RSSKeep Moving CIOs Into the Boardroom and Out of the Server Room
Both the Silicon Valley Watcher and Gartner capture the tone for CIOs as we enter into 2005. The Silicon Valley Watcher described a panel of four leading CIOs (Levi Strauss and Company, Agilent Technologies, Microsoft, fireman's Fund) as having a mood not unlike three funerals and a wedding. Additionally, Gartner "[predicts] that 2005 will be a year fraught with perilous change … economies, globalization and regulatory demands will create a business need for IT, but technology professionals will have to redefine their roles to show that they are as savvy at business as they are with technology …"
Time to put those professional new year's resolutions into effect it seems. Deloitte and Touche recently made available their publication "CIO 2.0: The Changing Role of the Chief Information Officer". On Deloitte's list (although in no particular order), list item #1 for the CIO is the question of how to generate shareholder value. With CEOs seeing technology net-net as a barrier to change as opposed to an enabler, well this is quite a hot seat for the CIOs to be in.
The 2005 environment should provide opportunities for CIOs and service providers to these CIOs to rise to the challenge. No longer should the question be "can we get the job done?". I continue to be amazed by how many IT organizations are satisfied with a simple, project management view of the world (getting things done on time, on budget and according to customer specifications). The questions have to continue to shift up the value chain and towards "what jobs should be done, and what quantitative and qualitative value are we creating for the company by getting these jobs done?".
Steve Shu
Great article. If CIO’s come into the boardroom business can’t help but be more in tune with the marketplace and the reality of the stress that their ivory tower thinking puts on hardware and software.
Best,
Harald
Constipation Information
As a former CIO (and currently a CEO), I can well-appreciate the difficulties that CIOs have in getting IT departments properly valued in businesses. This is often a huge problem – largely, I believe, because many CEOs (and other execs) don’t have a good understanding of IT. And when people don’t understand something they know is important (which everyone knows IT is), they will tend to view it as a cost and/or a problem.
So my advice, for what it’s worth, is that CIOs wanting to progress their departments (and their careers), need to:
o Learn to communicate much more effectively with other CXOs, by speaking the language of their businesses (and not IT jargon).
o Learn more about the core business
IT people have much to bring to senior management teams – they tend to think in different (complementary) ways to other executives.