Pick one and own it by Jason Cohen on A Smart Bear

The Strategy Trap: Why focusing too much on strategy could be killing your ability to execute by Olivier Blanchard on The BrandBuilder Blog

HR Hint of the Day: Let Them Run Through the Sprinklers by Frank Roche on KnowHR Blog {If you click on no other link today, click on this one!}

The twin evils of IT gridlock and denials by Michael Krigsman on Enterprise Irregulars

There’s no room for The Idea Guy by David on Signal vs. Noise

Business models for linked data and web 3.0 by Scott Brinker on Chief Marketing Technologist

Are innovation strategies back on CIO agendas? by Linda Tucci on TotalCIO

Thinking About Networks and Social Media and Online Collaborations by Beth Kanter on Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Like Siblings, Teams Get Locked Into Behavior Patterns by Andrew O’Connell on HarvardBusiness.org

Community Management: The Strategic New IT-Enabled Business Capability by Dion Hinchcliffe on Enterprise Irregulars

Who Are Your Positive Deviants? by Hutch Carpenter on CloudAve

Losing Andrew Carnegie by Seth Godin on Seth’s Blog

The One Thing About Building A Community By Mitch Joel on Six Pixels of Separation

Did you catch the news earlier this week?   Gene De Libero and I started a new blog titled “CIO Essentials“.  Gene and I have known each other for a few years now and recently collaborated on an article for Cutter IT Journal titled “The Futureproof CIO“.  That collaboration has turned into CIO Essentials (CIOE).

I had the pleasure of writing the first article to be published on CIOE and wanted to share it here for my regular readers/subscribers.  I hope you decide to join Gene and I over at CIOEssentials.com where we’ll be writing more on the topics of business, leadership, technology, and the people technology serves.

Culture and the CIO was first published on CIOEssentials.com on March 1 2010.

What’s the culture of your organization?

Have you built a hard-charging, do anything organization that demands things get done now? Or are you working in an organization that thinks things through, plans them out and takes years to get anything done? Perhaps you’re somewhere between these two extremes.

Personally, I’d rather be closer to the get it done (and get it done right) scenario than planning everything to death, but I’ve seen both types of cultures work. As the CIO, before you can deliver value to your organization, you must understand the culture within your organization.

“When planning for a year, plant corn. When planning for a decade, plant trees. When planning for life, train and educate people.” – Chinese Proverb

Culture and the CIO

What is culture within an organization? Most agree that organizational culture is the shared beliefs, values and norms that are held by the people within an organization.

What are the shared beliefs of your organization? Are you focused on moving quickly to beat your competition? Are you an innovative organization that wants to be at the forefront of the market? Or are you one of those companies that like to plan things to death and take years to get anything done?

Whatever your organizational culture, you’ve got to stay in sync with that culture or you might find yourself out of a job.

Story Time

Patty is a newly hired VP of IT for a mid-sized business in Chicago. Patty’s previous employer was a large, demanding company and Patty really thrived in that type of environment – she essentially grew-up in that hard driving organization.

In her previous role, she expected her staff to be as demanding and driven as she was, and for the most part, they were. Patty had worked her way up the ranks to a Director level role but was itching to move further up the ladder. After some internal review, she quickly found a VP role that seemed like a good fit and after a few months of negotiation, she accepted the position as the top IT person within the organization.

Patty was excited to have to an opportunity to finally run her own shop. After all, she’d been working towards this opportunity her entire career. Patty had finally arrived. She was the head of IT and could implement all the really cool processes and technologies that she’d been hearing about.

Patty brought her driven, hard-charging approach to IT to her new position – and immediately flopped. The culture of her new company was a slow-moving one. The people were methodical and planned things out to the ‘nth’ degree before moving forward with a project. There were committees and task forces for everything and not a single decision was made without going through a few rounds of committee discussions. Change was tough.

The Slow Pace of Progress

Patty railed against the slow pace of progress. She drove her IT staff to ‘pick up the pace’ and drove her managers into a frenzy trying to accomplish everything she wanted to get done as quickly as possible.

Sadly (and predictably), after six months, Patty had accomplished nothing. None of the high-priority projects had been completed and most hadn’t even been started. Patty’s boss, the CFO, pulled her into his office one day and suggested that she reign things in. He shared that the organization had always taken the slow approach and that wasn’t something that was likely to change any time soon.

This slow-and-steady approach had proven to be the success factor for them. He went on to explain that, while they weren’t the industry leader, they were extremely profitable. It was their organizational culture that was the driving factor behind that success.

Patty countered with her standard argument that the organization moved too slow and that she couldn’t get anything done at that pace. She couldn’t fund any of the projects that she’d made a priority. All projects were well-vetted before being funded because every project that was funded took money away from other parts of the business.

Outcomes

While there are actually a few points that can be made with this story, the one I want to highlight is the cultural issues apparent.

Patty didn’t understand the role of organizational culture within the company. She didn’t understand that culture exists for a reason and that the culture is made up of the values and belief systems of the people within the organization.

Patty thought she was railing against the snail’s pace of progress, but she was actually telling every single person within that company that they were wrong. Nobody likes to be told that they’re wrong, but telling an entire organization that they way they’ve done business for years is wrong is a career suicide mission. It can be difficult to recover once you’ve alienated enough people within the organization.

Patty never recovered. She was shown the door withing a few months of her meeting with the CFO. The reason for her dismissal? She didn’t fit the ‘culture’ of the organization.

Focus on Culture

Whether you’re looking to move another organization or you’ve moved into a new role at your current company, you’ve got to consider the organizational culture while considering how you’ll reach your objectives. You can’t be successful as a fast-moving IT manager if your team’s spent the last 20 years moving slowly.

Keep organizational culture in mind while planning out your next project, job or strategic plan.

Culture and the CIO was first published on CIOEssentials.com on March 1 2010.

Do you know Hutch Carpenter?  You should.  He write’s some awesome stuff over at I’m Not Actually a Geek.

Hutch recently wrote a post titled “Apple iPad and Google Buzz: Harsh Reality of Innovation” where he argues (successfully I think) that you’ve got to be OK with failure to really be innovative.

In the article Hutch points at Apple and Google as examples of companies that have amazing successes as well as amazing failures.

Hutch does a great job tying innovation with failure and showing that you’ve got to embrace failure to truly innovate.  It’s a great read.

The best part of the article wasn’t written by Hutch though….it’s a quote from Teddy Roosevelt. This quote really resonates with me and is a perfect addition to this argument. The quote is:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Emphasis mine.

Failure and the CIO

Is it OK for your IT staff to fail?

Have you built the proper culture that allows your teams to step out of bounds and innovate without fear of retribution if the attempt fails?

If you’ve said yes…good for you.  But…what would happen if I asked your team?  Would they say the same?

Think about the last three projects you’ve undertaken.  Have they all been a success?  Have they all been innovative? Can you point to projects that you’ve undertaken that have changed the ‘game’ for your organization?

If you can’t think of any innovative projects that you’ve undertaken recently…perhaps you’ve stepped into the realm of playing it safe.

Culture of Failure?

Nobody likes failure.  I hate it…but I’ve had my fair share of it.  I’ve watched my projects fail and I’ve watched my teams fail.  But…I’ve also seen some amazing things happen by those same teams.

So…am I saying that you should create a culture of failure? Absolutely not.

But I am saying that you need to create a culture that makes it OK to fail.

Ask yourself this question:

Do you want your IT staff to be known as folks that put themselves out there and bring  innovation to the organization….or do you want to be known as the IT group that plays it safe?

It might be easier to play it safe for some, but don’t expect to find and keep the best people if you’re playing it safe.  The best and brightest out there want to work on the ‘cool’ stuff. The ‘new’ stuff.  They don’t want to be relegated to a life of maintaining your COBOL application…they want to build a new app that will make the organization (and world) stand up and take notice.

Build a culture that says failure is OK and you’ll build the potential for a high performance team that can get some great stuff done.  Don’t do this and you’ll be relegated to being the also-ran.

Five by Chuck Musciano on The Effective CIO

The Splinternet means the end of the Web’s golden age by Josh Bernoff on Groundswell

Run IT Like a Business, Not As a Business by Chris Curran on CIO Dashboard

Why the CIO Loves Agile Development by Isaac Sacolick on Social, Agile, and Transformation

Are you keeping your standard in view? by Tim Walker on What I’ve Learned So Far

Can I get some social strategy with that Big Mac? by John Moore on Random Thoughts of a Boston-based CTO: John Moore’s Weblog

Social In a Corporate (And Agency) World by Lauren Fernandez on Marketing Profs Daily Fix

Is It Time To Say Goodbye To The CIO? by Dr. Jim Anderson on The Accidental Successful CIO

Lessons in Strategic Communications from an Admiral by Charles H. Green on Trust Matters blog

Quality: You Don’t Get What You Don’t Measure by Jurgen Appelo on NOOP.NL: Managing Software Development

How to Encourage Small Innovations by John Baldoni on HarvardBusiness.org

Better User Experience With Storytelling – Part One by Francisco Inchauste on Smashing Magazine

Stop thinking like a CIO by Patrick Flynn on Clear IT Leadership

The Burning Drive to Never Settle: Refuse to Compromise by Louis Gray on louisgray.com

Sunday Morning Reflections: All the great things are simple… by Skip Cohen on Marketing Essentials International

Short post this week as I’m swamped and haven’t had time to work anything up….but I wanted to take a quick second to ask my readers to give me some CIO topics you’d like to read about in the future (or…if you’d like to write it up and do a guest post…feel free!).

Drop me a comment, @ me on twitter or send me an email with your thoughts.

Like I said…short post this week but I have an extremely important question to ask everyone in IT (and anyone else who wants to answer).  Here goes:

If you could start from scratch, would you build your IT group the same?  Would you build your governance models the same?  How about your project management processes?

If the answer is yes, excellent…you’ve obviously been doing things right.

If the answer is no…well…perhaps you’ve been doing things right…but you aren’t able to get the things done that you want to get done.  Why not make a change?

Isn’t the economy and environment we are in the perfect time to experiment?

What would you do differently?

Think about that…how can we do “IT” differently?  Just because it worked in the past, doesn’t mean it’ll work in the future.

I ran across an interesting post today titled “Why you don’t need Social Media Consultants” on the Brains on Fire Blog.  The main thesis of the post is: “social media consultants provide little value…they do nothing more than you already know how to do so you don’t need them”.

In the article, Spike Jones says:

If you listen REALLY closely to their [social media consultant's] advice, you start to realize that most of it you already know. Because you have all the basic tools you need: Your humanity. Your ability to communicate with people around you. And your intuition. Because when you think about it, using social media is just a natural extension of yourself. Asking questions. Listening. Responding. And remember, social media apps are tactics. And tactics are tools. Sure, you might need some guidance on how to use that bandsaw, but you picked up a hammer and pretty much got the gist after you hit your thumb a few times.

In other words, we’re getting all worked up about (wait for it, wait for it) common sense. Common courtesy. And the best way to find that is to take off your marketing hat and use the hat you were born with – being a person.

Emphasis mine.

I have an issue with this statement.  Most organizations don’t know how to be human anymore.

Before I continue…I wholeheartedly agree with the premise of Spike’s argument (i.e., we already know how to be human) but I would argue that most companies have removed much of humanity from business.  Many organizations have been built to remove the human side of the business and have replaced it with processes and management…I’ve written about this before in a post titled Humanity and Business“…jump over and read that post for more on the subject of bringing humanity back to business.

Take a look at Jay Baer’s comment on the above article.  In the comment, Jay makes a few valid points…one of them is:

What social media consultants do best – at least those focused on tactical agnosticism – is to help companies connect the dots, align internal resources, and understand not that social media is about more than tools and pressing buttons, but about a cultural shift that manifests itself up and down the organization.

Amen.  Re-read that (and Jay’s entire comment)….did you catch the powerful stuff there?

A good social media consultant should help an organization bring about cultural change. That’s exactly what any good consultant should do….help the organization understand how to change to adapt to new realities. Whether that reality is purchasing a new software platform or using social media to build relationships with clients.

Back to my original question: Do you need consultants? Hell yes you do.

Why?  Here’s a few reasons:

• Consultants bring an external view
• Consultants bring experience
• Consultants bring expertise
• Consultants bring relevance
• Consultants bring authority

Whether you like it or not, consultants are a necessity.   Perhaps most organizations don’t need a social media consultant…but most organizations do need help understanding how to be more human.

That’s what a good consultant (social media or otherwise) sh0uld bring to the table.   A good SM consultant should help organizations understand how to be more human while building relationships with their clients.  A good IT consultant should help organizations bring humanity back to the IT organization by helping the organization understand that IT is more than processes, workflows and reasons ‘not to’.

Do you need consultants – yes you do. If you’re looking for a consultant, find one that ignores the technology, buzzwords and tools (at the beginning) and talks about your organization, your needs and hopefully they will also talk about being more ‘human’.  Find a consultant that talks about ‘humanity and business’ and hire them on the spot.  You’ll not regret it.

Last week I wrote about “Turbulence, IT & The New CIO” and discussed the need to embrace agility and speed in order to address the turbulence that we see in business today.  In order to be agile, I mentioned the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) model for use in helping keep agility at the front of your mind while planning and doing.

After writing last week’s post, I ran across an article by Kathleen Eisenhardt from titled “Making Fast Strategic Decisions in High-Velocity Environments“.  In this article, the author reports on a study that was conducted to compare the speed of the decision making process and the performance of those decisions at eight microcomputer organizations.

At the time of the article’s publication (1989), popular belief (and much research) stated the following:

• Leaders & organizations should be autocratic
• Decision making should be centralized for speed and control
• When planning, an organization should look at future projections, not operational data
• Careful analysis of the ‘best’ option should be performed
• Fast analysis means less data

Sound familiar to anyone?  I still see a lot of organizations and leaders following this approach today, especially in the IT space.

Eisenhardt’s research showed something interesting.  She was able to show that those organizations that made quick decisions were more apt to use more information and look at more options than those that made slow decisions.  The data also showed that centralized decision making isn’t the fastest route to a decision; organizations that shared data with a larger audience and welcomed feedback were more apt to perform better in the long run.

I won’t go into the full outcome of the research, but I wanted to highlight a few of the key propositions from the paper:

• The decision making process speeds up when you make use of real-time data
• The decision making process speeds up when you increased the # of alternatives considered simultaneously
• The more integrated your decision making process is, the faster it can go
• In “high-velocity environments”, the faster the decision making process goes, the greater the performance.
• Politics slows decision making and degrades performance.

So…what does this have to do with IT?

Everything.  To compete in the turbulent world today, we’ve got to be agile in our thinking and execution.  This research helps highlight that fact.

Organization’s, and especially organizations that use technology, are high-velocity environments.   We are doing more with less and have to do it faster than before.

The faster we can make decisions with more accurate data (real-time) and the more options we review, the better that decision outcome will be in the long run.  Will every decision be correct? No…but it will be a decision that moves you a little further.

If you take the OODA approach discussed last week, you’ll be making decisions, acting on those decisions and immediately looping back to review the post-decision environment and determining what needs to be tweaked in your strategy for the to reflect the ‘new’ environment and to prepare future.

Integrated Decision Making

One of the outcomes of the research showed that decision making processes worked better when they were integrated with each other.   Eisenhardt reports that in those organizations that had strategic planning integrated integrated with tactics (see my thoughts on this topic in Minding the gap between Strategy and Tactics), performance improved.  In addition, those leaders who brought together people from different parts of the organization during the decision making process performed better.

Surprised?  This is why it’s such a huge issue for The New CIO to be engaged and involved with the organizational strategic planning process and be tied in with other groups and teams’ decision making.    Eisenhardt reports that making decisions with as many options as possible using as much real-time operational information as possible is the key to performance…CIO’s should take this and run with it.

The New CIO needs to take research like this to heart.  Use all the data you can, include your team and others from the organization in your decision making process.  In addition, as CIO you need to push for inclusion in other teams’ decision making process.Ensuring integrated decision making with the proper people & data, you’ll be able to mind the strategy/tactic gap and act in an agile manner.

References

• Eisenhardt, K. (1989). Making Fast Strategic Decisions in High-Velocity Environments. The Academy of Management Journal, 32(3), 543-576.

The New CIO is a weekly article about the challenges facing today’s CIO as well as what can be done to prepare for future challenges. Join me next week for another article in the series.

The New CIO is a weekly article about the challenges facing today’s CIO as well as what can be done to prepare for future challenges.

I just completed reading The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing Opportunity in an Uncertain World. Great book.  Go buy it…the link above is an affiliate link or just go grab one from your favorite bookseller.

The book does an excellent job of discussing the world of business and the role that turbulence has played in shaping it.  Donald Sull does a great job describing how to embrace turbulence and seize the opportunities that turbulence can bring.

How do you embrace turbulence?   By being agile.

Before we continue, don’t confuse ‘being agile’ with the agile development methodology….while they may be similar, for the purposes of this article, I’ll be talking about a different ‘agile’.

That said, let me clear up what I mean when I saw agile (and what Donald Sull means when he uses it): Agile isn’t about speed. Agile has to do with the ability to change course when needed. Being agile means taking a look at your organizational landscape (strategy, operations, etc) and breaking up the long-term view into smaller samples of time to make it easier to see and respond to opportunities.

Dr Sull defines agility as:

“the capacity to identify and capture opportunities more quickly than rivals” (p. 138).

In addition, he uses the concept of air warfare to help tell the story of how agility can provide tremendous benefits.  Out of these stories of air warfare, Dr Sull introduces John Boyd, a military strategist who helped with a lot of the science behind the F-16 and F-18 fighter jets, and Boyd’s OODA Loop.

John Boyd's OODA Loop (Courtesy of Jeff McNeill's Flickr stream)

What is the OODA loop?  It stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

What does it have to do with IT? Everything.

In order to be an effective IT group and CIO in the world today, you’ve got to have some flexibility (i.e., be agile) so you can move quickly when opportunities arise.

As we all know, we are being asked to do more with less.  The only way to do that, is to remain flexible (as well as have a good team and not overwork them).  In addition to being agile, you’ve got to have a strategic plan and know how to execute that plan.

By using the OODA model, you might be able to be agile, plan and react as necessary.  Let’s look at how you might incorporate the OODA model into your business life.

Observe

To use the OODA model, the first (and perhaps most important) step is to continuously observe.

Observe your situation.  Look at your organization, team and the competitive landscape.  What can you and your IT team do to help move the company forward?

In addition, observe how your team operates. Do you have enough people?  Do you have the right people?

Is your strategic plan still valid based on these observations? What are the politics of your organization?

Orient

While observing, you’ll need to orient yourself to your landscape.  Orientation (in the OODA model) is all about positioning yourself.

Is your organization changing direction?  Are your competitors doing something differently that previously?  Is your team becoming overloaded?  Do you have the right people on board to make your plans successful?

Decide

You are observing your situation and have oriented yourself to the climate….now all you have to do is decide to do something.  Can you make a decision?  You better be able to.

In a turbulent world, you don’t have time to wait or over-analyze…you’ve got to decide quickly and move on.  In the world of air warfare, if you wait you die and in today’s world your fate and your organization’s fate might just hang on your ability to decide.

Act

You’ve decided on a plan of action.  Now you need to execute it.  If you’ve observed, oriented and made the right decision, you can act with ease…but do you have the right people in place?

Many organizations plan well but very few ACT well.  The ability to act and react after observing & orienting is a major reason that some organizations succeed and others don’t.

The New CIO & The Loop

The OODA model is built with feedback loops.  Each action is fed back to the observation stage to review for tweaks.  I’ve found that most organizations are missing this feedback mechanism…strategic plans are made and ‘rolled out’ without any feedback nor any way to change course quickly.

Dr Sull introduces his own version of the OODA loop…he calls it the ‘agility loop’.  The agility loop has four stages:

• Make sense of situation
• Make choices
• Make it happen
• Make revisions

I like what Dr Sull has to say about the agility loop…whether you use the OODA loop or Sull’s Agility loop, you’ll be in a position to improve your agility.

To succeed in the future, The New CIO has to remain agile.  Using the OODA loop (or Dr Sull’s agility loop) helps you keep your mindset right.  Remember to observe, orient, decide & act. Then repeat.

The New CIO is a weekly article about the challenges facing today’s CIO as well as what can be done to prepare for future challenges.

It as if we’re more hearing about businesses doing more with less.

In the world of IT, you definitely hear this.  Budgets are slashed or frozen.  Layoffs are happening.  The business is trying to bring their costs in-line with the reality of today.

This ‘doing more with less’ mentality seems to be helping. The latest reports on productivity shows an increase of 6.3% in the business sector.

So…we are more productive now. Great!

But are we productive doing the right things?  Are we getting the things done that need to be done?  Are we checking off the right boxes?

In order to get more done with less, The New CIO has to be able to help the organization and IT team set the right goals (what are the right goals?), set the priorities and let the team do their job..

This is easier said than done.   With the pressure on, will you deliver? If you stick to your priorities and ensure you’re working toward your goals, you should.  If you start being reactionary, you’re doomed.

Set your Goals

The Big Hairy Audacious Goal.   What a name.  Great idea. Every person and company should have one of these.  (Do you?)

Every organization needs to have goals.  Every IT group should have goals aligned with the organization. The CIO should have a set of goals that roll down to the IT leadership team and those goals should trickle down.

So…why is it when you ask the system administrator what their goals are for the year, their response is either: 1.) a shoulder shrug or 2.)  to keep the servers running.

While keeping the servers’ running is a valid goal, wouldn’t it be better to have a bigger goal for that system admin?

How about your Director of IT Operations?  What’s her goal? Is it to keep the lights on and servers running?  I hope not.  It’s not very big nor audacious.

With simplistic goals, you get simplistic results.

What happens when you have goals but no priorities?  Perhaps your team reaches their goals…but did they do it when you needed them to?

Priorities

It’s not enough to set goals, you’ve also got to set priorities for your team. Without priorities, the organization could happily work toward their goals…but at what rate?  Which goals are more important than others?

Let’s look at an example:

Your DBA has 2 goals for the quarter: 1.) Migrate 10% of the SQL Server 2005 databases to MS Sql Server 2008 and 2.) Earn the Microsoft Certified Master certification for SQL Server 2008.  Which should be his priority?   The operational goal or the personal goal?  Setting a priority on those 2 goals will help that DBA determine in which order to attack these goals.

Whoever said “When everything is a priority, nothing is” was a genius (anyone have an attribution for that quote?) .  Without priorities, or even worse, when everything is the ‘top’ priority, the organization will spin its wheels and eventually run out of gas. Steve Roesler has a great article about this titled “Kill Change with too many Priorities” that’s worth the read and tackles the “too many priorities’ topic head on.

Pick your goals, set your priorities (and remember…there can be only 1 ‘top’ priority) and let your team go.

Proactive vs Reactive

Want to know what Goals & Priorities really do for you and your team?  They set down the correct path and guide you & your team in your daily activities.  Setting goals and priorities help to set up a proactive environment.  Your team knows what they should be doing and they know how to react when ‘emergencies’ arise.

What happens when you don’t plan things out and set goals & priorities?  You become reactive.  Your team becomes reactive.   Being reactive is the death knell for the CIO and any organization. Take a minute and think of one company that meets the following criteria:

• Industry leader
• Innovative
• Has great people
• Is a great place to work
• Is constantly reacting to competitors.

I can’t think of one. The first four are easy…lots of companies come to mind…but the last criteria takes them all out of the running. If you constantly react, you never really get a chance to get ahead of the competition.

Setting goals & priories pulls yourself, your team and the organization away from the reactionary mindset.

What can you (The New CIO) do?

Well…you could take the approach that some take: tell people to “do more with less” and stop ‘bellyaching” (real quote from a CIO!). Or…you could help your team set realistic goals and priorities and step back and let them do their job.  Don’t react to every little thing that comes along….reacting pushes the priorities and goals out the window, even for a moment.

At the end of the day, The New CIO must stay proactive by setting goals and priorities for the IT Organization.  Those goals and priorities must be built up by working closely with the rest of the leadership team to ensure the IT staff is aligned with the organization.

Without this alignment and prioritization, perhaps your team can be productive while delivering value to the organization.  Or…you can keep your team busy and productive while being terribly inefficient by reacting to every ‘emergency’.

If you have to do more with less, and the latest reports say we are, at least make sure your team is working on the right stuff.  What is the right stuff? Only you, your team and your organization can decide that.

Join me next week for another article in The New CIO series.

“None” is Not a Social Media Strategy by Chris Curran on CIO Dashboard

Web 3.0 Is Coming – Are CIOs Ready? bt Dr. Jim Anderson on The Accidental Successful CIO

Blame storming – one of the signs of weak management by Mark McDonald on BLT: Business Leadership and Technology

“Social Learning” Will Be a Core Design Element in the Knowledge Workplace by Jon Husband on The AppGap

Do You Have These 11 Traits of Highly Creative People? by Dean Rieck on Copyblogger

Kill Change With Too Many Priorities by Steve Roesler on All Things Workplace

Transparency, Clarity, and Trust by Jamie Notter on Get Me Jamie Notter

How to Make Your PMO More Visible by Brad Egeland on Project Management Tips

Management is What and How by Rosa Say on Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching

Leadership is Why and When by Rosa Say on Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching

How to Make Scary-Big Stuff Happen by Taylor on Men With Pens

When Information is NOT the Answer by Andrew McAfee on Andrew McAfee’s Blog

IT for execution: It’s not how much you spend, it’s how you spend it by Don Sull on Don Sull’s Blog

Death spiral! by Seth Godin on Seth’s Blog

Elsevier’s Prototype: Is This The Scientific Article of the Future? by Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb (hat tip to Gene De Libero for the link)

Making Big with Small by Don Frederiksen on Lead Quietly