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!

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”!

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.

In a recent issue Harvard Business Review has an article about HR departments. Most of the things in article also apply to IT departments.

Many IT mission statements boasts about “excellent” service, of course “beyond expectation”, about support, about “enabling the business” and a lot of related buzzwords.

But in business it’s always about competitive advantage and about customer.

Any CEO wants a competitive advantage for every dollar spent: growth, better customer service, lower costs and so on. Consider Wall Mart: every dollar they spend on IT it’s dedicated to improvements in their supply chain – their competitive advantage. And the CIO wants to provide “excellent service, beyond expectation”… I am not saying that good service is not necessary; I am arguing only that service is not the mission of IT. IT, like any part of the company must help create and maintain competitive advantage.

Next time when you draft you IT strategic plan ask yourself: what are my company’s competitive advantages? And what can I do to increase them? Or even better: what can I do to create a new competitive advantage?

I tried today to find some blogs of fellows CIOs. Tough luck! I was proud of my Internet searching skills, but today I have to admit defeat.
A blog is a form of communication and require a certain degree of extroversion. A modern CIO job is about interacting with people: with top management, with peers, and with own team. A modern CIO is a communicator.
I wonder why CIOs are not present in blogoshpere….