Posts Tagged ‘failure’

Great CIOs Aren’t Afraid To Stumble On The Way To The Top

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011
Image Credit
G1reat CIOs always slip up before they become great

Great CIOs always slip up before they become great

A quick question for you: are you afraid to fail? Would you be willing to take on responsibility for an IT department that might not be a success? I’m willing to bet that a lot of us would say “no” – CIOs who are perfect are rewarded while CIOs who fail are kicked to the curb. However, I’m going to tell you that you’re wrong – get ready to fail if you want to succeed.

How To Kill Your CIO Career

In your job right now, if you fail then that end-of-year review would be a tough one to sit through, right? Let’s face it, failure is not something that is rewarded in our workplace and in fact it’s something that we all actively avoid if we possibly can.

However, maybe we’re just setting ourselves up for a much bigger career disaster. Can we all admit that the world as we know it is changing? Can you remember watching old-time movies where the hero would get a job at a company and then spend his or her entire career working there? We all know that those days are long gone.

Something else is changing also: our jobs. The job that you had when you started working may already be gone. The CIO one that you’re doing right now probably won’t exist in what, 2, maybe 3 years from now. This all means that you are going to have to change and change involves risk and along with risk comes the very real possibility that you are going to fail.

How To Become A Success By Failing

Well, that failing stuff doesn’t sound like it’s going to be any fun. But wait, has anyone else ever failed? Turns out that yes, in fact most successful people can look at their past and point to failures that helped them to get to where they are now.

The poster child for this kind of “good failure” would be Howard Schultz – the guy who founded the Starbucks chain of coffee shops. We all know and love the Starbucks store today, but when Howard first started it he really blew it. There were no chairs, he played lots of opera music, and his menu was in Italian. Clearly he quickly realized that he had failed, adjusted, and went on to become a big success.

You can do the same. You need to learn to make lots of small bets. Some of these bets will pay off, and some won’t. It’s through what you learn from the failures that you’ll be able to make tiny changes to your approach and try, try again.

If we keep doing things the same way that we’ve always been doing them, then we will eventually stagnate and then we’ll go into decline. However, if you have the courage to start to fail and to learn from those failures, then the future contains limitless possibilities for both you and your career.

What All Of This Means For You

CIOs who are afraid to fail will never become a true success. Oh sure, they may do ok for a few years, but when things get really rough, they’ll wash out.

If you are willing to adjust how you view failure, your career can take off. If you can start to look at failures as being simply being learning experiences that are not be feared, but they are to be used to become a better CIO then you’ll be able to grow and become better at what you do.

No, you can’t be an idiot about this and do silly things that cause your IT department to fail, but if you try your hardest and your department still fails than you will have learned what doesn’t work. The big deal is that it takes courage for you to be able to do this.

CIOs who are a success have to had failures in their past. It’s from the forge of failure that the steel of success is formed. Learn how to make small bets so that you can learn what works and what doesn’t. Do this well and you’ll become a successful CIO.

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

Question For You: What’s the best way to get your CEO to become comfortable with failures as a sign of success?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So there I was the other day talking with one of my CIO customers and I was going on and on about how they could introduce cloud computing into their IT department. I had been working with this client for several years and we know each other very well so he felt comfortable in stopping me in mid-sentence. He said “Jim, I’ve been hearing a lot about this cloud computing stuff and I sorta know what is it, but I’m not sure that I fully understand it. ” Oops, I hadn’t realized that there were still folks out there that hadn’t “drunk the cloud Kool-Aid”. Ok, so now we’re going to take care of this.

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Posted in economic failure | No Comments »

4 Ways That CIOs Can Start To Make Better Decisions

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011
Image Credit CIOs Need A Tool To Help Them Make Better Decisions

CIOs Need A Tool To Help Them Make Better Decisions

An important part of the job of being a CIO is the ability to make good decisions. Lots of good decisions. In fact, the ability to make more good decisions than bad decisions is arguably what allows a CIO to keep his / her job. Now the only problem is that it’s really, really hard to make good decisions all the time. To help you do a better job of this, I’m going to share with you four decision making tools that will help you every time you have to make a decision.

A New Way Of Making Decisions

CIOs need a new way to make correct decisions. Our ultimate goal should be to find ways to make the right decision more often than not. One way to do this is to adopt the “evidence based decision making” approach. This form of decision making rejects using gut feels and relying on past limited personal experience and instead is based on evidence and logic.

The problem that most CIOs run into when they try to apply evidence based decision making to their organizations is that it runs counter to the way that things are currently done. Every company has its share of stories about gutsy managers who just knew what the right thing to do was, and did it. What we forget are the stories about the managers who thought that they knew what to do and ended up doing the wrong thing.

Ask For Evidence

CIOs are always being presented with requests for something. More often than not it is for funding, but it can also be for resources or even simply for permission to proceed. You need to take a careful look at each of these requests.

When a CIO is using the evidence-based approach to making decisions, he or she needs to ask the people who are making the request for evidence. They are proposing doing something, they need to be able to prove to you that by taking the action that they want to take, good things will happen. If they can’t prove it, then you need to reject their request.

Look At Logic

When plans are presented to a CIO, they are often backed up with the results of surveys, charts and graphs of data, and lots of other impressive looking results. When presented with this type of information, CIOs need to be on the alert.

All too often in our very busy lives we tend to accept what is presented to us at face value. What we really need to be doing is taking a step back and looking more closely at the underlying data.

The question that you need to be asking yourself is if the results that have been drawn from the data really make sense. Are there any gaps or leaps in logic that really just don’t hold up? You’ll be amazed at how often you’ll find things that don’t support the conclusions that have been reached. When this happens, you need to send the team making the request back to the drawing board.

Experiment & Reward

Not every project is going to succeed. In fact, in the world of IT some projects fail in a spectacular fashion. Things really don’t have to be this way. If CIOs could become better decision-makers then a lot of this could be avoided.

One way to avoid big IT project failures is to encourage small IT project failures. That’s not as bad as it may sound. CIOs need to create an environment in which employees are encouraged to start pilot projects and to try out new ideas using trials before the CIO has to commit to a much larger project.

Many of these smaller projects will fail. This is a good thing – far better to have a small project fail and learn from it than have a much larger project fail and learn nothing. CIOs need to reward IT staff that work on projects that fail – everyone needs to see that there is much to be learned from each project no matter how it turns out.

Find Wisdom

Perhaps the simplest way for CIOs to make better decisions more of the time is for them to have one simple realization. If a CIO can understand that they don’t know it all, that there is still a lot that they need to learn, then they’ll be able to make better decisions.

Far too often CIOs assume that they know everything that they need to know in order to make the right decision. However, the reality is much different – there is no way that they know what they don’t know. Admitting that you don’t know it all is the first step in being open to collecting more information and becoming a CIO who makes better decisions.

What All Of This Means For You

All too often CIOs lose their job because they made bad decisions. It turns out that a big part of being the CIO is the ability to make a lot of good decisions. What is needed are tools that will help a CIO to do a better job of making the correct decision.

Four such tools exist and can be used by CIOs. The first is to demand evidence when a proposal is made. The next is to test the logic behind any proposal that is made. To ensure that the IT department can support the CIO in making good decisions, the CIO needs to allow trial programs to be run. These trials need to be allowed to fail and IT employees have to be rewarded for uncovering information before a bigger investment was made. Finally, CIOs need to teach their staff that they don’t know everything and everyone must respect the fact that there is much more for them to learn.

Although CIOs deal with technology, much of the their day-to-day job has to do with teaching. In order to make better decisions, they need to take the time to teach their IT department how to look at opportunities and how to use the information that is available to make the best decisions each and every time.

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

Question For You: How do you think that a CIO should react to an IT trial program that failed?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you are CIO you will quickly come to dread (or maybe you already do) the annual strategic planning process for the IT department. Talk about choices: mobile devices, privacy issues, cloud computing – who can pack strategic planning for all of these issues into one short period at the beginning of the year – there’s got to be a better way…

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Posted in decisions | 2 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.

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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…

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Posted in product managment | 4 Comments »

Why Don’t IT Alliances Work Out?

Monday, April 20th, 2009

IT Department Alliances Can Make Everyone Stronger - If They Are Done Correctly

IT Department Alliances Can Make Everyone Stronger - If They Are Done Correctly

You would think that the more alliances that your company / IT department makes with other firms, then the better that they would become at making them. After all, practice makes perfect – doesn’t it? It turns out that this is not always the case.

Koen Heimeriks has spent time studying 200 firms that had formed more than 3,400 alliances. What he has found just might surprise you.

He found that those firms that had the most experience striking up alliances actually had worse results when compared to those firms who had moderate experience.

Why the difference? It turns out that there are two problems that develop in firms that already have  a number of alliances:

  1. they have a tendency to become overconfident in their alliance building skills, and
  2. they can develop learnings about alliances that are in actuality based on unsupported ideas about cause and effect.

So what can make an IT department’s alliance with another firm actually work out well? It turns out that it’s the methods and procedures that the firm uses to create alliances that will determine their eventual success. Established firms that already have many alliances will probably have rigid and inflexible business processes for making decisions and selecting partners.

However, IT departments with fewer existing alliances will have more flexibility built into their processes. An example of this would be where employees who have worked on previous alliances share information with the employees who are trying to create a new alliance. This type of discussion can lead to experimentation and allows novel approaches to each alliance opportunity.

So in the end, what does all of this lead to? Heimeriks reports that the larger firms who had many alliances and a more rigid alliance creation process had an alliance success rate of around 50%. Those firms that had fewer alliances and a more flexible alliance creation process had an alliance success rate of around 71%. Sure looks like flexible processes are the key to successful IT alliances!

Does your IT department have any alliances with outside firms? Would you say that you have a lot or a few of these alliances? Are they generally successful or not so successful? Do you feel that your alliance creation processes are fixed or flexible? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in process | 2 Comments »

How To Drive An IT Department Into The Ground

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

Seven Things That An IT Department Needs To Avoid In Order To Be Successful

Seven Things That An IT Department Needs To Avoid In Order To Be Successful

You can go just about anywhere on the web or in your local bookstore and find ways to make your IT department a success. However, clearly this is not an easy thing to do when you take a moment to consider how much time that we spend trying to be successful.

What’s missing from all of this is that you need to understand how people have failed at this task in order to understand what you need to do in order to succeed. How about if we take a look at some of the classic ways that IT departments have failed big time?

  • Fake Synergies: All companies love this one – let’s merge with someone who has complementary strengths in order to grow. However, this rarely seems to work for IT departments. Sometimes synergies do actually exist; however, this can be even worse because it can cause an IT department to head off in the wrong direction. Getting access to new customers or delivery systems can seem like a good idea, until AFTER the merger.
  • Questionable Financial Engineering: We’ve all see this one show up at the end of a quarter or a fiscal year. Getting aggressive in how accounting is done won’t necessarily land someone (you) in jail, but it can cause you some sleepless nights. The two big problems that getting creative with your company / department’s financing is that they can cause you to believe in a product that is less than perfect and they can cause you to take on more risk – a move that the current downturn shows can be very risky.
  • Sticking With A Strategy Too Long: Tenacity has long been considered to be a key asset of IT leaders. However, if you are going in the wrong direction in the first place, then this can lead to disaster. There is a secret at work here: the reason that IT departments don’t change course is because the economics of doing things the new way don’t measure up to the economics of doing things the old way.
  • “It’s Just A Step To The Left”: Often companies and IT departments decide that they need to try to sell new products to their existing customers or maybe through new channels (sometimes called an “adjacent-market” strategy). However, sometimes this is a bad idea that can bring down a department. You can tell that this is a bad idea if you are considering  making this move not because it’s a good business opportunity, but rather because your core business is having problems.
  • Selecting The Wrong Technology: This one we all should recognize – betting on BetaMax when VHS ends up winning.
  • Consolidating Too Quickly: All too often companies rush to consolidate when markets are maturing and the number of companies in the market start to shrink. Keeping in mind that when you buy a company you not only get its IT department, but you also get all of the problems that come along with it.

An IT department is just a part of a larger organization. However, both the company and the IT department are responsible for the overall success of the company. If you can avoid making these mistakes then you will that much closer to being successful!

Have you ever worked at a company that made any of the mistakes that we’ve discussed? Could you see that there were going to be problems from the beginning or did that only show up later on? What did the company try to do when problems started showing up? Did it help to address the problems? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »