Leadership

The CIO Role: One of Influence or Control?

July 29, 2009

I’d like to thank Michael Krigsman for inviting me to join him in the IT Failures town hall yesterday. It was great to interact with a few CIOs and other experts in IT management and leadership and discuss challenges facing the CIO in successfully delivering value. For those who missed it, the entire session was recorded. The focus of our discussion was on the CIO’s role in project success or failure. (William Monroe regularly reminds ...

13 comments Read more →

10 CIO Dashboard Tips

June 25, 2009

Catch up on the CIO Dashboard Series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 As a wrap-up to the CIO Dashboard series, I’ve summarized some of the key points and added a few new ones to this list of 10 CIO Dashboard tips. Thanks to two of my colleagues at Diamond, Jim Quick and Adrian Vern, who are experts in measuring and communicating IT value through dashboards and provided their ideas. 10 CIO Dashboard Tips 1. ...

6 comments Read more →

The Art of Why

June 2, 2009

Many of the words associated with information technology reflect the long-standing focus on how to do things. Software engineering, methodology, use cases, BPM, governance, and workflow are just some examples. This makes sense because IT is complex and focusing on getting better is part of the challenge. With this as a backdrop, think about some of the questions that you discuss with other parts of the business. Maybe some of these will sound familiar: Why ...

8 comments Read more →

5 IT Governance Attitudes Foreshadow Failure

May 7, 2009

After you have the organization following your core IT processes (more on that here), you are ready to add effective IT governance to increase productivity and alignment. Before you do this, make sure that you squash any of these five attitudes that may exist in your teams that will implement governance – they will virtually eliminate any chances you have for success. “We are here to govern you” The primary goals of governance is to ...

4 comments Read more →

3 CIO Lessons from Obama’s First 100 Days

April 29, 2009

Today marks President Obama’s 100th day in office. Gallup reports that Obama’s 63% approval rating is the best since Carter’s early approval rating in 1977 (the highest was JFK’s 74% in 1961; CNN’s take). Americans have used the first 100 days as a predictor of Presidential success ever since FDR’s barrage of New Deal programs. NPR even has an Obama Tracker that has been documenting domestic, economic and foreign policy milestones since the President ...

0 comments Read more →

CIO Tenure: What is Wrong (if Anything)?

April 22, 2009

Along with IT project failure rates, the average time a CIO stays with a company is one of the most often quoted metrics in our trade. Recent studies cite that 1 in 4 CIOs are fired for poor performance and CIO’s have an average tenure of 4.4 years. These don’t seem to bode well for the CIO. Why is the tenure so short? And, is this seemingly short tenure really a bad thing? While certainly ...

11 comments Read more →

IT Governance: Does it Work?

April 14, 2009

My good friend Peter Weill, Chairman of MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), defines IT governance as “specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT.” In a perfect system, desirable behavior would be the norm and governance would deal with the exceptions. Unfortunately, in many organizations, the reverse is true. Consider the results of a question from Diamond’s most recent Digital IQ survey asking for indications ...

14 comments Read more →

CIO Leadership: Listen to the Guy on the Ground

April 3, 2009

I’ve been enjoying The Mission, The Men, and Me, an Army Special Forces commander’s account of his missions and the fundamental lessons that he took away from them. The author, Pete Blaber, is now an executive at Amgen, which both lends credibility to the application of his ideas in a business context and provides a glimpse into the kind of leader he is. Among the lessons he distills from his experiences is that a leader ...