Tips and Guidelines for Existing CIOCTO s


Tips and Guidelines for Existing CIO/CTO's

I find that it is very useful to follow some practical experts and advice provided by experts and practitioners in this field.

CIO Challenges

Let's begin with listing some common challenges, and talk about how to confront them, and offer an example of one CIO who identified innovative business implications for IT (81)

Typical barriers to change still exist at most IT departments. These include:

  • No time to think. Business units are continually throwing unplanned, unbudgeted project initiatives over the transom. IT people are so stretched that they unconsciously fall back defensively on old knowledge and behavior patterns. That very human response pulls their standing in the company below the level their talents merit.

  • No way to grasp all the technological possibilities. In this high-speed, high-tech world, there will always be a better package we haven't seen or a smarter configuration we haven't thought of. Make the best decision you can and move on.

  • IT's menial standing. Staff is highly trained, yet we're not widely viewed as relevant to the core business. This has always been a problem, and now, with the spotlight on IT's value, it's even more pressing that the company think of us more like engineers and less like plumbers. That's the only way to get the time, budget, and organizational backing to run potentially groundbreaking experiments with the mainstream businesses.

  • The change-resistant organization around us. From the inside, we look a lot like a government bureaucracy. Specialist silos, turf protection, ingrained attitudes, incomprehensible jargon, and plain risk aversion preserve the status quo. Even the CEO's efforts are generally thwarted. It's wise to figure that any idea grounded in crash-prone IT will be doubly suspect. (81)

    Barriers like these are formidable, but the rewards are even higher.

90 day plan

For some of us who need to get things done quickly, I would recommend a 90 day plan improvement. It is time to put together a quick and action oriented plan. Follow this plan for the next 90 days and see if your unit and your company performs better. (52)

First Month: Optimize the present

  • Make sure that you and your savviest IT people understand the business strategy you're serving and have a vision for its future. Send them into your business community to build understanding, a wider constituency for your perspectives, and a model of the current business.

  • Review the IT portfolio. Examine whether it directly serves the core value proposition and recent changes in business direction. You will find systems capabilities and IT projects that have lost their way. Identify those that are draining resources, still moving under their own momentum, or propped up by powerful backers.

  • Realign the portfolio. Kill anything that doesn't pass through the strategy filter. Be direct and forceful, and then be draconian. Free up space in IT to foster innovation and strategic thinking.

  • Define an IT strategy for 2004. State it in business terms.

Second Month: Develop leaders

  • Assess your organization's skills, capabilities, and assets. Figure out what combination of these drove past successes. Note who was involved and what values and skills they brought to the table. Review any special circumstances that affected the outcome.

  • Select a core group of current and future leaders. Your picks should be passionate, curious, and competent. Be sure it's a diverse group; include people of established credibility and new employees with fresh perspectives who can carry innovative ideas and actions outward to the larger organization.

  • Give your action troops an on-the-job MBA. Hold a boot camp with live ammo: Let them take aim at the business's core value proposition, value chain, and business model. Offer apprenticeships in customer service, sales, marketing, and R&D. Let them experience firsthand the pain points of your customers and suppliers.

Third Month: Build innovation into IT strategy

  • Develop a radar on emerging technologies. Challenge your technologists to periodically propose a set of technologies with potential to help drive your business strategy.

  • Help your team engage the business staff in conversations about the potential of strategic technologies. Give these conversations a context and structure that help uncover unmet needs and provide solutions.

  • Build an innovation agenda and a rich set of experimental projects that work on it.

  • Review and revise your strategy against emergent business needs and technology innovations (15)

Successful New Year Resolutions

Here are some New Year resolutions for CTOs and CIOs. (15)

  • Spend one day a week with the "one level down" and the "front line." Identify information that will broaden CIO's perspective and ensure that you apply practical experiences in the real world. "One level down" is a key phrase to influence the opinions of your peers, then influence the opinions of their direct reports. It is important to gain insight in the frontline employees of your organization.

  • Stay alert on service issues. Delivering the basics and core is priority for your organization's credibility. Other accomplishments will suffer if you are unable to deliver a level of service consistent with what your business delivers to its customers. It is important to analyze underlying root causes and formulate a workable improvement program.

  • Deliver some significant annual efficiency gains. Every executive is expected to deliver efficiencies. Beyond the one-time benefits of consolidation, the only way to deliver efficiency in a responsible manner is to reduce demand or the cost. Typically IT managers usually know the systems that take the most time to support, the customers who are the most demanding and the services that constantly require exception processing.

  • Facilitate an IT-enabled business strategy. Strategy is a demand management tactic. Establishing priorities and criteria for future opportunities are two of the most important outcomes of effective strategy-making. It is important to find individuals who can facilitate a process that answers "what should we invest in and why." It is important to get participation at the broadest and highest level.

  • Create a good leadership in CIO. Build a service organization that shows respect and appreciation for your customers. Ensure that senior IT leaders have good soft skills, including empathy, network-building, perceptiveness, teaming and persuasion. Design an organization that has the ability to flex capacity by allocating internal headcount on those positions that gate supply such as project managers, business analysts, and senior application and infrastructure design engineers.

  • Project value based results in six months. Build your credibility and reduce project risk by requiring that all IT-enabled business investments deliver value within six months. Increase the opportunity by understanding what drives value and sequencing these "value dependencies" as early as possible. The company understands improvements in quality, cycle time and efficiency requires many big changes in tandem: consolidated organizations, new order management and fulfillment processes, a single customer image, enterprise visibility on orders and status, and integration with key external vendors. The six-month value rule forced people to a sequence—consolidation of the organization followed by establishment of metrics, an integrated customer database, enterprise order transparency, and so forth.

  • Establish architecture. Focus on standards. The other focus is the goal of minimizing the technology footprint and operating costs. Set priorities based on application requirements for the next two years or so and invest ahead of need in a disciplined manner.

  • Management of resources. Run IT like a business by monitoring value, productivity, service and retention trends. Drive value and efficiency using operational metrics—not just financial ones. Monitor project success based on cycle time, use-case analysis and usage.

  • Manage mind share. Focus on feasibility and importance of tactical plans by summarizing your annual objectives, initiatives, accountabilities and measurements. (15)

Top Tips to Increase Influence

Finally, for the real experts, I would like to suggest some practical tips to increase influence. (52)

  1. Influence the influencers. Know what your colleagues read and watch, and seek out those they talk to.

  2. Adopt an executive to focus on and seek a business colleague to be your mentor.

  3. Keep your message simple and focus on ways to help this executive succeed.

  4. Position the start of every presentation and report with, "Here's where we were; here's where we are now."

  5. Provide case studies and examples

  6. Take road trips to check out technologies--and spend "soak time" with your business colleagues.

  7. Explain what competitors are doing; show their Web sites.

  8. Suggest some names as board members or advisers to ensure external--and perhaps IT-savvy--input.

  9. Equip and coach your executives to be confident IT-linked "road warriors."

  10. Make your business colleagues savvy IT executives on the road and at home. Suggest a mobile deployment that might spur their imagination concerning mobile deployment.

  11. And finally, continue to expand your ecosystem and rolodex around the world.




The CTO Handbook. The Indispensable Technology Leadership Resource for Chief Technology Officers
The CTO Handbook/Job Manual: A Wealth of Reference Material and Thought Leadership on What Every Manager Needs to Know to Lead Their Technology Team
ISBN: 1587623676
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 213

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