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Readers sound off on CIO leadership, outsourcing and the IT community's fading commitment to quality.

By Michael Schrage

April 15, 2004 — CIO — Reading the responses to my column via e-mail and CIO’s online Add a Comment inbox brings to mind Mark Twain’s venom-tipped reaction to the reelection of a particularly egregious scoundrel: "The people have spoken-the bastards!"

Not that any of my readers’ insights are illegitimate in any way, of course, but it is fascinating to observe what gets the CIO community hot and bothered and what wins its compliments. So this column is about what I’ve been learning from your feedback.

The obvious problem with columns like this is that the sampling of opinion is so skewed. The Outraged, Infuriated and Upset who think you a moron are far more likely to comment than the Nice Column folks. Indeed, "Liked the column" e-mailers are lovely-but reveal little-while the readers who think your cerebellum is a total waste of neurons vituperatively go to great lengths to explain why your ideas are moronic. Sometimes they’ve even got a point.

The best feedback comes from people who have a story to relay, an experience to share or a question to ask that forces me to rethink why I wrote what I wrote. Because this is a column about the challenge of IT implementations, rather than the wonderfulness of Big IT Ideas, you have to take people’s real world observations more seriously.

The readers who respond to this column are typically intelligent, articulate, concerned about their professional futures and frustrated by how difficult it is to work productively with their business counterparts. My columns are often criticized not for sounding jaundiced or cynical but for not being cynical enough!

Intriguingly, the columns that get the most intense feedback are the ones in which I argue that CIO leadership means having the courage to decide where IT shouldn’t be a leader in organizational change. Few things undermine legitimacy quicker than trying to do too much. Overextended IT organizations typically end up with the worst of both worlds: overpromised expectations and underdelivered implementations.

That sort of CIO critique drew a lengthy diatribe from Jim Wells, a CIO with a large health-care organization in the Midwest (reprinted with his kind permission), that captured the sentiments of many stalwart CIO champions. Wells wrote:

"CIOs who have not established policies and procedures to prevent departments from going their own way are not CIOs; they are directors or managers, whatever they call themselves.

"CIOs [who] do not report to the CEO are not CIOs; they are directors with a fancy title and salary.

 

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