Leadership/Management

The New Paradigm in IT …BUSINESS!

3 Ways of Rethinking IT to deliver more choice, faster, on a bigger scale

In conversation, Jim Fortner (VP of IT Development & Operations, Global Business Services, P&G), Gregory Simpson (CTO, GE), and John Dick (CIO, Western Union) all make it clear, IT is no longer an enabler, but a true business partner at their enterprises.  (See:  Rethinking IT to deliver Choice, Speed, and Scale)

"There is a new paradigm of leadership ... a real strong business orientation in IT staff folks with strong executive management skills, business skills, understand the process, so it is retooling the organization to readily step up to the challenge. ...business telling us we have such a tremendous opportunity to take on more scope and more work. They are looking for us to come back with more choices and strategies. (Jim Fortner, P&G)

The Language of Leadership

If you want to be a business leader, you need to speak like one.  I’m not talking about just being able to explain technical complex topics in terms that business leaders understand.  In this day and age, that is table stakes for a CIO.  I’m referring to understanding and discussing business issues using the lexicon that other business leaders are using in your company.

Should IT still remain bureaucratic with command and control style management to be successful?

While IT wants to be in the forefront of innovation to help deliver business value, in order to produce predictable results, should it still continue to have bureaucratic decision making with command and control structure?

Are CIO's guilty of DUI?

IT has its near misses and unnecessary crashes. As in the case of a DUI, we may be quick to ascribe such  failures to bad choices and the taking of unnecessary risks under the undue influence of pressure, politics, foibles, or  fears, but where is the evidence? Are CIO's guilty of driving IT under such influence?

How do we measure what a CIO delivers?

Given that most CIO’s deliverables are intangible, how do we measure them?