Download Stakeholder Relationship Worksheet

One CIO shares his method for tracking how to most effectively work with decision-making executives

By CIO Executive Council
Wed, August 26, 2009

CIO Executive Council — Every stakeholder has a different communication style, priorities for IT and the business, and personal goals. Keeping track of these individuals' characteristics on a worksheet and using that information to form personal relationships can make or break a CIO and his IT initiatives.

When Michael Whitmer, CIO and Executive VP of Operations, Hudson Highland Group and a member of the CIO Executive Council, first came to the company, he wanted to immediately establish relationships with the top stakeholders across the company. The Relationship Worksheet keeps the intelligence gleaned from the meetings he has had with each in front of him. Having this information in a single, organized form allows him to easily refer to it for issues as simple, yet fundamental, as knowing which executives prefer to communicate solely by electronic means and which prefer to talk in person.

But it was the decision of what to include in the worksheet—particularly the question, "What can I do to make your job better?"—that got the best reaction and formed the personal foundation for many relationships. It has even saved one, Whitmer says: Instead of constantly being at odds over differing viewpoints and priorities with one stakeholder, this colleague has agreed to disagree on many matters because both know the other is approaching the situation with a good faith attempt to understand the other side.

Download the stakeholder relationship worksheet, or learn more about the Council at council.cio.com.

You are here: Business/Management Topics » Careers » Download

Most Recent Relationship Building/Networking Stories

White Papers »

Top Solutions and Tools to Prevent Devastating Malware

Custom malware frequently goes undetected. According to Forrester Research, the best way to reduce risk of breach is to deploy file integrity monitoring (FIM) tools that provide immediate alerts. This white paper has been brought to you by NetIQ, the leader in solving complex IT challenges.

Identity Governance: The Business Imperatives

This white paper describes the business challenges and opportunities that are driving interest in Identity Governance while discussing considerations your organization should make to help achieve project success.

CA Technology Brief: CA Point of View: Content Aware Identity & Access Management

This paper explores the concept of content-aware IAM, describes the integrated architecture for this new approach, and highlights the benefits that this approach provides.

Measuring the Business Value of CI in the Data Center - IDC-HP White Paper

One of the key strategies that IT teams are pursuing to reduce capital costs while boosting asset utilization and employee productivity is the transition to highly virtualized data centers. However, IDC finds that expectations for further boosts in IT asset use and operational efficiency often surpass the actual results for a variety of reasons. These problems can quickly overwhelm any hoped-for benefits as the scope of virtual server deployment expands.

Accelerate time to application value

For your IT organization to keep pace with the business, you need a new, faster approach to infrastructure deployment-an approach that increases agility and accelerates time to application value. That's HP Converged Systems. Built on Converged Infrastructure, these systems deliver the industry's first portfolio of pre-integrated, tested, and optimized infrastructure solutions for applications running in virtual, cloud, dedicated, or hybrid environments.

Business Value of Blade

The nature of the blade platform makes system management, monitoring and provisioning easy and efficient. Access this resource to learn how blade migration will save your data center time and money while increasing performance.

Webcasts »

Apps QuickStart Series Part 2: Designing and Deploying SQL Server on VMware vSphere

Download this webcast to learn about the design considerations for virtualizing SQL workloads, performance and scalability information and high-availability options, as well as support considerations

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View - Webcast

Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business

Architecting a Modern Approach to Data Management

Applications are changing - they're increasingly web-oriented, global in nature and run from multiple device types. Additionally, the volume of data is growing exponentially every year. How do you ensure your applications have fast, accurate, up-to-date information in this new world? Modern applications are data-intensive; delivering data the old way using monolithic databases isn't working. What's needed is a modern approach to data. One that scales-out as needed and delivers predictable high performance, but without sacrificing data consistency or integrity.

Introduction to VMware View 5

VMware View™ 5 simplifies IT management while increasing end user freedom by delivering desktop services from your cloud. Building upon VMware's leadership in desktop virtualization, VMware View 5 delivers a high-performance user experience while giving IT greater policy control.

View this webcast and find out how VMware View 5 can help you:
- Deliver the highest fidelity experience of desktop services across any device and any network
- Simplify and automate IT management, security and control of desktop services
- Reduce the costs associated with your desktop environment

The CIO's View: Time-to-Value Through Automation

IT professionals are being asked to deliver faster "time-to-value" than ever before. An IDG Research survey found that CIOs are eager to invest in technologies that will enable them to get new applications and services up quickly, achieving faster time-to-value.

5 Steps to Successful IT Consolidation

Learn how to reduce IT management overhead, ease revision control, guarantee data security, scale systems more quickly and reduce server and software costs.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter