06.15.10
The Life of a CIO
[Cartoon]
Most CIOs that I have known could qualify as “Silver Tongue Devils”. No matter how bad things might get, these CIOs could give a pep talk and instill excitement. They could use the circumstance to their own advantage by proposing wonderful projects. They could describe the projects in such a way that anyone would clearly see the value of their new direction.
Often a CIO would be coupled with a major supplier of software and/or hardware components. These suppliers would be all too happy to back the CIO’s plan. They would bring the senior management to their home office and treat them like family. They would “open their kimono” and reveal their latest gadgetry. The supplier would make it clear that only the senior management’s needs were important. Profit on sales would take care of itself.
Partnering with a supplier has always been a wise choice for the CIO. The CIO’s management will only hear good things about the CIO from the supplier. Even when problems occurred, the supplier and the CIO would stand firm in their efforts to solve the problems.
Unfortunately for CIOs, today’s senior management is much more knowledgeable of IT and the major suppliers. The senior management is not so easily convinced of supplier solutions. They are also not so excited about too close a partnership with a supplier when there are so many competitive solutions available. A CIO is more often found to be on their own for delivering convincing presentations of solutions.
When a supplier fails to deliver on a solution, the senior management will blame the circumstance on the CIO rather than the supplier. If many of these types of instances occur or if one big instance occurs, the CIO may be asked to start packing.
The overall solution is to move away from the “Silver Tongued Devils” and move towards solid IT engineering principles. This requires a strong Enterprise Architecture program to help establish an organization’s principles and define business models.
In the best case scenarios the Enterprise Architecture program should not report to the CIO. It should be independent of IT. This allows the EAs to bring engineering leadership. They can apply the organization’s chosen principles in their review of projects.
We need to avoid the hype and emotion that some use to control IT. We need to move in a direction based upon engineering principles.
Closing the Business / IT gap
