CIO Mind

Tomorrow I will the whole day at CISCO Expo.

I have a presentation in the morning about Rompetrol voice network and I moderate together with CISCO country manager an afternoon session “Paths to Growth” reserved for IT Executives.

I will be back with some impressions.

Through some web “magic” I found two CIO blogs:

CIO Web Musings: http://petesiegel.blogspot.com/

and another one:

Keith Parnell :: Marketing CIO: http://keith.jaseblog.com/

Enjoy Reading

I knew I shouldn’t believe journalists.

As Norman Mailer said :

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

I my previous post I was quoting an article in Computer Weekly about the four types of CIOs.

Meanwhile after some emails exchanged with Brinley Platts, author of the Building Effective IT Executive Teams research and chairman of CIODevelopment.com I understand better the full picture:

Each of them will have strengths and weaknesses based solely on their career track and the experience it has given them, and smart CIOs (and CEOs) will take account of these in building and deploying their top executive teams.

The types are based on previous experience: technology versus other functions and current organization versus other organizations

Every type has it place in an organization life-cycle and culture. The CIO Role-Types Model is also great to plot your career path.

Please go to CIO Development site and download the study. Worth reading it!

Today Prashanth from CIO Weblog send me an Information Week article: “Credibility Of Analysts“.

Forrester, Gartner, IDC, and others insist their output is squeaky clean, yet they also rake in millions providing services to the very same companies they monitor, heavyweights like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. Which leads to a question that continues to dog the research firms: How much influence do technology vendors have over their work?

The article analyses in depth the relations between technology vendors and analysts. Worth reading:

Technology vendors often will sign up for analyst firm services when they feel their market is poised for growth. Cyveillance in January signed on with Gartner to help understand how its software fits with the growing demand for IT security and regulatory compliance. “I also wanted to understand how a product we’re rolling out should be priced,” Bransford says. So IDC helps seed the market, Gartner helps price it, and both get paid for doing so. Is everyone comfortable with that?

I always preach that IT is no different than any other business discipline: from project evaluation to people management the same good old ways applies. There is no “magic” in IT.

I am convinced that any good manager can run an IT organization.

I found today an intriguing article in Computer Weekly: The way to become a top CIO.

“Some organizations appoint the CIO from within, but not from within the IT department. These ‘executive CIOs’ are typically appointed when the chief executive has become so frustrated with IT that he gives it to a more experienced, proven executive.”

The CEO’s assumption is that IT will now be in safe, familiar hands, run by someone whose capability is known, and who is “one of us” so far as the business executives of the company are concerned.

This makes perfect sense to me.

But all too often the appointment proves temporary or a mistake - certainly for the CIO in question. On average, the executive CIO lasts two years in the CIO role, whereas the internal IT professional CIO lasts seven years, says Platts.

This comes as a big surprise to me. Unless Platts get his figures wrong this is very disturbing evidence.

Their problems stem from the fact that they will inevitably discover that they are between a rock and a hard place, says Platts. With neither competence in nor experience of IT, they will fail to engage the confidence of their own team.

Worse, if the CEO has placed them in charge of an IT function riddled with problems, they will swiftly realize that one of the key problems is the lack of trust in IT by senior business management and the poor relationship it has with IT in the first place.

Although it may be expected that the best relationships between IT and business should be where an executive CIO runs IT from general management, once they are CIO, the executive CIO’s relationship with their CEO can deteriorate very quickly.

“The CEO will say, ‘I have worked 20 years successfully with him and in six weeks in IT he has gone native’.” In general, no executive CIO should accept the job if offered - it is a no-win situation, says Platts.

Very disturbing. I’ll dig for some more facts.

I rediscovered today in Guy’s blog a great essay about writing by George Orwell (the original article is here).

I have to read (and write) almost daily a lot of English language documents: business cases, project initiations, reports, meeting minutes, etc.

Quote from George Orwell:

Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

All the current business documents are written using this “modern English” language or even worst.

Who is not tired of: “Time to Market”, “on the same page”, “at the end of the day”, “in a nutshell”, “total cost of ownership”, “business value” and so on.

Pages and pages of words voided of almost all the meaning. And we write like we speak. And we wander why staff is playing bullshit bingo in the meetings.

Even a business case must be written in good English. So, this is a letter to all writers:

Dear All,
Please read the great essay of George Orwell. Before starting to write anything, please read it again. After you finish writing read it again and correct you work.

Thank you,
Your Reader.

PS: And I don’t even mentioned vendor marketing materials. Another fine example of “business language”!

Garr Reynolds has an article about trust on his Presentation Zen blog.

Very good read especially now when each and every vendor want to be “your trusted partner”.

…many vendors today say it is IT that makes the difference to enabling business innovation. Mark Twain’s response to such a claim would likely have been to repeat another of his famous remarks: “Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she has laid an asteroid.”

Dan McLean of Globe and Mail analyze in his recent article one of the usual claims made by IT vendors. Today: IT driven innovation.

In their pursuit of selling another bottle of “snake-oil” SAP turn around a survey of “Canada’s leading IT executives” to show the link between IT an innovation.

Dan digs a little in the survey read it correctly:

The telling point may be what respondents ranked as the top benefit of IT. Operational efficiency was voted No. 1 by 36 per cent and business productivity came out on top in the minds of 26 per cent.

By comparison, business innovation ranked No. 1 with only 6 per cent of respondents — behind the IT benefit of mobilizing work forces, which was cited by 8 per cent. And yet, SAP’s press release announced the survey results under the headline: “Canada’s Road to Business Growth and Innovation Runs Through the IT Department.”

IT can do a lot for any organization, but many times it collapses under the pressure created by vendor hype. If you read the marketing materials you’ll think that every vendor has laid out an asteroid.
IT is a tool, a very powerful tool, a very smart tool, but only a tool. A tool cannot be smarter than the one using it.

Thanks Dan for the head up and people, go read the original article!

The short answer: with your eyes wide open.

The long answer:

Like many of my CIO colleagues, I am a big consumer of analyst services.

Silicon Valley Guy put it very well:

IT managers simply do not have the time or energy to systematically gather information including talking to many of their peers, vet blogs for accuracy and synthesize conclusions. So tens of thousands IT organizations outsource market, product and management technique research to analysts just like they outsource PC help desk outsourcing, hardware break/fix and janitorial work. Why do 20 or 40 hours of research when you can read a couple of research notes and do a 30-minute phony inquiry? Yeah, they might be cutting corners, but that’s life.

Still….your analyst (be it Gartner, Forrester, AMR or whatever) report is not the holy book. You can question your analyst conclusions; you can question whether or not they apply to your country or your industry.

Do your own homework: learn about your company, learn about your country and your region, learn about your industry, and talk to your close peers.

Don’t get scared by “the brave new world” and the “unprecedented speed of change”. The ground rules of management still apply!

Read the ARmadgeddon blog from time to time, and join (or start) your local CIO Council.

Quoting Tom Peters:

Even—especially?—the “unprecedented” “change”/”speed of change” argument is suspect. In General Grant’s day the arrival of the telegraph was as radical, I think you could argue, as the arrival of the Web. “Unprecedented change”? My Mom, who died in 2005 experienced, among other things: the arrival of radio, long-distance phones, TV, computers, the Web, cars, flight (Wright brothers to 747s to Neil Armstrong), WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, the Cold War, the Korean “police action,” Vietnam, Gulf Wars I & II, the scourge of HIV, etc, etc. By her standards, I’ve (we’ve) experienced a cakewalk!

We keep hearing that our time in unique, that our challenges are unique… Is that it?

Read the full post of Tom here.