10 Resolutions for CIOs to Kick-Start the New Year

Happy New Year. Have you made any resolutions yet? If you’re still mulling over the possibilities, allow me to share CIO‘s Top 10 resolutions. As we’re fond of saying around my company, “The biggest room in the house is the room for improvement.”

10. Lose some weight. I mean the legacy kind, not your own. Resolve to get rid of whatever legacy systems you can this year to make way for more modern architectures.

9. Spend quality time with your (work) family. Especially your chiefs of marketing, research and finance, if you want to deliver the value necessary to succeed.

8. Exercise daily. Get away from your desk and get out there with your customers, partners, clients or distributors. See how they view your partnership and learn what you can do to inspire deeper loyalty.

7. Travel less. Leverage social and collaboration tools to help your business and your employees get more done with less running around.

6. Improve your handicap. Not the golf kind, but your areas of professional weakness. Get better at communication, marketing the value of IT, meeting deadlines and working across company lines.

5. Smile more. How does the rest of the company view your IT organization and its attitude toward end users? What can you do to warm up those relationships?

4. Pay IT forward. With technology now touching every aspect of business, it’s time to cross over departmental lines and help your colleagues achieve their business goals. Don’t wait to be asked.

3. Eat better. Feed your architecture with healthy new technologies that make cloud, social and mobile work more effectively.

2. Think bigger. Innovate rather than sustain. Make the role of the CIO synonymous with innovation.

1. Value every day. You’ve mastered the art of delivering IT on time and on budget. Now shift your focus to delivering measurable business value through IT, whether it’s enhancing customer loyalty, boosting revenue growth or raising employee satisfaction levels.

Let 2013 be the year that CIOs and IT organizations move beyond business alignment and kick-start the future. And from all of us at CIO magazine, we wish you a healthy and prosperous 2013.

Michael Friedenberg is president and CEO of IDG Enterprise.

Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, on Facebook, and on Google +.