CIO Talk Radio Blog

"The new normal has become the now normal." The historical review of yearlong metrics and benchmarks is dying. The new metrics are about "What do we need to do about that ...blinking red light right now." (Michel Janssen, CRO, the Hackett Group) "The idea of the new is really important. Things are happening so fast that relying on year old numbers is not doing it. The more you can get ... these things in real time, even if not a perfect real time, the better you are, and "whether or not you have the perfect bench mark if you have a metric that works, you can trend that over time and looking at the trends can be very valuable. ...If it is a metric that works for you and you are measuring yourself against yourself that is a believable trend."  (George Westerman, Research Scientist at the CISR, MIT, SLOAN School)

Recently I was on the CIO Talk Radio and we were discussing on the emerging and changing role of the Head of IT function and I was pleasantly surprised with the co-speaker introducing himself as the Head of CPO (Chief Process Officer).  During the course of the interview, he explained that he preferred the title of the CPO v/s. CIO as it describes the real role that he is playing.

When it comes to negotiating with cloud providers, it’s my humble opinion that the most difficult part of the process is Service Level Agreements (SLA).  It is almost amusing what the vendor initially posts as their standard SLA terms.  As Morgan Hunter stated in a reply to my Feb 25th blog, the vendor usually gives you a line such as “Every other customer has been fine with our SLAs”.  We all know that is a big red flag, or as Shakespeare stated “Let every eye negotiate for itself and trust no agent.” (I bet you didn’t expect to see Shakespeare quoted in an IT article did you?)

Donald Rumsfeld’s recent book might help you answer that question – or perhaps the WSJ excerpts below will suffice and save you from reading his 815 page volume (Known and Unknown).

Ah, but there’s another book written almost 20 years ago that’s needed to complete the picture: Polarity Management, by Barry Johnson.  Subtitled “Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems,” its premise is that you can become a more effective leader by distinguishing problems you can solve from those you cannot; and additionally by increasing your ability to manage the polarities inherent in those unsolvable problems.

What rules do you live by? How do you define the culture and values you want in your IT department? We each hire the best talent, we all embrace diversity in people, skills and ideas, we all strive for business alignment, but how do we build a framework to assure we are targeting those most important elements that we as CIOs believe brings out our best, and delivers the greatest value to our companies? We each come from different backgrounds and experiences, face different corporate, budget, market, and industry challenges, and have our own ideas of what construes IT excellence. We each in common face the constant challenge of technology change, consumer technology empowerment, new markets and approaches to business, and the ever shortening shelf life of opportunity as pressures with which we must contend, adapt to or embrace, and which continually redefine our approach to IT.