Executive Guide To The Future of IT Leadership

Executive’s guide to the
future of IT leadership
Copyright ©2013 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.

2 EXECUTIVE’S GUIDE TO THE FUTURE OF IT LEADERSHIP
Executive’s guide to the future

of IT leadership
Copyright ©2013 by CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.
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Published by TechRepublic
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Contents
04 Introduction
05 Cloud, outsourcing, tablets, and smartphones: How the death of
IT will lead to the rebirth of the CIO
11 Three big challenges facing the CIO in 2014
13 Eight special qualities CIOs will need in the future
15 How the CAO can bridge the gap between business and IT
18 Strong governance and policy frameworks can help the CIO
succeed
20 11 challenges facing the “international” CIO
23 Why today’s CIOs may no longer be up to the job
25 Vendors bypassing the CIO: Six ways to stop it
27 Has the CIO lost big data?
29 Here’s what is really worrying CIOs, right now
31 Many CIOs are moving beyond IT
33 CIOs can’t go it alone anymore
36 Why do CIOs still need technical skills?

Introduction
The role of the CIO has been upended over the past few years. Trends like outsourcing, cloud, mobile, social,
and BYOD have changed the focus of enterprise technology—and the CIO’s job has changed right along with
it. CIOs were once responsible for acquiring, implementing, and maintaining IT infrastructure. Now they’re
being challenged to set the technology agenda and develop strategies that drive business advantage.
For the CIO, it’s a radical shift—from spending money on technology that supports the business to finding
ways to use technology to make money for the business.
This guide from ZDNet and TechRepublic explores the issues surrounding the ongoing reinvention of IT
leadership and offers practical advice for addressing the current and future challenges facing technology
executives.
Sincerely,
Jason Hiner
Editor in Chief

Cloud, outsourcing, tablets, and

smartphones: How the death of IT will
lead to the rebirth of the CIO
By Steve Ranger
Successive waves of change have undermined the old certainties for the CIO over the last few years. First
outsourcing and offshoring, then cloud, and now the emergence of consumer smartphones, tablets, and the
resulting bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon, are forcing organisations to reassess why—and how—
they acquire and manage their IT infrastructure, along with the role played in that process by the CIO.
CIOs who try to resist these changes risk ending up as ineffectual figures, overwhelmed by inexorable tide.
For the last couple of decades, the CIO’s job has been to build and manage the internal technology infra-
structure that a business requires to operate. Mostly that entailed creating a well-staffed and well-funded IT
department to go with it.
Today, CIOs are facing a new reality in which success is measured not by the how many staff and projects
are on the books, but by how few. They are also expected to find new ways to make money from technology,
rather than spending money on running it. That means the skills that helped build the old IT organisation are
very different from (and sometimes the opposite of) the ones CIOs will need in the future.
“Some CIOs get it, some don’t. Becoming more strategic is important, and that’s what’s going to make the
difference. It’s not about keeping their hands on the tin; it’s about using it for business value. Some people will
thrive and some will not,” says Alastair Behenna, an analyst with Forrester Research—and a former CIO.
The CIO status quo starts to crumble

Traditionally, the CIO has been the executive in control of technology strategy and spending across an organ-
isation, with oversight of all the business’s technology projects, if limited actual day-to-day involvement. It’s
a job title that tends to appear more regularly in large and multinational enterprises than smaller businesses
(where the senior tech decision maker is often given the “IT director” title).
The CIO is often promoted from within the technology department and will have a background in IT, perhaps
augmented by an MBA picked up along the way. The CIO is usually part of the executive team, perhaps
reporting to the CEO, or the CFO or COO, depending on the priority given to technology by the organisation.
They are also usually men: Only about 10 percent of CIOs are women—less than the average percentage of
women working in IT.
The CIO is sometimes supported by a CTO with a remit to explore emerging technologies at deeper level.
Indeed, the CIO, who usually focuses on business priorities, has traditionally functioned as the translator
between what’s often perceived as an introverted and insular IT group and the rest of the organisation.

But all these certainties are now being questioned. The CIO’s role, and that of the IT organisation they oversee,
will change significantly over the next five years—and not all CIOs are likely to welcome the change.
CIOs now face a series of contradictory demands, according to Lee Weldon, research director at analyst Gart-
ner. After years of being asked to increase efficiency and reduce costs thanks to a tough economic climate,
they’re also being asked to come up with new ways of using technology to create new business opportunities.
“The CIO is getting hit with these conflicting expectations. That’s a real pressure that they are feeling,” Weldon
says.
Khalid Kark, research director at analyst Forrester, adds that whereas the CIO’s role in the past was to manage
technology efficiently, business expectations around what technology can deliver have changed significantly in
the last five years. As a result, the CIO now needs to demonstrate how IT contributes to the bottom line.
“If you don’t, you are going to be commoditised as an entity and as an organisation, and you’ll see a lot of
business areas trying to get IT on their own and trying to do things on their own because they don’t get the
value and support they expect from technology through the CIO,” Kark says.
The CIO: Leading the battle or caught in the

crosshairs?
Forrester divides CIOs into three categories. Top of the pile are the “Generals,” who shoulder responsibility for
bringing in new ideas and innovation across the business. “That’s a very significant trend we are starting to
see, where CIOs are getting business responsibilities,” Kark says.
“Captain”-style CIOs see their role as supporting the business rather than leading it, while the “Soldier” CIO is
what the traditional CIO role has been demoted to.
“They are primarily order takers—they do what they’re told. They’re managing technology and they try to make
sure that they do that in the most efficient manner,” Kark says.
Soldier CIOs would do well to watch out, as their position is likely to come under attack. “The Soldiers are the
ones who come to us and say, ‘year over year my budget is being slashed and I’m expected to do more with
less.’ The other two categories typically have higher budgets, higher visibility, and higher influence within the
organisation,” Kark says.
Forrester estimates that about 10 percent of CIOs could be classed as Generals, about 30 percent are
Captains, and 60 percent are Soldiers. That balance is starting to change, however, with more Generals and
Captains but fewer Soldiers, as cloud, BYOD, and outsourcing start to eat away at the easily commoditised
elements of the CIO’s portfolio.
Kark warns: “There are still a lot of opportunities for Soldiers in the next five years, but it’s going to be harder
and harder for them to move around because that skillset is not going to be required or expected in many

cases. CIOs are changing their skillsets or being relegated to commodity status where they’re not able to
influence in any way.”
The dissolution of the IT department began with outsourcing, but it’s cloud that’s likely to reduce it even further.
According to research by Harvey Nash published earlier this year, almost two-thirds of CIOs outsource their
software application development, including mobile applications, while more than half already outsource their
data centres. Just under half of CIOs continue to outsource the maintenance and ongoing support of the ap-
plications they develop, while a third have handed over the management of their help desk to outsourcers. As
one CIO put it recently, “As an IT director, I don’t feel running an email service adds value.”
Spending on technology by departments outside IT is also on the rise. According to a survey by IDC, 61
percent of enterprise technology projects are now funded by the business rather than the IT department, and
IT spending driven by non-IT departments will outpace IT-department spending in the future. Marketing takes
the top position, with a five-year compound annual growth rate of more than nine percent.
Kevin Leypoldt, IS director at Structural Integrity Associates, says that the shift for the CIO is from being
directly in control to managing vendors and partners. “The CIO’s role of partnering with the business to identify
technology to enhance process will not change—only how that technology is implemented and where it lives.”
According to Forrester’s Kark, CIOs are becoming much more aware that they need to shift their approach
away from being defensive. “The traditional view has been: ‘This is my organisation, I’ve got to protect it, I’ve
got to grow it, I’ve got to manage it,’ but what we’re seeing is a shift in their thinking,” he says, with CIOs
increasingly focused on talent management and building the right organisational structure. “For some CIOs it
may be a no-brainer, for others a slow, gradual shift.”
CIOs are certainly aware of the need to change: How to innovate and how to work better with the business
are often ranked among their top concerns. But Kark warns that the pressure is on. “The CIO moves from a
technology leader to a business leader: The CIO role as we know it today will cease to exist—and if it does
exist it will be a commoditised role. It becomes the orchestrator of technology, not the provider.”
However, not all CIOs will be willing or able to make the transition. The old career path—a steady rise through
the ranks of the IT department—may no longer be the standard route, according to Forrester, because nearly
half of CIOs in the US don’t have a strong technology background.
The analyst firm points to executives such as the head of supply chain, the head of business operations, or
the COO being put in the CIO role—brought in to transform the IT operation and change its perspective and
mindset.
Over the next three to five years, Forrester predicts that a majority of CIOs will be coming from non-IT
backgrounds to manage and run technology for their organisations.

CIO future: Smaller team, bigger influence?

Not all of this change is necessarily bad for all CIOs. Because while the CIO may exchange an in-house army
of coders for a handful of contracts with outsourcers and cloud providers, the most savvy tech chiefs won’t
just retain their influence, they’ll extend it. “Their influence increases as the size of their organisation decreases.
The influence is going to increase over time to make them key stakeholders in business decisions as they are
being made, not after they’re made and being told to deliver technology around it,” Kark says.
Michael Spears, CIO at NCCI Holdings, says that although in five

years’ time the CIO position will be at least as influential as it is today, CIOs have historically
CIOs need to do more than ever to earn that influence. “There have had good ties with the
been endless debates about whether the CIO should be more of CFO and operations,
a business person or more of a technician. You must have skills in but relationships with
both areas, but I believe it’s more important to engage as a business marketing are weak.
person. Shadow IT in other departments is a good indicator that the
balance has shifted in the wrong direction. Cloud, outsourcing, etc,
are just excuses for lack of influence. If you are more of a roadblock than an enabler, it’s time for a change.”
But while CIOs may been keen on giving tech a makeover, many still face an uphill struggle persuading their
fellow execs of their strategy. According to the Harvey Nash survey, more than half of CIOs believe they lack
support from the board, and just under half struggle to build support from their C-level peers in achieving their
technology vision.
More than four in 10 CIOs say their business has not “bought into” technology to some extent, and 15 percent
say it’s a major issue in their organisation. “As we enter a more collaborative age, the importance placed on
the relationship-building and influencing skills of the CIO will only grow, as internal and external partners are
required to work together collaboratively to achieve success,” the report notes.
One in five CIOs in the Harvey Nash survey feel they have lost an element of direct control over their IT as-
sets in the last five years. But the report points out that “control” does not equate to “influence,” and CIOs
are increasingly seeing their role as collaborators rather than controllers. Almost half say their influence has
increased over the last five years.
Who the CIO needs to influence is also changing, as their fellow executives become more tech savvy.
Says Rohit Killam, CTO at Masan Group, “With democratization of technology, business applications will be
more easily understood by functional heads like CMOs, CFOs. etc. Hence they will have better handle over
technology decisions.”
CIOs have historically had good ties with the CFO and operations, but relationships with marketing are
weak. That’s a problem because chief marketing officers (CMOs) are playing a bigger role in the evolution of
many companies’ digital strategy—an overarching plan including Web and mobile that extends beyond the

internal IT infrastructure. Mobile strategy is a particular area of conflict between the two, making the CMO the
“aggressor in the C-suite battle with the CIO” according to one recent survey.
And it’s apparently the CIO who needs to persuade the CMO. According to research by Accenture, CIOs are
more committed to greater collaboration than CMOs: More than three out of four CIOs surveyed (77 percent)
agree that CMO-CIO alignment is important, compared to 57 percent of CMOs participating in the survey.
Of course outside these macro trends, the impact of each CIO is down to individual drive and personality and
the willingness to navigate the political currents.
John Gracyalny, VP of IT at SafeAmerica Credit Union, says that much depends on the size of the organiza-
tion. “At my shop, when I was hired five years ago it was the first time that there was an executive role for
technology. So to us, CIO, CTO, CDO, etc., are all one person and will continue to be that way for the indefi-
nite future.”
Still, Gracyalny has seen some changes since he came on board. “My role has expanded in the five years I’ve
been here to not only being a direct report to the CEO, but I work directly with our chairman of the board on
major technology initiatives. In a larger organization, which might have one of each, my guess is the relative
importance will be more a matter of the individuals’ political astuteness rather than pure business drivers, due
to the considerable potential overlap of responsibilities.”
New job titles, new rivalries?

As well as working with existing execs, CIOs will need to deal with newcomers who may eat into their author-
ity. Two emerging job titles in particular may limit the CIO’s room to manoeuvre: chief digital officer and chief
data officer.
The chief digital officer’s job will be to focus on the digital potential of an organisation, which will likely entail a
marketing or sales background. In organisations that create this position, the CIO may be relegated to the role
of cost control and process management (the Soldier CIO mentioned earlier). The chief data officer will take on
issues of risk and compliance.
According to Gartner’s Weldon, there is room for both CIOs and CDOs and an opportunity for synergy, but
also an element of risk. “Certainly there will be growing pains. If they treat [the CDO] as a threat there’s a risk;
if there’s pushing back from the CIO that can lead to some challenges. This is an area where there is some
maturing to do; we need to figure out how these roles fit together.”
At a recent event, I caught a glimpse of one possible version of how this plays out: When Tesco launched its
new Hudl tablet, the three speakers were the CIO, the CDO, and the CEO (who had previously been the head
of technology).

To complicate matters even further, it’s possible that other job titles will also emerge as the IT department
changes. According to Gartner, the role of the chief digital officer needs to be broken down even further, into
three distinct roles: digital strategy advisers (DSAs), digital market leaders (DMLs), and digital business unit
leaders (DBULs).
CIO: Career is over?

All of this change only adds to what’s already a high-pressure role in which reputations are made and broken
by every successful or failed project. The average tenure of CIOs hovers around three or four years before they
quit or are fired, so they have little time to assess the organisation and make an impact before moving on. Not
for nothing do CIOs joke that the acronym really stands for “career is over.”
There’s also a certain irony in that for years CIOs have been arguing that smart use of technology is essential
for the success of any business. Now the business finally agrees but isn’t convinced that the CIOs can be
trusted to get it right.
Hence the emergence of new tech leaders in waiting—and turf wars with internal rivals like the marketing chief
who wants control of the company’s digital strategy. The stakes have never been higher for the CIO and the
IT department: Those that succeed will become a central part of their businesses’ success stories. Those that
don’t make the grade will be reduced to a footnote in organisational history.

Three big challenges facing the CIO in

2014
By Patrick Gray
With factors like the Cloud, BYOD, and big data making their marks in a big way, the CIO needs to start
reevaluating his or her role. What can you do to make yourself valuable in this changing architecture? Here are
some considerations to keep in mind as you step into 2014 and some big changes.
1: Lights out IT
IT outsourcing is nothing new. Companies have been turning over bits of their infrastructure and staffing to
third parties since the dawn of IT. What is interesting is that a confluence of cloud computing, better offerings
from service providers, and improved technology are making the idea of “lights out IT” possible for the first
time. Rather than hiring someone else to staff the department and maintain the applications, boxes, and wires
typical of the average IT department, it’s now possible for a fully functional corporate IT department to have
a handful of staff and no real infrastructure beyond networks and end-user devices. With BYOD, IT can even
exit the business of maintaining end-user devices, and the CIO can exist in a purely strategic role, effectively
purchasing all utility functions from another party.
2: The continued rise of the CMO

While IT spending for major ERP and supply chain initiatives has largely become a thing of the past, marketing
is emerging as a major technology buyer. Marketing has become deeply dependent on technology as its tasks
have shifted from major mass-marketing campaigns to highly tailored data-driven “engagements” that occur
continually. It’s worth taking some time to understand the trends in marketing and sitting down with the CMO,
since that’s who may ultimately be setting IT’s agenda in 2014.
3: The next great talent migration

If you lived through the dot-com bust in the early 2000s, you saw IT staff who once routinely switched employ-
ers looking for a better deal quickly cowed by the fear of losing their jobs. Many were willing to work through
nearly anything, and we saw record productivity gains with minimal pay increases in the following years.
There’s already a resurgent startup industry poaching the best and brightest developers, and if the economy
can finally shift out of neutral in 2014, I believe talented IT staff will be in high demand. Employers whose
workplace and HR policies seemed to take a page from a prison camp will suffer the most. Intriguingly, high
pay is generally not the most important factor for employee retention, and a rigorous and transparent evalu-
ation process, obvious paths of career progression, and interesting work are all low-cost ways to keep your
best people. It’s worth vetting your policies and ensuring that you’ll retain your top staff when better times (and
better offers to your employees) finally arrive. And if your IT shop is a great place to work, there may be some
opportunities to poach top talent while the economy remains grim.

Does the CIO matter?

It’s been a decade since Nicholas Carr published Does IT Matter?, and this is a question every CIO should
ask each year. While seemingly a bit flippant, the availability of managed services and viability of lights out
IT make a purely utility-oriented CIO increasingly irrelevant. Striving for high uptime numbers is now an
expectation rather than a cause for recognition, and increasingly complex technologies like big data build a
case for hiring outside expertise and bypassing internal IT. Consider how your IT department—and you as
CIO—are perceived by your peers. Are you the technical plumbers called in to connect the dots after the key
strategic decisions have been made or are you a trusted source of guidance and insight that helps shape your
company’s future?

Eight special qualities CIOs will need in

the future
By Joe McKendrick
There’s a fine line between a tech startup chief executive officer and a corporate chief information officer. In
fact, that line may even disappear within the decade. Future CIOs will be entrepreneurs in their own right.
That’s the prediction of Joel Dobbs, CEO and president of The Compass Talent Management Group LLC,
who pointed out in a recent post at the HP blogsite that CIOs are part of the “creation of a game-changing
technology that reshaped or substantially altered their company’s business and, in almost every case, the
technology focused on directly impacting the organization’s end customers.”
More than being tech leaders, CIOs have to conceive and sell ideas, identify and secure resources, and be
leaders: They must marshal and lead a team to create a new product or service “and successfully introduce it
into the organization and the marketplace,” Dobbs added.
That sounds like the role of entrepreneur.
Along with Dobbs’ observations, it’s notable that with the rise of cloud computing, IT organizations are either
brokering or competing with outside services, or even becoming cloud providers themselves to given markets.
For anyone who wants to become a CIO at some point in his or her career over the next few years, Dobbs
provided some of the prerequisites needed:
Vision: “An entrepreneurial visionary sees not a new task, technique, or technology, but a totally different way
of doing business. Yes, this is likely enabled by technology, but the technology is simply an enabler. The vision
encompasses more than projects; it involves disruptive and transformational change.”
Passion: “When I speak with entrepreneurs, their eyes light up, their speech quickens, and they become
much more animated as they explain their idea or the mission of their new company. Entrepreneurial CIOs are
passionate about the mission of their company and the value their products and services provide. This passion
is channeled into making the company better, not just improving its efficiency. Their passion is not just to make
the IT function better, it is to make the whole enterprise better.”
Confidence: Entrepreneurs need the self-confidence to see ideas through even when others are saying “no.”
Confident CIOs “are self-aware and are equally comfortable giving advice and counsel and taking initiative in
areas of strength,” Dobbs said. “They are also comfortable seeking advice and input from a variety of others.
Confident CIOs have no problem accepting responsibility and being held accountable for their actions.”
Okay with ambiguity: This is also one of the tests of a successful entrepreneur, Dobbs said. “New ven-
tures are inherently messy and uncertain, especially in the early stages. Entrepreneurs know this, learn to get
comfortable with it, and lead themselves and their organizations through it. IT folks have a natural tendency to

be inflexible. IT folks like ‘process.’ They like standards and detailed project plans. They like predictability. CIOs
need to learn to deal with this uncertainty and learn to lead their organizations through periods of ambiguity.”
Risk tolerance: “Risk is a constant companion for the entrepreneur,” Dobbs said. “One of the complaints
most frequently leveled at IT organizations is their aversion to risk. Entrepreneurial CIOs understand that risk is
a part of the job.”
Creativity: “Entrepreneurs find creative ways to solve difficult problems or create products that allow people
to do things they couldn’t do before or enable them to do them in radically different ways. Entrepreneurial CIOs
are creative. They transcend traditional ideas, and traditional ideas about the CIO role itself. They truly think,
and act, ‘outside of the box’ and create organizations that do the same.”
Self-motivation: Successful entrepreneurs relish the “chance to do something that could change the world,
or change people’s lives. An entrepreneurial CIO has this same drive to do something big and meaningful, and
this drive gives them the energy to push ahead when others lose focus and give up.”
Energy, restlessness, and persistence: “Most of the successful entrepreneurs I know are never satisfied.
They always believe they can do better,” Dobbs said. They “persevere through hardships, around obstacles,
and over setbacks. They don’t give up without a fight…. Entrepreneurial CIOs must be persistent, because all
of the easy stuff has already been done. The game-changing stuff is difficult, and only people who persevere
through challenges succeed at difficult things.”

How the CAO can bridge the gap

between business and IT
By Toni Bowers
In 1986, when BusinessWeek introduced “Management’s Newest Star” and invited us to “Meet the chief
information officer,” the idea of adding anyone else to the C-Suite was not only revolutionary, it was frighten-
ing. Business computing was still a burgeoning field. Typewriters and paper files, the status quo. A CIO wasn’t
just a new officer: A CIO was a new way of doing things. Everything.
And yet, less than 30 years later, it feels as if the CIO role has always been there—making decisions on key
hardware and software purchases, working with business-side counterparts to determine how to align soft-
ware and strategy, monitoring new trends and technologies to determine which are worth implementing and
which should be ignored. It’s hard to imagine any mid- to large-size businesses without a CIO on board.
But now CIOs, at least as we know them, aren’t cutting it anymore. Their role has become so necessary, so
counted-upon, that they spend most of their time on tactical execution. They’re thinking, if not one day at a
time, certainly one purchase or implementation or project at a time.
Enter the CAO

And so the communication between IT and business, and between both departments and the CEO, can
suffer. Let the CIO worry about technology. Let the COO worry about business. And bring on the chief auto-
mation officer (CAO) to bridge the gap between business and IT, ensuring that both departments communi-
cate efficiently and effectively. While some individual business processes and some IT processes are already
automated, the CAO can look at them as parts of a whole automation strategy.
We spoke with Tijl Vuyk, the founder and CEO of Redwood Software, who has seen this shift firsthand through
his career with Redwood and the customers it works with. Here is our Q&A with Mr. Vuyk.
Q: It doesn’t seem that long ago that the CIO title was new and offered a way for tech to get a seat at the ex-
ecutive table. Now it’s hard to imagine any mid- to large-size business without a CIO on board. But you don’t
think the CIO role cuts it anymore. Why is that?
A: For decades, the C-level has dealt with the challenges of aligning business and IT to meet corporate goals.
As market environments and expectations have changed, corporate leadership has always adapted and
expanded. For most companies today, the heavy responsibility of building efficient, accurate, and managed IT
processes that support the business falls on the shoulders of the chief information officer (CIO) and his or her
department—among many other tasks. As IT and the processes it supports have become more pervasive and
complex, the role of the CIO has also become increasingly complex.
With the rise of the “connected enterprise,” mass-scale digital analytics (big data), and a wide range of
automation opportunities that combine business and IT goals, company leadership must once again rethink

how they manage and use technology for competitive advantage. It’s truly a challenge for a CIO to touch all
the types of technology needed within a business, as today the word “technology” encompasses many, many
business and operational activities. One such activity is automation.
Automation is a special area that unites operational policies, repeated activities, resources, and people in such
a pervasive way that companies need to approach it with a coordinated view. It needs accountability all the
way up to the C-level. Best practices show that 75% of all automation is repeatable across processes; 25% is
customized for specific requirements. Companies can gain tremendous efficiency, consistency, and quality all
at once with carefully implemented, enterprise-wide automation.
When organizations look at automation in a holistic and focused way from the highest level, they can regain
control and value from their existing IT enterprise while they move ahead of the competition. They can stop
duplicating tasks and do more in less time. To do all of this effectively, they will need a chief automation officer
(CAO).
Q: What roles are you seeing for tech executives going forward and how will they differ from that of the CIO?
A: The CAO will be responsible for organizing and coordinating all the enterprise processes under a single
value chain and one set of governance rules. Much like an enterprise architect, they will be responsible for the
architecture and implementation of an enterprise-wide approach to automation.
They will also need to understand (like the CIO, CFO, and CEO) business process fundamentals together with
the technological requirements that keep the business moving ahead every day. They’ve got to be extremely
practical. They will have decision-making abilities for the business and IT. Their job will be to make sure that
the company uses automation wisely, correctly, and pervasively.
Of course, the CIO still has plenty to do. He or she can focus on technology for transformation of the company
in different ways. Many analysts and industry watchers have noted that CIOs need to refine their focus in our
changing digital world.
For example, Mark McDonald, group vice president and Gartner Fellow, said in a statement: “The world out-
side IT changed creating a quiet crisis for IT. Demands have increased in a world grown dynamic and digital.
The harder CIOs work tended to current concerns, the less relevant IT became. CIOs know that the future
rests in not repeating the past but in extending IT by hunting and harvesting in a digital world.”
In a 2010 survey by CIO magazine, 43 percent of the CIOs surveyed reported to the CEO, and 60 percent of
the respondents listed “long-term strategic thinking and planning” as one of their critical leadership compe-
tencies. That can be tough for a CIO who is spending most of his or her time simply managing the overall IT
enterprise.

CIOs have played a balancing act for years now, between business processes and IT management. Improve-
ments in both areas can mean success for any business, but companies must create roles that make this suc-
cess achievable. Having a CIO and a CAO performing separate but complementary jobs would most certainly
help.
Q: How should an enterprise go about implementing the new role of CAO?
A: Companies can find candidates for the new CAO position within their own ranks—in the IT department,
existing enterprise architects, or within other departments, like finance. They may also find them outside the
organization, but the best candidates should understand as many of the processes at the core of the business
as possible. They see business processes and the IT that supports them as a single ecosystem.
The CAO will look at all company resources—people, infrastructure, and processes—as a machine that should
function at top efficiency and accuracy to achieve business goals. They will create automated supply chains
for information and other processes at the very core of the business. Their role will be critical to the next phase
of IT development—the re-engineering of corporate IT to function logically and completely. This will require
both a focused vision for automation and a spirit of collaboration with every stakeholder in the company. They
will work with the entire C-level as a team.
By assessing all processes within the organization and analyzing them to see which ones can be united, sim-
plified, and/or eliminated through automation, the CAO can build business processes that work like clockwork.
They can connect dependent processes and enable technology to provide consistency, quality, and control at
every level of the business. This will take a special kind of person who, like the CIO, can see the potential for
improvement, how to get there, and what that will mean for the business. Unlike the CIO, the CAO’s focus will
be sharply on how automation can accomplish these goals.

Strong governance and policy

frameworks can help the CIO succeed
By Scott Lowe
How many of you work for an organization that has a policy manual that’s a foot thick? Now, how many of you
work for an organization that has little to no written policy? Which one would you rather work for? Before you
answer, read on.
Every day, CIOs and senior IT leaders have to make tough decisions regarding tight budgets, difficult person-
nel situations, and complex projects in the quest to drive efficiency throughout the enterprise. Often, these
decisions are far from routine; they are unique to the situation at hand. In many organizations, the CIO can
focus on these strategic decisions and not have to worry as much about decisions that should be routine.
However, in many organizations, the CIO is constantly having to make everyday decisions as well as having to
make the same decision multiple times. Worse, the CIO might find it necessary to make different decisions for
different audiences just because one was yelling louder than another.
What’s the difference?
While there are a ton of possibilities, start with a look at the policy manuals. In the first organization, the CIO
can focus on strategic and impactful responsibilities because the “everyday concerns” are considered routine.
There are policies that address the most common scenarios so that consistent and repeatable process in the
decision-making takes place. In the second organization, lack of policies leaves the potential for inconsistency
and forces the CIO to shift focus from the big picture to matters more mundane.
At this point, you might be telling yourself that it’s time to go out and write a bunch of policies to address the
mundane... but not so fast.
The process of creating good policy stems from having good governance in place to begin with. Much has
been written specifically about IT governance, but when it comes to managing the organization, there must
be agreed-upon standards that will be followed. Often, to address the IT portion of the governance equation,
IT steering or advisory committees are formed. Through these governance structures, the CIO can vet policy,
gain insight, and make better strategic decisions for the organization.
I’ve seen what happens with IT departments are left to their own devices and the CIO loses touch with the
organization. Projects go awry, users get frustrated, and business goals are missed. In many cases, this is not
necessarily anyone’s direct “fault.” CIOs may think that they’re on exactly the right track, but the organization’s
feedback loop isn’t working.

By instituting a strong IT governance model:
• Organizations can provide more transparency about what’s going on in IT. Too often, IT depart-
ments are overwhelmed by the volume of work and underwhelmed at the staffing levels that exist to get
the work done. Users who have been waiting for project completion get frustrated because their needs
aren’t being addressed quickly enough. A governance structure will help the CIO be more transparent
about what is going on in IT and why certain projects are getting attention and others aren’t.
• There will be more buy-in on IT priorities. After all, a good governance structure will represent all
aspects of the business. All of these pieces will need to come together and agree on what the real priori-
ties will be. With users having a say in the process, even if they don’t get their work done, at least they’re
involved in the decision and understand the reasons. Is it perfect? Nah. But it’s better than leaving people
in the dark.
• IT will be more productive. With a clearly defined set of priorities that are agreed upon by the organiza-
tion, IT knows what it should be doing and there should be much less ambiguity and hand-wringing due
to constantly shifting orders.
• The user base will be reined in. Believe it or not, a strong governance model can serve to rein in
the user base, at least in some cases. This is going to be more important than ever as cloud adoption
increases. The danger of unchecked application acquisition is real, but if there is a well-defined and work-
able governance and policy structure, the right people should always get involved.
• The CIO will have a sounding board for policy development. Remember our chat about policies
earlier in this piece? With the right governance structure, the CIO has an automatic sounding board for
the impact that potential policies might have on the user base. In some cases, there may need to be
draconian policies that no one likes. But for more routine items, the CIO can get the counsel and advice
necessary to craft policies that are enforceable and achievable and maybe, just maybe, be able to start
shifting focus a bit more toward the big picture and away from some of the mundane.
What IT governance shouldn’t be is a direct management team. That’s the CIO’s job. The other thing that
shouldn’t be brought to the governance table is a personal agenda. While everyone should reflect their roles
and needs, the higher order need is to make sure that the organization as a whole is successful. Some of this
is unavoidable. But if it’s constant, you have the wrong people on the team.
A good governance framework helps the CIO make the routine things, well, routine. It also helps the CIO gain
an operating framework under which clear, constant, and consistent decisions can be made.

11 challenges facing the “international”

CIO
By Mary Shacklett
CIOs and managers who are responsible for international IT encounter different kinds of technical, organi-
zational, and people issues from those who have IT responsibilities only on the home front. Yet few of these
international executives get formal training on how to conduct international business before they go abroad.
There are numerous issues to consider—and many are only peripherally related to technology. Here are 10
things IT leaders should consider when they take on international operations.
1: Culture
Different countries have different cultural values and standards. I experienced this a number of years ago when
I was a CIO for an international company and I was getting ready to make a business trip to several Asian
countries. I knew most of the people in the Asian offices because they had worked with me at our U.S. head-
quarters, and the projects had gone well. But when I looked at the organizational charts for their companies, I
noticed that female managers and engineers were not accorded position titles. Instead, they were just labeled
as “female” in the org charts. I also learned that I would not be accorded the respect of my position title (it was
vice president, at that time) in certain countries because I was female. It was a difficult decision, but I opted to
send one of my senior male IT managers in my place to ensure that there would be no cultural impediments to
the work we had to accomplish.
2: The clock
You never realize how convenient it is to work at headquarters until you are at a facility that is halfway around
the word. Email and instant messaging don’t change the fact that people are home asleep when you need to
reach them. The clock is an adjustment factor for those who usually have time working in their favor.
3: Office hours
Also because of time differences, international offices (especially if they are affiliated with U.S. companies) tend
to set up their workday hours so they at least provide some overlap with work hours in the U.S. When I visit
European offices, for instance, it isn’t uncommon to see office hours start around 9:30 AM, since it is at least
6:30 AM on the U.S. east coast. And it isn’t unusual to see people in the European offices working until 7 or 8
PM. The workday adjustment provides more working hours overlap with the U.S.
4: Family
No matter how well prepared you are, if you’re on an extended international trip, it is harder to keep up with
events at home. Seasoned international business people make time for communications with family and work
their schedules around this.

5: Software and hardware support

Even if you
Universal cloud computing has made some IT software and hardware
don’t know the
purchases easier, but challenges remain if you are working with several
languages of the
different offices in different countries and you’re trying to gain a consen-
countries you’re
sus on a new software package to buy. I once found myself working with
going to, it’s
offices in four countries to find a new accounting package, but the office
smart to take a
in Holland wanted one solution and the office in France wanted another.
few lessons and
Both offices agreed that either solution was good—but the problem
at least make an
was vendor support. The French software had great support in France,
effort.
but poor local support in Holland. The Dutch package was the reverse.
Eventually, we found the right solution, but it wasn’t easy.
6: Regulations
Just as vendor support can vary across borders, the ability of a software package to meet different sets of
government regulations varies, too. In accounting, for instance, there was a time when the German govern-
ment required numerical fields to be spelled out to four digits to the right of the decimal point. In France, there
are significantly more government reports that an accounting package must produce. Any solution you select
for multiple countries must be broad enough to cover all these scenarios.
7: Language
Even if you don’t know the languages of the countries you’re going to, it’s smart to take a few lessons and at
least make an effort. I was luckier than many in this regard, because I could conduct business in French and
German. This really benefitted me when I worked with our European offices. I was able to build a cooperative
team project faster because people respected the effort.
8: Measured leadership
If you’re the CIO in charge of worldwide operations (as I was), the tendency can be to just go into these offices
around the world and tell them how things are going to be. Avoid this. You will get further with office buy-in
and project advances if you work collaboratively and cooperatively with the people around you.
9: History
World War II ended nearly 70 years ago, but there are still difficult family memories that have passed down. I
remember walking into one of our European offices to arrange a phone meeting with another office. The local
office manager told me, “I don’t want to talk to them. They killed my grandfather during the war.” These situa-
tions usually don’t affect work, but it’s important for U.S.-based IT managers to remember that they can.

10: Different IT factors

IT infrastructure capabilities vary from country to country. In many emerging countries, telephone and Internet
infrastructures are not built out, so access to these communications channels is impeded. This can also affect
the ability to fail over to non-local data centers. In other countries, Internet communications are so fast, you’ll
find yourself wishing the same capabilities were available in the U.S. It’s a smart move to understand these
technology strengths and weaknesses before you go abroad.
11: Different standards

Different countries also hold up different standards for IT product quality and acceptance. Two of the most
demanding environments for technology quality are in Germany and Japan. High quality acceptance standards
can affect the time invested and the speed of projects—and in some cases, local IT might also have different
testing methodologies for apps that are internally developed.

Why today’s CIOs may no longer be

up to the job
By Nick Heath
New blood may be needed at the top of IT departments to meet the changing demands being placed on
CIOs. The primary role of the CIO is shifting from optimising and integrating packaged enterprise systems
to identifying how new technologies can drive business advantage, according to Gartner research VP Mark
Raskino.
“For a long time—maybe for two or three CIOs in a row—CIOs have been used to tidy up the mess made in
the past,” said Raskino, who co-authored the report CIO New Year’s Resolutions, 2013.
“We’ve seen very large global ERP integration and standardisation projects. Those took the best part of a
decade in some cases but they’re mostly done now and I’ve met CIOs from all kinds of corporations who are
saying the big question now is ‘What next?’”
What should come next, Raskino said, is that CIOs stop being order takers executing the demands of the
board and start advising on the best ways to get business value from technologies like social media and
mobile.
“Words like mobile and social are being used very vaguely, they don’t describe capabilities or competencies.
There’s a loss of translation of ideas into action,” he said.
“CIOs need to turn back towards being agenda formers as they were in the late 80s and early 90s,” Raskino
said, before many “got into a pattern of delivering packaged stuff from the industry.”
The problem is that incumbent CIOs may not be the best qualified to carry out this more strategic role. If a CIO
is appointed “to spend the five years sorting out an ERP mess, you can’t necessarily expect the same indi-
vidual to become a progressive agenda setter after that,” he said.
While some existing CIOs will adapt to the more strategic demands of the job, the high turnover of the post
means that there will be a ready supply of new talent to meet this new challenge. “It’s probable that we will
start to see CIOs appointed who are being asked from the beginning to be more agenda forming,” he said.
Strategic vacuum
Raskino also noted that the failure of existing CIOs to provide this strategic guidance is creating a vacuum that
few other business leaders or the IT industry executives are well placed to fill. “The IT industry used to package
ideas for businesses very well; that’s why we had CRM and ERP. The industry doesn’t need to provide that so
much any more because a lot of the industry’s revenue comes from consumers.”

And when it is left to other business leaders to set the technology agenda, they tend to favour strategies that
are heavily influenced by consumer technology—which may not best serve the needs of the business. “You’ll
often see demands for tablet computers with scant justification for that.”
The failure of CIOs to provide the necessary technology strategy is leading to the creation of new roles to
meet this need. “We are seeing the appointment of people like chief digital officers and chief data officers.
It’s symptomatic of businesses trying to create an agenda for the use of technology that isn’t otherwise
happening,” Raskino said.

Vendors bypassing the CIO: Six ways

to stop it
By Scott Lowe
I’m convinced that vendors hate it when IT becomes involved in the sales process, particularly in organizations
that do not have strong IT governance or software/service acquisition policies in place. By going straight to
the end user, the vendor is more likely to sell the product on that product’s merits alone without having to go
through a pesky check of requirements or integration possibilities.
This sometimes results in a software purchase being made and IT being forced to “just make it work.” It’s a
bad position for the CIO. It’s a bad position for the company. And ultimately, it’s a bad position for the depart-
ment that actually buys the software. It’s left with a system that may or may not integrate into existing pro-
cesses, that the IT department may not be able to adequately support, and that could result in establishing a
“data island” that confuses or disrupts decision making.
How can you—the CIO—stop this behavior?
It all depends on what kind of organization you work for and what your goal is. If your goal is a strict command
and control—you’re the gatekeeper and there’s no two ways about it—you’re probably fighting a losing battle.
The goal is not to simply say no. The goal should be to ensure that solutions that are ultimately implemented in
the organization are properly evaluated so that they meet the needs and overall requirements of the organiza-
tion. These requirements may include provisions that require all services to meet certain specific data integra-
tion standards.
Be transparent
The more transparent you are in your work, the more you’ll foster collaboration and build trust that you will do
the right thing. Now, if a vendor calls, it’s more likely that you’ll be pulled into the discussion at the beginning
rather than having a blowup at the end.
Be approachable
If you’re not approachable, people will work hard to go around you. After all, taking the path of least resistance
is human nature. If people don’t feel comfortable working with you, they’ll just work with the vendor and find
ways to beat the system rather than working with you.
Forge strong relationships

The better the relationship you have with your executive peers, the less likely it is that sneaky stuff will take
place that affects your success. People will see you as a trusted colleague and bring you into conversations
sooner, heading off what could be a nasty surprise down the line.

Work with finance

Eventually, everything costs money. Create a policy and process that requires finance to verify that IT has been
involved before officially committing funds to a software or service purchase. If IT hasn’t been involved, pay-
ments are stopped.
Be proactive
Work with individual units to determine needs and together, identify solutions that can meet those needs. The
unit will determine whether a solution is viable and the CIO will determine whether a solution can be grafted
into the existing architecture.
Take the hard line

I include this here for completeness, but consider it the “nuclear option” since it can have long-lasting conse-
quences and may not be good for your reputation. Make it known that vendors who refuse to engage the CIO
are blacklisted. Inside the organization, make it known that services acquired without input from the CIO will
be ignored, even if they’re already paid for. The downside here is that a good solution might be thrown out or
ignored.
Let your reputation precede you

As I mentioned, I’m not a huge advocate of taking the hard line unless it becomes absolutely necessary.
I’d much rather see an organization in which the CIO is seen as a collaborative, resourceful partner in busi-
ness who is respected enough for business units to make sure that IT is involved in new initiatives from the
beginning. Regardless, make sure everyone understands just how important it is for the CIO to be involved in
services acquisition so you can retain order whenever possible.

Has the CIO lost big data?

By Patrick Gray
An interesting phenomenon has been occurring in corporate IT. In an area where CIOs once ruled the roost for
anything and everything regarding technology, and large, monolithic IT organizations were the norm, technol-
ogy has increasingly become embedded in business units, and budgets and initiative ownership is shifting
away from the CIO and toward line-of-business ownership.
With big data in particular, a confluence of factors is moving what has been a traditionally technical activity—
managing and reporting on data—away from the most technically oriented department in the organization.
How should CIOs deal with this shift?
The perfect storm

While this shift was evident in some organizations decades ago, several new technologies have accelerated
it and made it more prevalent. Cloud computing is the most obvious example, allowing anyone with a credit
card to provision IT services that once would have been impossible without an IT department, technical project
teams, and months of hard work.
The second factor pulling big data away from traditional IT organizations is the specialized skillsets required
to perform big data analytics. On the technical front, much of the data used in big data is unstructured and
requires new database technology that’s unfamiliar to those who have spent careers with standard relational
databases. While this technical challenge is not insurmountable, the expertise of data scientists who craft the
queries and analytics behind successful big data is not present or readily learned at most companies.
Much of the demand for big data analytics is coming from marketing, a potent business function that’s often
well funded and familiar with dealing with external service providers—and one with a low tolerance for long
initiatives. Combine these three factors with the cadre of large and small consulting shops that are targeting
CMOs rather than CIOs when selling big data, and it’s easy to envision a scenario where IT is the last to hear
about a big data project, getting a call only when data is needed from an internal system.
Run up the white flag?

So should CIOs cede the big data battle and let CMOs take charge of these types of initiatives? After all, there
is an abundance of recent precedents where marketing has taken over technically oriented initiatives, from the
early days of the Web to marketing automation to social media. It may be tempting to let big data slip from IT’s
fingertips, but it will be a cornerstone of future enterprise technology, and it’s an area where the CIO can add
demonstrable value.
While it’s unlikely IT can wrest total control of big data away from organizations like marketing and sales, IT
brings several competencies to the table. The most obvious and important is that IT usually “owns” most of
an organization’s internal data. This data may be readily available in well-curated data warehouses or business

intelligence applications or scattered about a variety of legacy platforms waiting to be unlocked by an IT-driven
data cleansing effort.
Furthermore, IT has a strong knowledge of technology and vendor relationships. While big data is certainly
not all about technology, the hype surrounding the technology has everyone from ad agencies to mid-market,
commodity IT shops screaming about their big data capabilities. IT can introduce some sanity to these discus-
sions and help other business units evaluate the technical capabilities of potential partners, bringing some
sense to overinflated claims.
Finally, the CIO can ensure that big data efforts offer benefits to multiple business units. Rather than launching
a marketing-specific big data effort, IT can leverage its knowledge of the entire organization to make sure that
big data initiatives serve the larger organization, not a narrow niche.
Looking to partner and play more of a background role in initiatives like big data may seem unsavory at first.
But technology is evolving away from technology-centric, internally driven projects. CIOs who can get ahead of
this shift and present IT as a competent, knowledgeable, trusted advisor rather than a parochial “department
of no” will evolve and grow more important to an organization rather than gradually fade away.

Here’s what is really worrying CIOs,

right now
By Steve Ranger
Developers, IT managers, and chief executives—and of course, tech vendors—spend a lot of time trying to
second-guess what CIOs are really thinking.
I chaired a CIO conference last spring and asked the assembled IT chiefs to come up with the three key issues
that are facing them as CIOs and business executives. It’s not an exhaustive list—it reflects the issues of a
particular group of executives at a particular time—but I think it’s a fascinating snapshot of what CIOs are wor-
rying about right here, right now.
I’ve taken the list, tidied it, and split it into tactical and strategic challenges—as in, the stuff that’s giving CIOs
headaches today and the stuff they’re worried about in the longer term. Clearly, there’s quite a lot of crossover
between the two.
Tactical
• BYOD, in terms of questions around personal ownership, employee satisfaction, and risk versus need
• Successful merger and acquisition integration
• Justifying legacy upgrades
• Getting value from outsourcing providers, managing those relationships, avoiding loss of sovereignty when
outsourcing
• Big data, both in terms of internal data and external data
• Dealing with shadow IT
• Integrating cloud and in-house operations and understanding the liability of cloud providers
• Ensuring IT security
• Reducing opex
Strategic issues
• Data quality
• Dealing with the demand for innovation, telling the difference between cutting-edge and bleeding-edge,
and handling the risk involved
• Stopping IT from being viewed as a commodity
• Reducing complexity

• Managing expectations
• Presenting IT as an enabler
• Engaging with the business
• Managing talent
So what does this list tell us about the trials and tribulations of the modern CIO? First, it’s worth noting there
really isn’t much technology on this list. I don’t see any mentions of specific vendors or point releases or hard-
ware (nobody was complaining about Windows 8 or iPads, for example).
Some of the tactical stuff is also business as usual. Managing acquisitions is a headache that CIOs face on a
regular basis and something that no one technology is ever likely to fix. Some of the issues are a reflection of
IT industry fashion. That’s how I’d categorise CIOs wondering what to do about big data, for example.
Others reflect current practice in the industry: Outsourcing continues to dominate, hence the focus on man-
aging those relationships effectively. And inevitably, cloud is throwing up a similar set of issues for the CIO,
around control and liability and integration, that outsourcing did before it.
BYOD was an issue raised by many, many CIOs. That’s probably because it’s an issue they have to deal with
right now, whether because of the potential to cut cost or because of pressure from staff (or the board) to
implement it.
It’s also interesting that shadow IT gets a look in, too, which is a broader issue of disintermediation for the IT
department.
The more strategic, longer-term issues also tell a story—about CIOs who want to take business advantage of
the latest technologies without risking the firm on something too bleeding edge. And about CIOs who want
to engage fully with the rest of their organization and reduce the complexity of their companies while inspiring
their teams.
And yes, they still agonise about their place in the world in terms of proving their relevance and worth to the
business. Sure, it sounds like an impossible wish list, and some of those issues haven’t changed in decades,
but CIOs are still struggling with how to resolve them.

Many CIOs are moving beyond IT

By Joe McKendrick
In the fourth quarter of 2012, Gartner surveyed 2,053 CIOs and asked what would be most important to them
over the coming year. If you look at the lists below—for technology and business priorities—there probably
aren’t too many surprises. Analytics/BI tops the list, followed by mobile, then cloud, and so on.
The three main anchors of service-oriented technologies—cloud, legacy modernization, and virtualization—
make the list, at numbers 3, 5, and 8, respectively. Not the top of the list, but at least on the list. Of course, it
can be argued that the business side isn’t really tuned into service technologies. But business types are ex-
cited about analytics and mobile. In fact, CIOs brand these technologies as “disruptive”—mobile (70 percent),
analytics (55 percent), social media (54 percent), and public cloud (51 percent).
What’s really new and different is evidence that CIOs are increasingly evolving into “chief digital officers”
(CDOs). This is more than semantics; it suggests a shift away from overseeing systems and applications to
overseeing their organization’s efforts to build new channels and markets. (Well, actually, “CIO” might still be a
better label, since the impetus is still harvesting value from information, not just being “digital.”)
Nevertheless, almost a fifth of CIOs now act as their enterprise’s CDO, leading digital commerce and channels.
More CIOs “will find themselves leading in areas outside of traditional IT,” Gartner predicted, especially since
they are starting to oversee digital business initiatives. In fact, Gartner said that 77 percent of CIOs surveyed
“have significant leadership responsibilities outside of IT.” Compare this to 2008, when almost half of CIOs had
no responsibilities outside of IT.
Ultimately, a CDO posture may attract far more corporate budget dollars than the traditional IT-centric CIO role,
Gartner suggested. “Reacting to limited budgets by restructuring costs, outsourcing and doing more with less
made sense from 2002 to 2011, when the supply of innovative technologies was scarce. Adapting to, and
leading, in the digital world requires doing things differently, yet in ways consistent with the demands of digital
technologies.” Open the floodgates.
Top 10 CIO technology priorities

1. Analytics and business intelligence
2. Mobile technologies
3. Cloud computing (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS)
4. Collaboration technologies (workflow)
5. Legacy modernization
6. IT management
7. CRM

8. Virtualization
9. Security
10. ERP applications
Top CIO 10 business priorities

1. Increasing enterprise growth
2. Delivering operational results
3. Reducing enterprise costs
4. Attracting and retaining new customers
5. Improving IT applications and infrastructure
6. Creating new products and services (innovation)
7. Improving efficiency
8. Attracting and retaining the workforce
9. Implementing analytics and big data
10. Expanding into new markets and geographies

CIOs can’t go it alone anymore

By Scott Lowe
Trends have always driven IT. But these days, it seems like the trends and their associated buzzwords
are becoming louder and even more critical to business—and business is becoming more aware than
ever of the fact that technology can be used to improve their individual units.
Here are just a few trends currently getting a ton of headlines:
• Big data
• Cloud
• BYOD
• Consumerization of IT
• Virtualization
• Software-defined networking
And the list goes on and on. All these trends come at the same time that IT continues to support normal
operations, which consist of dozens or sometimes hundreds of systems all working together to support
the business. Further, users are becoming more demanding and less tolerant of delays or poor service.
The sheer number of disparate skill sets that are necessary in today’s technology environment is daunt-
ing, particularly in smaller IT shops where fewer people must be able to handle many baseline skills
expected of all IT departments. As new expectations creep in and CIOs find it harder to simply hire ad-
ditional staff, it becomes more and more difficult to keep forging ahead.
What’s a CIO to do?

Fortunately, there are ways for the CIO to cope. But they all require deep partnerships with people both
inside and outside the organization. Frankly, if you’re a CIO, IT director, or other person with executive-
level responsibility for IT and you’re not forging partnerships of some kind, you’re doing it wrong. IT
requires deep partnerships to succeed.
Implement a governance structure

In many organizations seen as struggling with an overloaded, overworked IT department, I’ve seen one
root cause as a serious lack of real IT governance. In these places, IT is tasked with prioritizing, planning,
and implementing every technology project and request that comes into the department. In many cases,
when IT attempts to push back, originating departments simply escalate the request until it becomes a
priority for IT. As a result, IT has a lot of high priority requests all on the table at once and ends up with
zero happy users and a negative reputation.

With the right representative governance structure, the chaos can

be tamed. With assistance from across the organization, technol- Although IT
ogy requests can be debated, discussed, and eventually prioritized departments are
so that IT staff can adequately function and have some semblance seeing a need to
of direction in their tasks. acquire new skills at
an alarming rate, CIOs
Governance of some kind is critical. If you just read this section
can control some of
and have decided that you really don’t need governance in your
this through strategic
organization, stop reading now, as this is what I consider to be a
partnerships with
building block for effective IT management. If you’re working for
outside parties.
someone who won’t let you implement a governance model, start
sending out resumes because your life will eventually become very,
very difficult.
Implement good project management practices

Many IT organizations have implemented full project management offices (PMO) complete with certified
project management staff. Some organizations can’t afford to take project management to this level.
However, every IT organization still needs basic project management skills. In smaller organizations, I
highly recommend that, at a minimum, the CIO be trained on project portfolio management and reporting
techniques and that any staff responsible for project management receive at least basic training.
These skills will help IT staff learn who needs to be involved in project execution and ensure that the right
internal partners are brought into discussions regarding project execution.
Rethink the data center

Want to do something radical? Repurpose some of your data center staff into business analysts. Yes,
there are some prerequisites to making this happen. First off, you need to rethink how the data center is
managed and, when the time is right, consider the implementation of all-in-one systems such as Dell’s
vStart series of products, which is capable of replacing many individual data center elements. Obviously,
you will still need data center staff who understand how it all works. But by partnering with a company
like Dell, you may be able to reconsider some existing job responsibilities. Again, this won’t work for
everyone, but it’s something to think about.
Consider deep partnerships outside the organization

Although IT departments are seeing a need to acquire new skills at an alarming rate, CIOs can control
some of this through strategic partnerships with outside parties. One method I’ve used in the past was
to decouple the deployment of a new service from the ongoing administration. For example, implement-
ing an Exchange environment requires a vastly different skill set from managing one on an ongoing basis.
Further, the implementation process is generally a one-time ordeal, whereas administration is ongoing.

Consider outsourcing the deployment of new services and limiting training to administrative tasks. In this
way, you can get a job done and may avoid overwhelming internal staff. Such endeavors may require
that you have a contract with that outside group for occasional tasks that may arise, but it may still be
more efficient than expecting internal staff to pick up the load, particularly if you can’t hire new people.
Summary
There are many ways CIOs can build partnerships that can help handle the onslaught of expectations
that hit the IT department every day. Once a governance structure is in place, the CIO should leverage
that structure as well as new outside partnerships to ensure that critical business ventures can be com-
pleted without overwhelming internal staff.

Why do CIOs still need technical skills?

By Scott Lowe
CIOs need to be business leaders. That is an incontrovertible fact. Over the years, however, much has been
written by people who believe that a CIO can be fully successful without knowing anything about what’s really
keeping the lights on. The tone of these articles often seems to suggest that companies can simply pluck
someone out of finance or sales, thrust that person into the job of the CIO, and expect the rainbow and lepre-
chaun to appear with the pot of gold. After all, IT isn’t really about technology, right? It’s about getting business
done using technology.
Before I get into a discussion, let me ask a follow up set of questions:
• Would you hire a CFO who had only ancillary experience in finance?
• Would you hire a VP for Sales who didn’t know the sales process from start to finish?
I’d bet that the answer to both of these questions is “No.” Why, then, do some companies believe that a CIO
can simply be plucked from the fold without specific background or training in technology? After all, no matter
how strategic the efforts of an IT group, if the “lights go out” that’s all that’s going to matter. That is, if the
basics that people have come to expect fail to be met, it won’t matter how experienced or inexperienced the
CIO.
It’s important to understand that I don’t believe that the CIO needs to be the “alpha tech” in the office. After all,
except in very small organizations, the CIO probably won’t be configuring switches, creating LUNs on a SAN,
or making sure that VMware is configured to fail over. However, the CIO should:
• Know what is and is not possible—to a reasonable extent—with the network hardware on hand.
• Understand—at least at a basic level—what it means to create a LUN and how much capacity there is in
the organization.
• Realize that VMware can be configured for automated failover to meet disaster recovery requirements.
While the CIO must speak the language of the business to be taken seriously, without the respect of the IT
staff, getting behind the CIO may be difficult. Charisma and business acumen alone may be enough to ac-
complish this goal, but I believe that most IT people want to work for someone who understands their daily
work and what it really takes to get a job done and who appreciates the effort and challenges that are inherent
in the work.
So… to summarize so far: I believe that CIOs must have at least some level of technical knowledge. They
need to understand what it really takes to keep the lights on.
This becomes ever more critical when it comes to prioritizing new projects and making a determination about
what it will take to implement a new project. The tech-savvy CIO will gain an understanding of the new project
and be able to better weigh it against what appear to be “tech-only” projects, such as implementing a new

backup system—which, on the surface, would appear to have no business benefit. Further, when considering
new needs, a CIO who has a broad understanding of the technology environment may be able to envision a
quicker path to success that leverages existing systems. At the very least, the tech-savvy CIO will be able to
“sit at two tables.” The first table is the executive table, the magical place where business decisions are made.
The second table is the IT directors table, where the high-level implementation details are discussed.
I want to reiterate my opening sentence: CIOs need to be business leaders first and technologists second. But
there needs to be a good balance.
Perhaps the primary danger with an especially tech-savvy CIO is this: Getting too deeply involved in the
tactical at the expense of the strategic. Perhaps, fearing this outcome, companies prefer someone who can’t
focus on the tactical?

Executive Guide To The Future of IT Leadership

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Executive’s guide to the

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Executive’s guide to the future

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Cloud, outsourcing, tablets, and

The CIO status quo starts to crumble

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The CIO: Leading the battle or caught in the

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CIO future: Smaller team, bigger influence?

Michael Spears, CIO at NCCI Holdings, says that although in five

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New job titles, new rivalries?

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CIO: Career is over?

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Three big challenges facing the CIO in

2: The continued rise of the CMO

3: The next great talent migration

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Does the CIO matter?

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Eight special qualities CIOs will need in

That sounds like the role of entrepreneur.

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How the CAO can bridge the gap

Enter the CAO

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Q: How should an enterprise go about implementing the new role of CAO?

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Strong governance and policy

What’s the difference?

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By instituting a strong IT governance model:

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11 challenges facing the “international”

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5: Software and hardware support

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10: Different IT factors

11: Different standards

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Why today’s CIOs may no longer be

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Vendors bypassing the CIO: Six ways

How can you—the CIO—stop this behavior?

Forge strong relationships

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Work with finance

Take the hard line

Let your reputation precede you

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Has the CIO lost big data?

The perfect storm

Run up the white flag?

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