Posts Tagged ‘leadership’

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Why Do None Of The Other Kids Want To Play With The CIO?

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010
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Why So Sad Mr. / Ms. CIO?

Why So Sad Mr. / Ms. CIO?

Just imagine that amazing moment in the future when you finally become the CIO! Now imagine yourself all alone – none of the other “C” level executives want to play with you. What’s going on here?

Not An Equal Among Peers

Something is seriously wrong in the world of CIOs. In most companies they are not being treated as a member of the senior management team. Instead, they are viewed as being simply viewed as technical specialists. Dang, what’s gone wrong here?

If you take a moment and talk with the other senior managers who are actually running the company you’ll start to hear the same things over and over again. CIOs just aren’t seen as having enough of the general management skills that it takes to participate in the process of running a company of any significant size. Other managers view the CIO as more often than not lacking both the strategic vision as well as the basic interpersonal skills that it takes to be a true leader.

What makes this a bit of a double whammy for a CIO is that the very skills that got you to this top spot in IT may be the ones that are holding you back now. Although this doesn’t really seem fair, there is good news here.

It turns out that the skills that a CIO needs in order to succeed can be learned (have I mentioned that Blue Elephant Consulting can help in this area?). The key is to understand just exactly what skills you will need.

That Leadership Thing

A classic CIO is someone who waits around to be told what to do instead of taking the lead. This skill is the way that most projects are run within the IT department – we get requirements from the customers / end users and then we apply our IT knowledge to solving their issues.

However, in the real world of business things don’t work that way. The CIO needs to be out in front showing true leadership. He / she needs to be uncovering the issues that are holding the company back and then showing the rest of the company what parts of solving that problem can be handled by IT and how the rest of the company has to lend a hand.

Are You Thinking Strategically?

Since the world of IT is often insulated from the world outside of the company, most CIOs have never had to think about how their actions (and now the IT department’s actions) impact the company’s competitive posture.

For that matter, most CIOs probably don’t know what the company’s current strategy is. It never mattered before. Once you become the CIO these things start to become very important. The key question that the CIO needs to be able to answer (every day) is what is the IT department doing to implement the company’s strategy right now?

It’s Not About Information, It’s All About Knowledge

As though staying on top of everything that is going on in the world of IT wasn’t enough, CIOs also have to be aware of what’s going on the rest of the company as well as in its marketplace. Needless to say, it can be easy to become overwhelmed with lots and lots of raw information.

In order to be able to contribute to the management of the company, CIOs need to be able to take all of this information in and process it. The ability to synthesis lots and lots of inputs and then make solid well-thought out decisions is what the rest of the management team is expecting the CIO to be able to do.

What All Of This Means For You

Gone are the days when a CIO could afford to be a wallflower in the executive boardroom. IT is too critical to how every company hopes to succeed to allow the CIO to not be a vital part of the company’s management team.

In order to make this happen when you become CIO, you’re going to need to make sure that you have the skills that the other senior managers are going to be expecting you to have. This will include the ability to lead, to think strategically, and to process large amounts of information.

Although this may all strike you as being just a bit scary, don’t be put off. Everything is doable and now that you know what will be expected of you, you can get a head start on learning what you need to know…

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

Question For You: What do you think the #1 skill that a CIO must have is?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’m not sure if this is going to make you feel any better, but it turns out that most CIOs are showing up for work only partially dressed when you consider what skills they are missing. Maybe we’d better have a talk about this…

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Posted in leadership | No Comments »

Is It Time To Say Goodbye To The CIO?

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
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Do You Really Know What Position You Ultimately Want To Get Promoted To?

Do You Really Know What Position You Ultimately Want To Get Promoted To?

So you want to be a CIO someday. Great. However, there may be a bit of a problem with your goal — the position of CIO may be going away. In fact, in about 10 years or so (is that when you are planning on seizing the reigns of IT control?) the position may look completely different from how it looks today. Hmm, a moving target. Maybe we should talk with some current CIOs to find out just what’s going on here…

Do CIOs Still Need To Have Business Skills?

Over at CIO Insight magazine they just got done doing their annual survey of CIOs. The results were, to say the least, eye-opening. The answer to the most asked question about the need for CIOs to have business skills is still a definite YES.

Current CIOs report that they are acting as much as business leaders as technology leaders. The days in which a CIO could lost himself / herself in the world of IT and be left alone appear to be long gone.

There is a bit of a double standard going one here however. CIOs are reporting that although they are being asked to implement programs that will result in fundamental business improvements, the position of CIO is still being pushed back to the second tier of senior management.

What Skills Do CIOs Need To Have Today?

With all of this talk of business skills, won’t CIOs need to have solid technical knowledge going forward? The answer appears to be yes, but. CIOs are saying that the job skills that they use most include finance, business process modeling, written and spoken communications, and just a bit of sales and marketing skills. I sure didn’t see servers, bandwidth, application security, or API knowledge anywhere on that list.

In fact, CIOs are reporting that the folks who are currently getting hired into IT positions have, can you believe it, even less business knowledge than people did just two years ago. This is quickly going to cause a problem: there are going to be very few qualified candidates to become CIO over the next few years. Can anyone say “opportunity”?

Skills That CIO-Wanna Bes Need To Be Working On

You might be asking yourself, so what skills do I need to be working on to take advantage of the need for business savvy CIO candidates that will be coming in the future?

The list is actually fairly short. To start with, you need to have very good public speaking skills and the leadership skills that will be required to implement what you talk about. A detailed understanding of the business that you are working for (like how they REALLY make their money) and a solid understanding of corporate finance.

There is, of course, more to this list. Once you’ve mastered the basics, then you’ll have to keep adding skills. Today’s CIOs report that you’ll also need to know how to master the strategic use of information, how to lead enterprise-wide changes, perform business model innovation, and improve business processes.

What All Of This Means For You

The report from today’s CIOs is not all good. It sure looks like CIOs are currently being treated as second-class citizens in the C-suite. However, as we all know, IT is not going away and it sure is not getting any less important. I’m thinking that CIOs are actually going to become more important over time.

CIOs are reporting that although business skills are becoming an even more important part of the set of tools that a CIO needs to have, fewer and fewer IT hires are coming with these skills. Clearly this is opening the door for those who dream of someday becoming the CIO.

Although it looks like you might have a shot at the top spot, it’s not going to be handed to you. You’re going to have to work at it. We’ve laid out the skills that you need to develop. Not go out there and get ready for the day that they call your name to become the firm’s next CIO…!

Do you think that the position of CIO will still exist in 10 years?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Forget the whole alignment thing, is it possible that a CIO’s behavior is the root of the problem that the IT side of the house and the business side of the house have never been able to get along? Could it be that this is the secret as to why there has always been such a gap between these groups?

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Posted in career | 5 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 »

Cisco’s John Chambers’ Recession Tips For CIOs

Monday, August 10th, 2009
John Chambers Knows How To Survive A Recession

John Chambers Knows How To Survive A Recession

It can be a long and lonely journey through a recession for anyone, including CIOs. The company’s very survival may be at stake, the CIO’s job may be at risk, and of course there is that big unanswered question about what needs to be done to prepare for life AFTER the recession is over. Maybe Cisco’s John Chambers can offer us some insights…

Who Is John Chambers?

Michael Malone over at the Wall Street Journal had a chance to sit down with John Chambers and ask him for some guidance  for how CIOs can make it through these troubling times.

Just in case you don’t know who John Chambers is, he’s the CEO of the computer networking giant Cisco. Roughly 3/4 of all Internet traffic is estimated to run over Cisco gear and if you own a LinkSys router in your home or use one of those little Flip digital cameras then you are a Cisco customer.

John Chambers was at the helm of Cisco when the tech world really took a dive back in 2001. When he talks about what CIOs need to do to survive the current downturn, he knows what he’s talking about…

Chamber’s Suggestions For Surviving A Recession

John Chambers has a playbook that contains four key elements for how to survive a downturn. The playbook has been created based on years of experience in the tech industry and having had a chance to watch once great companies fall by the wayside. Here are Chambers’ key points:

  • Be Realistic: All too often CIOs like to pretend that the challenges that they are facing are all caused by the current economic situation. In reality, it’s more often a combination of what’s going on in the market as well as challenges that they are creating internally. Being able to realize that these are two separate groups is the first step in coming up with a plan to deal with them.
  • Assess Your Situation: When  a CIO discovers that a recession is starting to happen, he/she needs to ask themselves how long they think that this is going to last (they always end eventually!) and how deep it’s going to be. The answer all too often turns out to be that it’s going to last longer than you anticipate and be more severe. Knowing this you can create plans that will see you though the entire downturn, not just some made up short period of time.
  • Get Ready For The Upturn: This is the part that so many CIOs miss – all recessions eventually end. Although the ability to do a good job of cutting costs will help see the company through the recession, it’s the ability to position the IT department to help the company burst into the lead once the recession is over that will prove a CIO’s true value.
  • Get Closer To Your Customers: You would think that this would have always been on Cisco’s list, but Chambers admits that it was added only after the 2001 recession. The closer that you are to your customers, the sooner you will realize when a recession is starting because you’ll see the pain that they are starting to feel. This helps you to react quicker and better.

Final Thoughts

In an era in which firms seem to go through CEOs like copier paper and in a region of the county, Silicon Valley, in which there are very few survivors, John Chambers has not only survived, but he has done a great job of thriving. His experiences with multiple recessions provide a great lesson for all current and future CIOs who want to help their companies to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The very first baby boomer was born on January 1st, 1946. Soon after that a LOT more baby boomers were born. This generation of workers is just now reachingretirement age en-mass. With the possibility of having a large group of experienced workers leave the workforce all at once, should CIOs be worried?

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Posted in recession | 5 Comments »

CIO Cloud Computing 101: Problems With Clouds

Monday, August 3rd, 2009
Not All Clouds Are Right For Cloud Computing<br>(c) - 2006

Not All Clouds Are Right For Cloud Computing(c) - 2006

Cloud computing is all the rage these days and everyone who is anyone is making plans to implement at least some flavor of it as soon as possible. It turns out that the decision to go with a cloud computing solution for your IT department might not be as simple as some would lead you to believe. There are challenges to successfully using a cloud and we need to talk about them…

The Seven Challenges Of Cloud Computing

With all of the magazine articles, conferences, and vendors who have shown up to sell it, it’s easy to forget that cloud computing is still an emerging technology – it’s not quite fully baked yet. Neal Leavitt has spent some time studying cloud computing and has identified the following seven issues. CIOs will need to investigate their potential effects before agreeing to any cloud computing initiative:

  • Control: this is the biggest issue when it comes to using cloud computing. By design a company gives up control when they sign up to use a firm’s cloud resources. This means that the cloud provider can make changes to the infrastructure without telling the company at any time. This needs to be managed.
  • Performance / Reliability: When you are using resources that are not located within your firm’s buildings the question of how much computing horsepower you have available when you need it comes up. Additionally, failures will happen and so understanding how you’ll be notified and how quickly issues will be resolved is critical.
  • Security: You know that you can protect your mission critical business data when it’s inside your own walls, but what happens when somebody else is managing it for you?
  • Cost Of Bandwidth: You should be saving money on buying hardware and staffing to maintain it. However, you’ll need to very accurately forecast you bandwidth costs in order to determine the true cost of using the cloud.
  • Vendor Lock-In: true standards for how applications communicate and control applications that are in a vendor’s cloud have not yet been established. This means that vendors are creating their own proprietary interfaces that could end up tying you to a vendor for longer than you would like.
  • Transparency: basically this comes down to the difficulty that you’ll have doing an audit of your IT resources. Since you don’t have true visibility into the cloud you can’t say for certain who has access to your data and how you can keep people out of your sensitive data.
  • Reliability: I’d like to say that clouds are 100% reliable, but I can’t. The trade rags are filled with stories about connections that have gone down and back-up diesel generators that have failed to switch on. There is risk with every decision, you need to decide if you can handle the risk that comes with cloud computing.

Final Thoughts

As exciting as the new field of cloud computing is, CIOs need to slow down and take a deep breath. This is new stuff and that means that not all of the details have been worked out just yet. There are seven major areas that could have a dramatic impact on your company’s ability to get the most out of cloud computing. Do your homework and see if cloud computing offers you a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

Questions For You

How important is it for you to retain complete control over your IT boxes? How much downtime can your department / business handle? What would the impact of a security breach be? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Cloud computing is hot – there’s no denying that. However, as with all things in the information technology field, cloud computing isn’t standing still. Even as  you read these words, engineers are hard at work defining and refining just exactly what a cloud computing architecture looks like and how it behaves. Let’s take a peek at what the future holds…

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Posted in cloud computing | 2 Comments »

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