CIO Survival Guide
Articles by Bob Lewis
CIO Survival Guide
5 ways CIOs will disappoint their CEOs in 2023
Now that it’s 2023 it’s a perfect time to look at the promises we’re making for the coming year and how they’re likely to disappoint the CEOs who CIOs need on their side.
CIO Survival Guide
A CIO’s gift guide for IT and business colleagues
This holiday season, show your appreciation by offering up some hard-earned gifts to those hard-to-buy-for IT professionals and hangers-on on your list.
CIO Survival Guide
7 ways CIOs get themselves fired
Keeping your job as CIO is tough, even when you do everything right. Here are seven ways unwary CIOs make their jobs even riskier.
CIO Survival Guide
The successful CIO’s trick to mastering politics
IT leaders must realize that relationships outlive transactions. Failing to embrace this fact of organizational dynamics can kill your career.
CIO Survival Guide
Bad metrics are worse than no metrics
When it comes to setting goals and assessing your progress toward achieving them, be smart about how you use metrics and what you pay attention to. Not SMART.
CIO Survival Guide
What CIOs get wrong about optimization
Optimization efforts too often fall afoul of an essential principle: To optimize the whole you must suboptimize the parts.
CIO Survival Guide
Why every IT leader should avoid ‘best practices’
‘Best’ may be the enemy of good. But in IT, ‘best practice’ is the enemy of good sense. CIOs would be wise to know there are no best practices, only practices that fit best.
CIO Survival Guide
XaaS isn’t everything — and it isn’t serviceable
‘Everything as a service’ doesn’t include every service IT provides, not to mention everything outside IT that can be characterized as a service. And what it leaves out is arguably more important than what it includes.
CIO Survival Guide
A CIO’s guide to guiding business change
As CIOs re-think IT’s role in the enterprise, leading or facilitating business change is central to the conversation. Here’s one way IT can and should regain center stage.
CIO Survival Guide
The XaaS trap: ‘Everything as a service’ isn’t anything IT really needs
Everything as a service (XaaS) should be about extending SOA to how businesses organize. Instead, it’s just another chargeback pricing model — exactly what IT doesn’t need.
CIO Survival Guide
The Edison Ratio: What business and IT leaders get wrong about innovation
When it comes to innovation, great ideas matter. But in the end, understanding the need to act on fewer great ideas matters more.
CIO Survival Guide
7 tools for mastering organizational listening
Organizational listening — knowing What’s Going On Out There — is leadership’s most poorly understood and undervalued responsibility. To fix this you need the right tools.
CIO Survival Guide
How to make the consultant’s edge your own
By dodging your culture of silence and offering employees an escape from the bureaucracy of blamestorming, consultants show how to discover and address root causes.
CIO Survival Guide
3 consultant mistakes CIOs can’t help making
When it comes time to tap outside expertise, IT leaders too often fail to know what to ask for, who to select, or what to do with the advice they pay for.
CIO Survival Guide
The hard truth of IT metrics
Want to survive as CIO? You’ll need metrics. But not just any metrics. Here’s a quick guide.
CIO Survival Guide
The CIO’s missing priority
Directing decision-maker-awareness to the right targets is a key skill for CIO success. Investment risks that pit information security vs. information technology prove the point.
Opinion
The hard truth about lifecycle management
Lifecycle management should head off crises in the making but doesn’t. Instead, consider ‘version currency management’ and stave off catastrophe by being tactical about keeping systems current.
Opinion
The CIO’s no-bull guide to effective IT
Building effective IT 101: Looking to run a successful 21st century, digital-ready IT organization? Here’s an overview on how to pull it all together.
Opinion