Feature

How to Identify Bad CIOs in Their Natural Habitat

Bad CIOs are a blight on the IT profession and on the organizations that employ them. The following list of behaviors common among bad CIOs will prevent you from hiring them into your organizations. If they're already there, it will give you good reason to eliminate them.

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Miano suspects that the higher-ups are too intimidated to ask the fearsome technologious variety of the nocens executor what he means. "They just assume that since the person speaks in a way they cannot understand, he must know what he is talking about," he says. "The use of technobabble is the common defining feature I have seen in bad CIOs."

They play favorites with vendors.
Bojonny has also seen CIOs allocate generous contracts to prized vendors. On one occasion, a CIO gave a contract for a disaster recovery plan to a consultant. "The company paid a lot of money for it, and a year later, the plan was never delivered," he says. "The consultant did studies and analysis but never did anything else, and no one ever questioned it."

Other signs readers at CIO.com's Advice and Opinion section have noted: Be skeptical if a CIO has previously worked for the vendor they recommend. And watch out if an IT executive asks his managers to perform detailed evaluations of expensive hardware and software repeatedly until the managers choose the vendors that the CIO wants.

They act like a wolf in sheep's clothing.
A member of the Software Quality Assurance Forums who goes by the name DSquared writes that bad CIOs don't take seriously the recommendations or concerns of their IT departments. They pretend to listen to their IT staffs only to do what they want.

When DSquared's company wanted to purchase new accounting software, the IT department was asked to weigh in on the business's decision to purchase a particular package for which it had already been pitched. The IT staff came up with several questions they thought the business should ask the vendor before buying the software, such as, Is it industry standard or proprietary? How do we migrate data from the old application to the new one? and What is the total cost of the new software, including installation, support and training? The CIO agreed that the business should get answers to these questions and report back to the IT group. The next thing DSquared knew, the CIO recommended that the company purchase the software even though there was never a follow-up meeting.

More signs of bad CIOs

They overpromise and underdeliver.
They can't sum up their IT strategy into an elevator speech, nor can they articulate the company's vision.
They don't take ownership of critical issues, nor do they demonstrate accountability for problems, but they're quick to take credit for successes.
They can't motivate their staff and don't pay attention to building teams inside the IT group. They can't attract and retain IT staff.
Instead of working on projects that make meaningful contributions to the company's bottom line, they focus either on projects that will look good on their résumés or on sucking up to executives by giving them Blackberrys and new laptops with wireless Internet connections.
They overemphasize project management to the point where 90 percent of the timeline for projects is given over to planning and only 10 percent to implementation.
They view project management as a waste of time.
They can't prioritize projects.
They give staff responsibility for projects but no authority, direction or support. When the individual and the project fail, they publicly berate the individual.
They espouse a different management practice every month.

Source: CIO Reporting.

--M. Levinson