Posts Tagged ‘CIO’

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How IT Managers Work With Their CIO

Thursday, October 6th, 2011
Image Credit Presenting To The CIO Is A Big Step For IT Managers

Presenting To The CIO Is A Big Step For IT Managers

Congratulations IT Manager – you’ve been asked to make a presentation to your company’s CIO. Oh, oh. What are you going to have to do in order to make your career move forward due to this opportunity and not screw it up?

What Does A CIO Of Directors Want From A IT Manager?

Let’s make sure that we’re all on board here – do you really understand what the CIO does for the company? Although the CIO is in charge of the IT department, he or she is really responsible for making IT a company asset, not so much about the day-to-day working of the technology side of IT.

Although the CIO does understand the importance of information technology, they really don’t care about the nitty-gritty details that everyone in their department works on every day – they have much bigger things to worry about. That means that you are going to have present the information that they have requested very carefully.

Arthur Langer has done some research in this area and he has the following four recommendations for how IT Managers should present information to their CIO:

  1. New Ideas: IT Managers need to understand why they have been asked to make a presentation to the CIO. The CIO is not interested in what you spend most of your time worrying about – budget details, hiring issues, etc. Instead, his or her focus is on the IT department as a whole and they want to hear from you what you can do to help the department help out the rest of the company. This can include how your team can help out with ongoing operations as well as what you can do more strategically.

  2. Security: Every presentation that a IT Manager makes to the CIO needs to touch on the topic of information security. Remember, they don’t care about the details. Instead, what they want to hear from you is what you are doing to protect the company against risks and what you are doing to ensure that the company’s confidential information won’t get stolen.

  3. Data: If there is one thing that is keeping your CIO up at night, it’s worrying about all of that data that your company is sitting on. As the IT Manager, they see you as being responsible for keeping track of all of this data. That also means that you are viewed as acting as the point-of-contact if the company gets sued and one of those e-discovery programs has to be conducted.

  4. Analytics: Since the CIO sees the IT Manager as being in charge of all of the data that your team collects, they also see you as being responsible for finding ways to get the most out of that data. This means that you need to be ready to tell them how you plan on going about doing this.

How Can You Prepare For A CIO Presentation?

Being invited to make a presentation to your company’s CIO is a great honor. Now you’re going to have to ensure that you make the most of this opportunity. That means, sorry about this, you’re going to have to do some homework.

Here are four things that every IT Manager needs to do both before and during their presentation to the CIO:

  1. Know Your Audience: You should do this before every presentation, and presenting to your CIO is no different. You need to understand the personalities of the CIO. What is their background? What is their reputation within the company? What do other people who have presented to them have to say about them?

  2. Make Friends: How the presentation is going to turn out is often determined before it starts. If you can make contact with the CIO before the day of the presentation and ask them questions, then you will have a chance to have an ally in your corner on the day of your presentation.

  3. Time Counts: When you were told how much time you had for your presentation, the person who told it to you was lying. The way that these things work out is that you never get as much time as you were told, or even as much as you ended up being allocated. The CIO will hate you forever if you run over your allocated time and will love you forever if you finish up early. Always show up with multiple version of your presentation so that you can fit into smaller and smaller time periods.

  4. Use Stories: As one of the company’s IT Managers you have a great deal of sophisticated knowledge about all things related to the IT sector and how they work. Don’t share this during your presentation. Instead, keep things simple and use stories to make you points – this is what the CIO will be able to remember.

What All Of This Means For You

The definition of information technology is that it is how a company uses computers to become more successful. As one of the company’s IT Managers, it’s your job to make this happen. When your CIO summons you to present to them, you need to understand both what they are interested in and what they don’t want you to talk about.

When you are preparing for your presentation you’ll want to focus on what the CIO wants hear: how your IT team can help to grow the company, data security, data management, and how best to use the data that the company has. Additionally you’ll need to do your homework in order to prepare for your big presentation.

We talk a lot about finding ways to get the IT Manager a “seat at the table” when it comes to working with other departments. Being asked to present to your CIO is a fantastic opportunity for an IT Manager to make a name for himself or herself. Make sure that you take the time to prepare for this presentation and you’ll see your career take off…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that you should prepare a separate handout for your presentation to the CIO?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As an IT manager, your time is spent keeping projects and teams on track. You wouldn’t think that something like strategy would be part of your job at this stage of your career. I mean, that strategy stuff is what the big boys in IT spend their days worrying about right? Hmm, if you don’t start thinking about how to both come up with and execute a strategy now, how are you going to develop these management skills later on? Let’s see if we can show you what you need to be doing with strategy right now…

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Posted in communication | 1 Comment »

IT Leaders Need To Know What Their Company’s Goals Are

Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Image Credit
You Can’t Score If You Don’t Know What The Goals Are

You Can’t Score If You Don’t Know What The Goals Are

As an IT leader you’ve got a lot to do. As though it wasn’t enough to stay on top of your staff keeping them happy, engaged, and productive, you are also constantly working to stay on top of all of that changing technology (can anyone say “new release”?) It turns out that you have an additional task that you might not be taking the time to do: figuring out where your company is trying to get to.

Why Knowing The Goals Is Important

How many of those “corporate” emails have arrived in your inbox this week so far? You know the ones that I’m talking about: they talk about the quarterly profits, some clever words that your CEO / COO / CFO / CIO said that got quoted in some trade journal, etc. Did you take the time to read it? Probably not – your too busy doing real IT work.

It turns out that you should take the time to read these emails. The reason is because this is how the company is telling you where they are trying to go as a company. Sure you might be working shoveling coal down in the IT boiler room of the company, but you have a vested interest in where the ship is sailing to because at the very least if it hits a rock, you’ll be affected too.

The leaders of your company work for the people who own the company. This means that the company has to make money or else the leaders will be replaced. How they plan on going about making that money is what you really care about. In order to hold on to their jobs, your management needs to be successful at almost any cost. This means that their goals need to be your goals.

How To Find Out What Your Company’s Goals Are

If we can all agree that knowing what your company is trying to do is important, then we can move on to trying to answer the really big question: just how can an IT Leader go about getting your hands on this type of information? It turns out that it is both easy and hard to do.

The easy part of this is to do some reading. Depending on whether your company is a public company or is privately held, there will be either more or less written information available to you. Things like quarterly reports and annual reports, although dry at times, do make for great reading if you are an IT Leader who wants to know where your company is headed.

Now about those emails that you’ve been getting. Sure, any one of the corporate emails that we all get probably isn’t all that important by itself. However, when you take them all together they can tell you a very interesting story.

Your senior management can’t actually accomplish any of the goals that they set for the company by themselves. They need your help. I tend to look upon those corporate emails as a desperate plea for assistance by management. The tricky part is that they generally can’t come out and say that their jobs depend on you helping them accomplish the company’s goals, instead they have to use clever wording that hides their pleas.

What To Do With This Knowledge

Once you’ve done your reading, listened to any speeches that your senior management has given, and generally come to an understanding of just what the company is trying to accomplish and where they are trying to get to, the big question is what now?

In order to move your career forward, you need to actually use the information that you’ve uncovered. The trick here is that you need to use it in a visible way. As you work on IT projects and participate in IT meetings, you’d like to become known as the person who is always asking the question “how does this help us to reach our company goals?” Sure, it might get to be a bit redundant over time, but the word will get out that you actually know what the company is trying to do and this can be a great career booster.

Just keeping everyone else on track is not enough, you’ve got to do more. Specifically those high-level company goals won’t exactly translate into specific IT project actions. This means that you need to step up and help to interpret the goals into specific IT actions that people on your team need to take. Depending on the goal, the actions may relate to reducing or avoiding costs, improving efficiency, etc.

What All Of This Means For You

We all feel that we are drowning in too much information already; however, it turns out that we still have one additional job that we need to be doing. The company that we work for has goals and it turns out that IT Leaders can play a big role in seeing that these goals happen.

In order to help the company, IT Leaders need to first make sure that they understand just exactly what the company’s goals are. Next they need to make sure that they let everyone else know that the goals are important. Finally, within an IT Leader’s team, real actions need to be taken in order to translate high-level company goals into specific IT tasks.

If we can view company goals as not being a bothersome distraction, and instead start to view them as a request for assistance that only we can provide, then change can happen. Your career is tied to how successful your company is and helping the company to achieve its goals is one way to be successful.

Question for you: where would you go to learn what your company’s real goals for this year are?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What do you think the mood of your IT team is right now? Poor? Downright bad? If your workplace is like most businesses out there right now, your team is still reeling from all of the layoffs, hiring freezes, pay cuts, etc. If nothing else, there has been a lingering sense of dread that has been in the air for the better part of two years. What do you need to be doing?

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Posted in goals | 2 Comments »

Web 3.0 Is Coming – Are IT Leaders Ready?

Thursday, July 30th, 2009
What Is The Web 3.0 And Are CIOs Going To Be Ready?

What Is The Web 3.0 And Are IT Leaders Going To Be Ready?

Oh Web 2.0, it seems like only yesterday that you arrived – is it possible that already you may be getting ready to be replaced? The answer is not quite yet, but the outline of what the Web 3.0 is going to look like is starting to firm up. IT Leaders need to start getting ready for this change now so that when it arrives they can take advantage of all that it will offer…

What Was Web 2.0?

Before we run off and start making predictions about the future of the Internet, maybe it would be a good idea to take just a moment and make sure that we are all on the same page as to just exactly what the Web 2.0 is / was.

When the web first showed up (Web 1.0), everyone rushed out and created static web pages. That was a great start, but it got a bit boring because nothing changed without a great deal of effort. Web 2.0 extended what we had by adding blogging, Wikipedia, social networking (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and even microblogging (Twitter). This changed everything because all of a sudden things could be easily changed – and they were!

What Is Web 3.0 Going To Be?

IT Leaders who are trying to keep their teams on track and on top of new technologies need to be asking just what is going to make up the Web 3.0. Dr. Jim Hendler at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been spending some time thinking about this and he’s come up with some interesting ideas. Dr. Hendler points out that the next version of the Web appears to all be based on Tim Berners-Lee’s (you know, the guy who invented the Web) vision of a semantic web.

In this next iteration of the web, what we’re going to see is more and more complex mashups of data from different applications being used to deliver data in more useful ways. Dr. Hendler believes that the read-write abilities of Web 2.0 applications will be used to build Web 3.0 applications that operate at the data, not the application level.

What’s Going To Make The Web 3.0 Happen?

Before the Web 3.0 can show up, a few critical pieces need to drop into place. Ultimately, what needs to happen is that it has to become easier to integrate web data resources. This is exactly what IT Leaders need to be staying on top of. Here are the emerging technologies that are going to allow this to happen:

  • Resource Description Framework (RDF): provides a means to link data from multiple different websites or databases. Uses the SQL-like SPARQL query language.
  • Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): We already have these – this is how you merge and map data that is found in different locations on the web.
  • Web Ontology Language (OWL): allows relationships to be inferred between data that is stored in different parts of the same application.

Final Thoughts

IT Leaders have many different responsibilities that they have to juggle at the same time. Keeping up on new and emerging technologies is part of the job. The Web 3.0 will be at least as significant of a change as the Web 2.0 was. If they move quickly, IT Leaders can position their teams to get in front of a significant change before it happens. Right now they have such a chance – Web 3.0 is not here yet, but it’s getting ready to arrive.

IT Leaders need to have their teams spending time time to understand what problems that the company is facing today will be able to be solved once you have a better way to unify all of that data that is available on the web. A critical first step is assigning staff to learn and become experts on the new Web 3.0 technologies early on. If you can prepare for the future AND accomplish your other IT tasks at the same time, then the Web 3.0 will have provided you with yet another way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Questions For You

What is the level of adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in your department currently? Is anyone currently studying the new technologies that Web 3.0 will be built on? Is anyone on your team studying how Web 3.0 abilities can be used to help your company? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Have you ever heard the phrase “When senior management doesn’t know what to do, they reorganize”? I’m not sure if this is always true, but it sure seems as though when times are tough reorganizations, restructuring, and even re-engineering are things that can happen to any department in IT. What’s an IT Leader to do about it?

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Posted in information technology | 2 Comments »

What Is An IT Leader To Do When Winning Is EVERYTHING?

Monday, October 6th, 2008
Sometimes IT Staff Can Get Too Focused On Winning At All Costs

Sometimes IT Staff Can Get Too Focused On Winning At All Costs

So here’s an interesting issue that I’m sure that most CIO’s and IT managers would love to have: how best to mange over-the-top “A-Type” personalities? Hey, we all know folks like this (put that mirror down!) These are the people in our company / department / team for which winning can become more important then the big picture. We all seek to have enthusiastic people on our teams, but what can we do when enthusiasm turns into something very, very bad?

So what’s the real problem with really wanting to win a discussion, a bidding war, or a design decision? Simple – focusing too much on winning can cause smart people to make bad decision errors. When IT managers and executives become overcome by competition, they can shift their goals from maximizing value to beating their competition at any cost.

Dr. Deepak Malhotra has done a great deal of study on such folks, and he spilled his guts in an article that he wrote for the Harvard Business Review. What he found, is that there is very strong evidance that, what he likes to call “competitive arousal”, is at the root of a number of high profile business mistakes. IT is not immune to this effect.

Now this brings up a very good point: there is nothing wrong with wanting to win! We all enjoy winning, hey – it makes us feel good. In fact, we are often willing to pay a price to win. Just to make sure that we all understand it, there is often a good reason to want to win. We encounter competitive situations in which we want to win in all sorts of different forms: auctions, negotiations, legal issues, merges, acquisitions, promotions,  or even when we go recruiting new talent. In some of these cases, it may be worth it to end up paying more than the fair value for what we really, really want because it will weaken our competition, etc.

Here’s the trick: if you are going to go after some prize with that much zeal, then you had better have done an upfront analysis of the situation and determined what your limits of loss that are acceptable are. Additionally, you are going to have to balance these against the benefits to your IT organization. If you don’t do this BEFORE you get involved in the competition, and you try to do it DURING the competition then that’s when your competitive arousal will end up overriding your rational decision making process.

So what’s an IT leader to do? We are going to have to provide you with a way to identify what causes this competitive arousal to show up. Once you can spot it, you are going to need some tools that will allow you to avoid or at least reduce the possibility that it will screw-up your IT department’s strategy or destroy your department’s value. We’ll do all of this, next time…

Have you ever seen someone in your department (you?) go out of control when they got into a competitive situation? How did it start – was it them against just one rival or did they face off against a group? When did you realize that they had gone too far? How did it end up? Was there any long term impacts due to this out of control competition? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in management | 2 Comments »

IT Leaders Have Two Of These But Do They Use Them?

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
You Should Be Listening Twice As Much As You Talk!

You Should Be Listening Twice As Much As You Talk!

About a year ago I had a chance to sit down with a member of an IT team that was working for me in order to have a heart-to-heart with him. We’ll call him Tim. Tim was a project manager on one of my teams and so far he had been a steady performer. I’d say that he was strong on the analytical side and soft on the interpersonal side; however, he was doing a good job and I had really had no complaints on his performance. Recently, things had changed with Tim. His whole demeanor had been transformed as a deep depression seemed to both surround him and flow off of him and onto anyone that he interacted with. It had gotten so bad that nobody really wanted to have anything to do with him. Clearly this was having an impact on his ability to do his job. It was time for me to step in and see what I could do.

I took Tim with me down to the cafeteria in order to get him into a neutral location. I started my conversation with him by explaining that I had been pleased with his work up until recently. I told him that it sure seemed like something had changed and I needed to find out what it was because things couldn’t continue like they were. Tim initially said exactly what you’d expect a guy to say: “Nothing’s wrong.” I thought about opening up on him with both barrels – look, he was doing a lousy job and he was going to be out the door if he didn’t shape up. However, I knew better and so I kept gently probing. Finally, Tim got around to saying “I hate my Director.” Once again, my gut reaction was to tell him “Too bad, he’s not leaving so you had better make some changes.” However, somehow I was able to hold my tongue and instead said the three most important words that an IT Leader can say “Tell Me More…”

Tim started telling me the standard things that everyone says about their boss behind their backs “He doesn’t give clear instructions, he changes his mind too often, he’s never around when I need to talk to him, etc.” This is regular stuff – not enough to cause such a change in personality. So I went on and said “What else has happened lately?” This finally got Tim to confess everything. In a staff meeting, his boss had found some errors in some slides that Tim had prepared showing the status of the project and had called him out on it in front of the rest of the department. Given Tim’s personality, this was just about the worst thing that anyone could do to him. He was wounded and still sulking several weeks after the event. Bingo! We had our smoking gun.

This was a problem that I could (and did) fix rather easily. That’s not the point of this posting. Rather, my first reactions as Tim’s story unfolded would have been the wrong ones to act on and if I had, then I would have ended up doing a great deal of damage and not fixing the problem. I guess that’s why we all have two ears and just one mouth.

David Benzel is an author and a speaker and he points out that as IT Leaders we all have four main responsibilities when it comes to communicating with our IT teams:

  1. To listen
  2. To get the facts
  3. To determine the problem
  4. To help resolve the situation

As hard as it is to do, listening is both an art and a science that all of us IT Leaders need to get better at doing. Listening is hard to do because it requires you to focus your attention and use your full brain to process what is being said – no multi-tasking allowed! By keeping your mouth shut and your ears open, you allow your staff to do the talking and when they do that, you will learn amazing things.

Have you ever been in a situation in which you spoke too soon without doing enough listening? What happened when you did this? Have you ever seen someone who was a good listener at work? How did people respond to them? Were they more or less effective at their jobs than their peers? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in IT manager, soft skills | 3 Comments »

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