Tag CIO Role

Entries 6 Total

What Staff Really Need From The CIO

Aug 11, ’09 1:41 PM

Much has been said about the role of the CIO in the enterprise and how that role may be changing over time, the need for more innovative ideas, more accountability, better partnership with internal customers and the significant challenges ahead for IT senior leaders.

In the mix of advice for CIOs and senior management, there is less guidance on what the staff, the folks who actually do all the hard work, need from senior IT leadership (usually the CIO or a similar role). What are the traits and behaviors that staff really need in a CIO? Here is a list to start discussion:

[1] – Articulating the Mission and Vision of IT – but perhaps not in the way it is normally done. Along with the standard PowerPoint deck or the coffee cup with a mission statement painted on the side, staff need to hear about the priorities, where you want to take the organization and how their work supports the larger enterprise. Sure, a presentation is nice, but these items are really driven home by informal, day-to-day actions, such as:

Continue Reading… Comments (12)

Flying At The Right Level As An IT Leader

Aug 5, ’09 3:23 PM

Like many other professions, the career path of an IT leader, VP, CTO or CIO usually starts out at a lower level within an organizational hierarchy, and may take many routes. A business analyst fresh out of college moves through the project management ranks, leading larger teams and programs until he is responsible for an enterprise-wide technology portfolio. A developer writes quality code for a few years, then leads a team of developers, and eventually finds herself as CTO for a software company managing hundreds.

The road to greater responsibility requires constant adjustment, from being an individual contributor to a manager, from being self-directed to a motivator of a large team. Many have correctly noted that organizations don’t usually provide much in the way of support resources for these transitions – they just happen, summed up well by the line “Poof, you’re a boss.”

Many of the challenges described by IT leaders as they move up the ladder can be categorized as changes of scale – how managing 100 people will differ from managing 5, the volume and types of HR issues to be encountered with a larger group, etc… and are all valid concerns.

Continue Reading… Comments (0)

Is the Role of CIO Ascending or Descending?

Jun 12, ’09 10:54 AM
Reading through the abundant content on the topics of “partnership” and “alignment” between IT and business units, it’s easy to get a little dispirited.  In survey after survey:
From the Business perspective, we hear that there is a large communication divide between IT and business units, that IT doesn’t understand the business, that IT staff don’t have the necessary skills to think beyond simple black and white (as proven by their Myers-Briggs scores), that they are still thinking in bits and bytes instead of business solutions, that they lack the communication and marketing skills to translate IT investments into business strategies, and can’t move fast enough to keep up with those changing strategies anyway…
From the IT perspective, we hear that the business is difficult to work with, that they only treat IT as a service organization and not as strategic partners, that their business “strategy” is really just a series of tactical projects that become a strategy in hindsight, that the business doesn’t understand the need for “infrastructure”, that IT only learns about the organization’s plans well downstream from when they were envisioned, and that IT may not have the “seat at the table” it requires to be a real strategic partner anyway…
Much as it’s possible to tune into a soap opera and see the same character hooked up to that hospital room ventilator after missing a year’s worth of episodes, we see these studies repeated each year, with eerily similar results.
Paging Dr. Phil?
Some look at these studies, the anecdotal evidence of CIO position eliminations and at the CIO tenure stats, and openly wonder about the future demise of the CIO role as it is known today.  Yet in the midst of this conversation we also see examples of organizations reinstating a prominent CIO role to their hierarchies after trying to get by without it, or even expanding the senior IT executive position to include additional functions such as Operations (in my view a great combination).
http://www.cio.com/article/441079/A_New_Role_for_CIOs
So where is the truth here?  Is the traditional CIO role on a downward slide based upon our inability to deliver real value (and market that value), or are we just in transition to something potentially better?
How are you defining your own future role?
Related articles:

Reading through the abundant content on the topics of “partnership” and “alignment” between IT and business units, it’s easy to get a little dispirited. In survey after survey:

From the Business perspective, we hear that there are large communication divides between IT and business units, that IT doesn’t understand the business, that IT staff don’t have the necessary skills to assist beyond simple black-and-white issues (as proven by their Myers-Briggs scores), that they are still thinking in bits and bytes instead of business solutions, that they lack the communication and marketing prowess to translate IT investments into business strategies, and can’t move fast enough to keep up with those changing strategies anyway…

From the IT perspective, we hear that the business is difficult to work with, that they only treat IT as a service organization and not as strategic partners, that their business “strategy” is really just a series of tactical projects that become a strategy in hindsight, that the business doesn’t understand the need for “infrastructure”, that IT only learns about the organization’s plans well downstream from when they were envisioned, and that IT may not have the “seat at the table” it requires to be a real strategic partner anyway…

Much as it’s possible to tune into a soap opera and see the same character hooked up to that hospital room ventilator after missing a year’s worth of episodes, we see these studies repeated each year, with eerily similar results.

Paging Dr. Phil?

Some look at these studies, the anecdotal evidence of CIO position eliminations and at the CIO tenure stats, and openly wonder about the future demise of the CIO role as it is known today.  Yet in the midst of all this gnashing of teeth we also see examples of organizations reinstating a prominent CIO role to their hierarchies after trying to get by without it, or even expanding the senior IT executive position to include additional functions such as Operations (in my view a great combination).

So where is the truth here?  Is the consensus C-Suite perception of the CIO role really on a downward trajectory, driven by our inability to deliver value (and market that value), or are we just in transition to something potentially better, more flexible, and more integrated with the rest of the organizations we serve?

How are you defining your own future role?

Comments (15)