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.

Some interesting research results being reported over on Fistful of Talent by Lizz Pellet who is the Chief Culture Officer at EMERGE International in a post titled “The Economic Recovery F-You Factor“.

And yes…for those keeping score, this is the 2nd day in a row that I’ve linked to Fistful of Talent…they’ve got some great stuff over there.

A few highlights from the article:

Leadership IQ Group surveyed 4,000 individuals who watched colleagues get laid off and were left behind to carry on and found:

• 75% said their productivity had declined
• 70% said the quality of products/services had declined
• 81% said customer service had dropped

Interesting numbers and not surprising.

Do you want to do business with an organization that shows these numbers?  Would you want to give your hard earned money to a company who’s employees just aren’t engaged and really just don’t give a hoot about their job, their product/service or helping you?

Think employee engagement doesn’t matter?  Take a look at those numbers and then think again.  Employee engagement is more than a buzzword or something consultants are trying to sell you…it’s real and effects your employees, your organization, your customers and you.

During downturns like this, organizations always have to cut costs and inevitably there are lay-offs.   That said, the manner in which companies cut costs, treat their employees and handle employee layoffs will come back to haunt them.

What happens to these companies when the economy picks up?  It won’t be pretty.

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.

I just read a ‘call for papers’ from Cutter IT Journal with the title “The Great Recession Fallout: Will CIOs Be Elevated or Exterminated?”  It doesn’t look like they’ve posted this latest call for papers on their website, but you should be able to find it there sometime soon.

While I’ve already been thinking about this topic for some time (an example can be seen in last week’s post titled “The Future of IT & The CIO“) it’s good to see  there are other folks thinking about the same thing.

A passage in the email really made me stop and think about what we (industry, IT & CIO’s) are doing.  Here’s what caught my eye:

No longer singularly pursuing either an innovation or an efficiency agenda, CIOs may now need to pursue both as their firms are driven by both the need for efficiency and the fear of having an obsolete business model. While CIOs have for some time been asked to contribute in strategic and tactical ways, has this recession pushed them too hard down both paths?

Take a look at that last sentence and think about it. We’ve been pushing (and been pushed) to do ‘more with less’ for quite a while now.  We are being asked to be strategic and tactical.  Our IT Staff are being asked to be both technical and business savvy at the same time.  This is a fact of life…but is it a reality?  Are we really able to do everything asked of us?

Can you really focus on the strategic and tactical at the same time?  Can you really expect your technical staff to interface with the business?  Have we cut our staffs and budgets so far that we’ve cut out ability to deliver real value? Are we running on empty these days?

Great questions (I think anyway).

Can you (or your team) really do it all?

There is a point at which you and your team become overloaded.  In a normal economy, this overload could be offset by hiring new staff, but in this recession there’s no new staff and many organizations aren’t bringing in new contractors either.  At some point, the overload becomes too much and you and/or your team need to pull back the effort or you’ll overload your circuits and burn yourself or your team out.  Just like the fuel gauge shown above, you and your team will be running on empty.

The New CIO needs to know when they can take on the extra work and responsibilities and when they need to push back at the organization to ensure proper staffing levels.

In addition, the New CIO must ensure that they have the right mix of IT staff.  If we’re being asked to be both strategic and tactical, you better have some folks who can do both.  If you have to interface with the organization, you better make sure you have IT staff who can interface with the business.

Lastly, as I’ve said before, in this age of doing more with less, the New CIO has to lead by saying no as much as they can.  The organization has to understand what the IT group is capable of and what will take additional staff and/or budget.

Keep your eye on your team and make sure they’ve got a bit of fuel left at all times.  Keep working hard and moving closer to your goals…but make sure you aren’t killing your staff.

Take a few minutes and ask yourself and your team: Can you really do it all?  If the answer is no, start building a business case for what needs to change, how it needs to change and why. That business case needs to land on every leader’s desk within the organization and you’d better drive hard to make the changes necessary.  If you don’t you might just find yourself looking at a staff who’s running on empty and an economy that has just moved out of the recession…and you’ve got no way to do what needs to be done to take advantage of the changes.

That said, if your organization was working right, the recession would be the time to invest in additional staff and projects…not cut staff and projects.  But that’s a topic for another post

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.

A few months ago, I aksed a question on LinkedIn about the role of the CIO (read the original question & responses):

Will the CIO role change in the next 5 years? If so, how…and why?

Quite a few folks responded with some excellent points. I’ve been ruminating on this question (and the answers) and finally realized that I may have asked the wrong question.   Why?  Because organizations want to be more nimble. Users want to be able to do more with the IT assets.  The ‘cloud’ is growing rapidly.

I think the better question to ask is:

How will IT’s role change in the next 5 years? Can current IT groups and CIO’s provide the value that organizations need?

Find the answer to how IT will change in the coming years and the CIO’s role will be clearer.

The Future of IT

I’m not an expert nor am I a ‘futurist’.  That said, I’m going to make a few wild guesses here on the future if IT.

The big IT group of today goes away.  No longer will we see large IT groups with tons of Developers, Project Managers, Network Security, Database Administrators, IT Operations, Desktop support, etc etc.  The IT group will splinter into much smaller groups more closely aligned with the organization.

Instead, I think we’ll see IT Groups split into multiple smaller groups.  There will still need to be desktop support and database administrators and all the other things that fall within IT operations.   That said, why wouldn’t IT operations move into other ‘operations’ areas.   Is IT operations really that much different than facilities management?  They both have to keep things running don’t they? Should IT to be split into an operational team and project team and have them report into different reporting structures.

Most of the real activity will happen around the business analysts and project management teams.   Will we see the CIO migrate into a Chief Project Officer and manage all aspects of business analysis, projects and technology strategy?  Will the IT operations team be managed just like any other part of an organizations facilities are?

Conjecture and Hyperbole

While the statements above are just wild conjecture during a bought of stream of consciousness writing, I think there are some good things to think about there.  Have you taken a second to think about the future of IT and the role of the CIO in your organization?

The New CIO will need to step back and revisit the IT group to see if the organization is delivering the value it should deliver to the organization. Should IT operations be your focus or should it be on analyzing the business requirements for new IT projects?  Should you continue to pour money into legacy systems or make a clean break and move to more agile systems?

Many of you may not agree with me…but that’s the whole point of this post.  Is the Future of IT and that of the CIO certain?  Do we know that we have a valuable place in the future of organizations in our current form?

The New CIO has to look five to ten years down the road to see where you and your IT staff will be.  If you can’t see a clear picture of yourself and your team helping the organization, perhaps you need to start working to defog that future.

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

There’s lots of articles, books and posts about how to be a good CIO and/or good IT leader….many you’ll find on my blog under my The New CIO series (shameless plug!).

What you won’t find much of are articles & books on how NOT to be a good CIO. So I decided to write a few lessons for how not to be a CIO. Actually…these lessons are valid for any leader or manager regardless of position or functional role but I will use the CIO & IT group as examples to illustrate my points.

Lesson #1 – Focus on yourself

Rather than focus on your team, department or organization, focus on yourself.  Don’t think about the best things for your team or the company…think about what’s best for yourself and your career.

By focusing on yourself,  you can ignore the needs of your team and organization.  You can do the right things (for you) and focus strictly on your own career.  Forget about being a leader or managing your team…manage your career and your appearance and you’ll go far.

Lesson #2 – Gossip and Talk about others behind their back

This is a good one….it could easily have been Lesson #1. There’s nothing better than gossip….and even better is when you can be the one spreading it!  Take it one step further to the ultimate level of badness….gossip about your own staff!

You’ve got people that work for you that you just don’t think are doing a good job and you need to let others know that.  Forget about having a one-on-one with the individual doing a bad job…you need to continue gossiping and spreading information about their performance.

You can take this a step further to talk about your own staff that are doing a good job but who worry you.  You wouldn’t want anyone to think your staff is smarter than you would you? Start some gossip about the bad job they’ve been doing.  That’ll teach ‘em to try!

Lesson #3 – Don’t grow your team

What’s all this talk about growing your team? Why do that?  If you provide training and learning opportunities for your team they’ll just leave and you wouldn’t want that would you?

Keep your staff doing the same job that they’ve been doing.  There’s no reason to let them do something else.  Treat them like a bonzai tree….keep pruning them back (but don’t think about pruning the way bonzai master’s do).

Keep those hidden talents hidden…there’s no need to let your team members do anything other than what they’ve been doing.

Lesson #4 – Avoid Confrontation

Confrontation is overrated.  You should try to get through your day (and career) without disagreeing with anyone. Why say ‘no’ if you can say yes? There’s no need to speak up and let your team, your organization or coworkers know that you don’t agree with them or their approach.

Don’t rock the boat….you need to be a team player and you can’t do that by disagreeing with others.

Lesson #5 – Take credit for everything

Spin every project that succeeds so that you’re in the limelight. That new big Content Management System implementation that everyone’s raving about?  All you baby!  The new Exchange Server roll-out that was a success?  Again…You.

But what about the projects that go bad?  That’s easy.  That’s what your managers are for.  They can be thrown in the line of fire to take the heat.  You warned them that the project would go wrong didn’t you?

Keep yourself in front of those successful projects and hide from the bad ones and you’ll do fine.

Remember – these are BAD lessons

Follow these lessons and you’ll end up looking at a dead-end sign.  In fact, you may end up driving through the dead-end sign and crashing and burning.  Take these  lessons to heart and remember this: to lead today you’ve got to do the opposite of these lessons.  Stay away from the dead-end road.

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

Do you know the full capabilities of your team?

Sure…you know what their resume’s said.  You think you know their backgrounds and their experience…but do you really know your team?

Do you have a developer who, in their free time, is extremely active in the blogosphere and the social media world?  Do you have a project manager who really wants to make a lateral move into service management?

Do you really know your team?  If you don’t, you may be leaving a lot of talent, skills and passion on the table.

Dangers of Hidden Talent

Leaving talent untapped is unforgivable to me and should be unacceptable to you. We live in a world where we’re expected to do more with less and rely more heavily on people’s knowledge & skills to make our businesses work.

Knowing this is the case, why do we hire a person, train them (do you train your people?) and then forget about them?  Why do we ignore the idea of talent management and human capital? Read more of my thoughts on those topics here and here and if you’re looking for a great book on Talent & Competitive Advantage, check out Talent : Making People Your Competitive Advantage (amazon affiliate link) and/or Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty (amazon affiliate link).  Both of those books are excellent.

Do you have regular meetings with your team?  Do you talk about their careers?  Do you know that your star programmer is a widely read blogger?  Can you use the talent and passion of that programmer to more than just develop the next application?

Hidden talent doesn’t just sit within your front-line teams.  Did you know that your Director of Technical Support is working on her Masters of Fine Art in Creative Writing?  Are there things she can do to provide more value to the organization than just leading the service desk?

Hidden talent is hidden profit, hidden revenue and hidden advantage.  Hidden talent can also be the death of your team if it isn’t uncovered.

Uncovering Hidden Talent

Do you know what drives each of your team members? What really gets them excited in the morning?  I’d bet there are a few people on your team that aren’t that happy in their current role and who are looking for something else to do.  Rather than lose them to another company, why not help them find something more interesting within your team and/or organization?

What can you do to help them become happier and more engaged? Could you get your programmer / blogger to work on more projects where he can use his writing skills?  What could your Tech Support Director provide to the organization now that you know she’s extremely interested in creative writing?

Of course you can’t make everyone 100% happy all the time.  People still have jobs to do…but if you take some time to talk with your team about the career ambitions and do what you can to help them reach their goals, you’ll be amazed at the response you’ll receive from them.

What can you do to uncover hidden talent?  Simple…talk to your team.  I mean really talk.  Try to understand their aspirations and what drives them.  Look for their hidden passions & skills.  Work with your team to uncover the hidden talents and you’ll see new vigor from your team.

Finding the Talent – A New CIO skill

So…time to add one more skillset to The New CIO’s job requirements…that of Talent Miner.  Of course, this role can be fulfilled by any member of the IT staff (and anyone else in the organization), but as the top dog in IT you’ve got to lead people in this area.

The New CIO needs to get things done with the resources given to them…but those resources might be able to provide  more value than originally thought…if you look for the hidden talent. “Doing more with less” is the mantra these days…find those folks on your team who are passionate about something and find ways to let them bring that passion to their job.

Uncover the hidden talent within your team/organization and watch the growth that occurs.  Fail to uncover that talent and you’ll fail to reach the potential of your people and your team.

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

As a follow-up to my Goals, Priorities and The New CIO post last week, I wanted to take some time to talk about Values and how they play into the organization and the role of CIO.

Imagine that you are the CIO of ABC Company, a retail chain focused on quick turn and logistics to make the most profit you can (think Wal-Mart…although you aren’t the CIO of Wal-Mart…or…if you are, say hi!).  Your goals and priorities are set for the year. Your team knows how to do their job and have a clear direction from the organization.

They know the Why, What, When and Where, and they have the technical knowledge to address the How.   You’re all set right? Maybe not.

Part of the What and How involve some less analytical skills than pure technical knowledge & skills.

Back to your role of CIO of ABC Company.  You set the direction and let your team go.  Do they understand the organizational values that they are expected to work under?  Do they understand your values?

Values

What are values? I think of values as the driving force behind everything we do.  Values are the invisible ‘ether’ that guide us daily.

According to Steve Pavlina, values are:

Values are priorities that tell you how to spend your time, right here, right now.

When developing priorities and goals, the values of your organization should seep into these things, but many times they aren’t quite as noticeable as they should be.

So…if values are the driving force behind you and your organization, shouldn’t your team know what they are? Your team (and everyone within the organization) should know what the organization’s values are.  And they should be OK with living up to those values.

Back to your CIO role at ABC Company.  You’ve given a goal to your IT Contracts team to get the lowest price possible for all IT services (I know…this isn’t a SMART Goal…but bear with me).

Are the results the only thing that matter to you?  At the end of the year, how with this team be ‘graded’.  Does it matter HOW they achieved their results?  Does it matter if they’ve threatened a vendor or lied to them? Does it matter if they ‘break the rules’ to reach their goal.

Of course, everyone reading this is probably thinking “yes it matters’….but at the end of the day, can you really say it does?  If your bonus is tied to their ability to save 2% on IT costs and they reach that goal, do you care how they reach it?

You should. Scratch that. You must care.

Living the Values

Let’s take a step back.

If your organization’s values are such that lying, cheating and backstabbing is considered OK, then perhaps your IT Contracts team did live their values.   I know a few companies out there who have unwritten values such as these and would be OK with this approach.  Perhaps this type of organization and values worked in the past, but it won’t work in the future.

To stay valid and competitive in the transparent world of now (and the future), organizations and leaders must set a true set of values to live by.

You, as The New CIO, must be an example of these values (as well as your own values). It’s not enough to point to a list of values, but the organization (and you) have to live to these values daily.

If your values (or organization’s values) are based around integrity, leadership, social consciousness and agility, then by-golly, you better live those values every second of every day.  You’ve got to haveve integrity, be honest & open and do what you say you’ll do. You’ve got to be a leader and do the difficult things as well as the easy things. You’ve got to find ways for your group and organization to give back to society and to think about how your actions affect the larger society. You must be be Agile. Build strategies, systems and solutions to enable agility.

You should also push your team to live those values…and the people that can’t accept those values need to move on. In order to truly live the values, The New CIO has to clearly articulate what hey are and hold people accountable for following them.

Values & The New CIO

As I’ve said before, it’s a new world.  The New CIO has to be someone that can juggle a lot of ’stuff’. Whether that stuff is technology or business related, they’ve got to have an underlying set of values to guide them. In today’s open (i.e., transparent) world, you’ve got to be able to state your values, live those values and ensure that your team is living them too. If In addition, you must allow your values to be seen and understood by the rest of the organization.

If you don’t articulare your values and live them, your team, vendors, customers and the world will soon notice.  You can save that 2% in IT spend, but at what real cost?

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.

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.

Innovation.

That’s a powerful word.  It can conjure up many feelings and thoughts, but does the word mean anything to the CIO and/or the IT Group?

Do most IT organizations know what innovation really means? Is it the job of the IT group and Chief Information Officer to help drive innovation?

I believe it is.  I believe the CIO has to step out from the role of IT leader and move into a role of innovation leader within the organization.

CIO = Chief Innovation Officer?

We probably won’t see a title change, but The New CIO will need to be able to not only speak the language of business and technology, but also the language of innovation.  The New CIO will needs to be comfortable talking about the world of now as well as the world of tomorrow.

Gone are the days of waiting on the sidelines to see what other companies are doing.  The New CIO has to have their finger on the pulse of popular culture, technology culture and academia to know where society is going, what technology is available now and in the near future and where technology is going in the long term.

Can The New CIO really do this? I think they have to.  The New CIO must take a lead in innovating.

While the CIO still has to worry about IT Operations, Governance,  Security, Project Management and everything in the world of IT, if The New CIO can build the right team, they’ll have more time to focus on the responsibilities of driving innovation throughout the enterprise.

What other group or person within an organization is better positioned than The New CIO?  The majority of innovative ideas today revolve around using technology in some manner.   What better way for The New CIO to drive home the value of  IT than to help lead innovation.

The New CIO has a lot of hats to wear: Portfolio manager,  Leader, Strategist are just a few.   Add Innovator to that list and you might just have the perfect CIO.

From CIO to Innovator to CEO?

Many organizations are looking for people who can think strategically and innovate.  Add to that, the ability to blend technology with business, and you’ve got the makings of a great CEO.

Put on your thinking hat, dust off your strategic thinking skills (hopefully they aren’t too dusty!) and start driving innovation. For the CIO who figures out how to do these things well, they might just find themselves being sought out for larger leadership roles within the organization.

Take that step from operational CIO to The New CIO…you just might find it’s fun being involved in changing the way to the organization does business.  You might also find yourself in the CEO position in the future.

Join me next week for another The New CIO article.