers solve problems by sitting in their cubes and dreaming up new ways to deal with old problems. Participatory design requires IT staffers to deal with a problem directly. They share their views on the problem and then they offer their suggestions as to how IT can be used to solve the problem.

In order to engage senior IT management, they need to be involved in this development of an answer to why IT needs to be involved in solving the problem. This is where problem mapping comes in.

Problem mapping is designed to allow the argument regarding if and how IT should be used to solve a problem to be evaluated. It provides a means by which the argument can be visualized and helps in seeing the structure of the argument.

When you use problem mapping, you create a table that has four columns with the following headers:

  • Problem / Need
  • Causes
  • Consequences
  • Solutions

The real power of using a problem map is that it will force all involved to talk about what they see as being the real problem. The link between what they are proposing as a solution and the original problem is very clearly shown.

The key point to make here is that by making the whole problem solving process so visible, you will actively engage the top management in the process. They will be given an opportunity to sit back and challenge, make changes to, and review the solution that is being created before their very eyes.

Once you’ve achieved this level of participation at the start of a project, the senior IT management will remain involved during the entire project because they will better understand what is being done and they will feel as though they have contributed to the solution.

Do you have problems keeping your senior management involved in projects after they get started? What have you tried to improve their involvement? Was it successful? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in business alignment | 1 Comment »

What Is The #1 IT Skill That A CIO Needs To Have?

Monday, December 29th, 2008

CIOs Need One Critical Missing Skill In Order To Make Good Decisions

CIOs Need One Critical Missing Skill In Order To Make Good Decisions

Today’s CIOs are expected to have many more sets of skills than those that they followed did. One can only suspect that the CIOs of tomorrow will be faced with even higher expectations. Cloud computing, outsourcing, insourcing, business alignment, top line growth, bottom line growth – which one is the most important to know the most about? It turns out that the answer is none of these.

A little secret that nobody ever talks about is that the higher in an organization that you rise, the less “real work” you actually get to do. Many first time IT managers struggle with this new reality – they are the ones who can’t help but do the work of those that they mange.

Jack Welch probably said it best in his biography Jack: Straight from the Gut when he said that as CEO of GE, really all he was able to do was to hire and fire people and approve budgets – that’s it! CIOs are in the same situation, so what is the #1 skill that they must have?

Simple, the ability to reach conclusions when all that they have to work with is ambiguous evidence. Think about it for a moment, all of the information that a CIO gets has been heavily filtered by the rest of the IT organization. If there are any unpopular opinions, then they have probably been censored before reaching the CIO. An slanted or partisan viewpoints have been masked as objective arguments. There is even the possibility that honest mistakes have been made.

CIO’s need to have a type of analytical rigor that will allow them to make sense of the information that is presented to them. This is the skill that will allow them to sort through all of the information that crosses their desk and will allow them to dive down and finally get to the real story.

The big question for tomorrow’s CIOs is how can you get the bottom of things when all that you have to work with is incomplete information? How can you present yourself to your colleagues and to your IT department as an authentic IT leader in such a way that others will be willing to follow you?

One of the most dangerous things that can mislead a CIO is his/her own opnion. Sure we all have an opinion; however, if we pre-judge a situation and reach our own opinion too quickly then we can find ourselves falling into a pattern of belief. We may do this because it’s simple to do or because it fits some particular social need.

However, the problem with our opinions is that they don’t necessarily have to be true. If a CIO chooses to believe something because of just the information that has been presented to him/her, then its going to be very hard to get him/her to surrender that belief.

Too many of us like to say that we keep an open mind when we really don’t. In order to be an effective CIO both today and tomorrow, we’re going to need to make sure that we work very hard to make good decisions. This means that we’ve got to realize that we will never have complete information. What we need to do is find ways to use the partial information that we have to get to the bottom of the issues. Then, and only then, will we be effective CIOs.

Have you ever had to make a decision without all of the information that you needed? How did you go about reaching a decision? Was it the right decision? What would you have done differently if you could go back and make that decision again? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in CIO, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

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