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 »
Social Responsibility's Strategic Benefits
December 15, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Ed Granger-Happ, CIO of Save the Children, for a discussion of how creating an organization that is socially responsible improves staffing, retention, leadership development and overall corporate health.
Working With and Communicating to Your Board of Directors
January 13, 2009, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM US/Eastern (GMT-5)
CIO panelists who will share tips and experiences working with their boards: Twila Day of SYSCO; Jeff O'Hare, West Corp.; Marc West, formerly with H&R Block.
IT's Role in Growing Mid-Market Companies
January 14, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM ET (GMT-5)
Mid-market Council members will share their companies' stories and challenges in driving or coping with growth. Panelists represent Veterinary Pet Insurance, Medicis Pharmaceutical, and Intrax Cultural Exchange.
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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.
Just the basics, please. Sometimes we all need a refresher or we need to make sure our team and our colleagues are all on the same page.
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