CIO Survival Guide
Articles by Bob Lewis
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
The savvy CIO’s secret weapon: Your IT team
Building effective IT 101: When building an effective IT organization, nothing matters as much as the humans who get IT’s work done.
Opinion
11 lies CIOs will tell themselves in 2022
Self-deception thy role is chief information officer. Here’s what you’re likely to be fooling yourself about the year ahead.
Opinion
The secret art of technical architecture improvement
Building effective IT 101: Now that you know what you have in your technical architecture, and how good (or not-so-good) it is, you’re ready to plan for its improvement.
Opinion
Evaluating technical architecture: 11 key criteria and how to apply them
Building effective IT 101: Knowing what you have is a good first step. But knowing whether what you have is what you ought to have is a different matter.
Opinion
Technical architecture: What IT does for a living
Building effective IT 101: Technical architecture is what separates a hard-to-navigate pile of tech from accelerating IT’s ability to get things done.
Opinion