Your Leadership Portfolio: The View from C-level
Former senior IT leaders who rise to head of the function are often surprised by the competencies that they are expected to have at the C-level.
Former senior IT leaders who rise to head of the function are often surprised by the competencies that they are expected to have at the C-level.
Funny thing about the word "and." You would think it would function as a connector, a word that implies the togetherness of two entities, like "stars and stripes" or "franks and beans." Yet the phrase "IT and the business" does not work that way. Rather, it connotes separateness and difference, creating an "us and them" perception that belies the actual embedded condition of IT.
To ensure harmony between IT and business management, Jeff Kubacki recommends communication, communication, and more communication.
The thrill of booting up a team never gets old for Steve Finnerty, Applied Materials' vice president of IT and vendor services and a mentor in the CIO Executive Council's Pathways leadership development program. Good thing. The 40-year IT veteran and former CIO for Kraft Foods, Johnson Controls and JM Huber has headed up no fewer than three big new teams in as many years since joining Applied Materials, the world's largest supplier of manufacturing equipment to the semiconductor, display and solar photovoltaic industries.
One thing is clear about our recent CIO.com story, "Are Macs really cheaper to manage than PCs" --readers have vehement opinions on this topic. One other thing: there is no "right" answer to this question.
Plenty of seismic shifts have rocked and reshaped IT in the past. Some big rumblings' epicenters had origins in an unstoppable technology shift; other fissures had nothing to do with PCs and servers. Consider the recent shocks: the Internet revolution and dotcom bust; Y2K and 9/11; the consumerization of IT; and the unstoppable broadband and mobile explosion.
With the Olympic fanfare over, I finally had the chance to watch Undercover Boss, CBS's new reality TV show about corporate executives who go undercover to observe first-hand what's happening on the front lines of their businesses and find out how their almighty management decisions really get implemented.
Middle management just isn't what it used to be. The old definition of a middle manager--those senior staff in charge of overseeing the details of day-to-day management and reporting to top management--is too narrow, says Leslie Willcocks, Professor of Technology Work and Globalization at the London School of Economics (LSE) and head of its Outsourcing Unit.
Last month, I introduced the concept of the CIO paradox, a set of pernicious contradictions that permeate the core of your role. I also issued a challenge to make that paradox a thing of the past. To be sure, what I propose is a marathon, not a sprint. The paradox has been around since the dawn of IT. But by using professional associations, forums and events, you can put together a long-term plan of attack. If you do nothing, these contradictions will continue to undercut you and block your successor's path to the Future-State CIO.
CIOs are reworking how they manage IT to address business technology (BT)--pervasive technology use accompanied by increased direct engagement of non-IT business leaders.
Researchers at the University of Tennessee have studied a variety of outsourcing deals-from IT and back-office work to manufacturing and logistics-and identified the most common mistakes organizations make when partnering with an external provider.
"If you board the wrong train, it's no use running along the corridor in the other direction," said famed World War II German resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We in IT boarded the wrong train a long time ago. It's the "standard model" of information technology organizations - the familiar litany that says CIOs should run IT as a business, meeting the requirements of its internal customers. This refrain has been endorsed by our holy trinity, too: analyst firms, most consultancies and ITIL.
Ten years ago, I started asking CIOs a question: When you walked into your job, what did you find? The answer, roughly 90 percent of the time: "I inherited a mess. The IT organization had major delivery problems and no credibility with the business." A decade later, I am getting the same answer. How can this be? Is every CIO I have ever spoken to an idiot? Or, more plausibly, is there something so inherently problematic about the CIO role that even the most talented and experienced leaders have trouble making it work?
In a market fraught with uncertainty, many companies have focused on cutting expenses and increasing productivity and efficiency as a way to stem market share losses and reverse downward sales trends. This often means downsizing and reorganizing to reduce labor costs, eliminate redundancy, and better target scarce resources.
No one ever claimed that managing corporate IT systems was easy, or without its fare share of tumult, or for the faint of heart. But during the past decade, as better IT tools emerged in the high-tech industry-such as application integration software, Web-based software delivery methods, project implementation strategies and virtualization techniques-it would be reasonable to think that the overall management of IT might have become less arduous and risky.