Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »January 01, 2006 — CIO —
Usefully interpreting surveys about CIOs is a bit like veterinary medicine: While the howls of animal pain reveal something is amiss, the patients can’t articulate the details. You have to probe carefully to learn more even though it hurts.
Pain is surely evident in "The State of the CIO 2006" survey, but the devil is truly in the details. The unhappiness that immediately captured attention was embedded in these results: The backlog of projects/requests is the number-one hurdle to effectiveness for CIOs, followed by inadequate budgets and a shortage of time for strategic thinking and planning. Unknown and unrealistic expectations from the business, if combined, would displace backlog as the top factor.
This is going to hurt: Who are we kidding? Where do CIOs think these backlogs come from? The backlog fairy? But wait, there’s more! What do CIOs claim is their number-two hurdle in the effectiveness rankings? Inadequate budgets and a shortage of time for strategic thinking and planning.
Excuse me, but if you don’t have enough time or money to plan, strategize or prioritize, just what the heck do you think will happen to all those project requests? My bet is that you’ll get—yes!—a backlog. A big backlog. A messy backlog. The kind of backlog an unseasoned CIO might describe as the biggest hurdle to his effectiveness.
Backlogs are clearly symptoms, not causes of ineffectiveness. To wit: I’m in excruciating pain because my leg is broken. However, I still have a race to run. Believe it or not, my number-one hurdle to running fast isn’t the excruciating pain, it’s that my leg is broken! You would (rightly) think me a fool if I claimed I’d run marathons like an Olympic Kenyan if only I could tough it out or creatively sedate myself. Nonsense. CIOs have backlog pain because their budget and planning processes are broken.
That the surveyed CIOs declare backlogs as their number-one reason for ineffectiveness displays a professional predilection to treat symptoms rather than causes. Not good. If I were a CEO, CFO or COO, I’d think twice about retaining CIOs who prioritized managerial time and budgets that way.
The Expectations Trap
To underscore this blooming confusion around cause and effect management, let’s dig a little deeper into the survey results. Here’s an intriguing finding: Unknown and unrealistic expectations from the business, if combined, would displace backlog as the top factor. Now we’re getting somewhere useful. Maybe backlogs aren’t just symptoms of paltry budgets and a poverty of time. Maybe—just maybe—the better explanation for our backlogs and our awful feelings of ineffectiveness is our unhappy perception that the businesspeople we work with either don’t know what they want and need or have fantastical notions of what’s genuinely possible.