The Accidental Successful CIO

The one thing that stock traders want to be able to do is to trade their  stocks. 

However, if the IT systems that they use to make this happen  have a fault or an outage, then all of a sudden something that is  normally always there can vanish instantly. When this happens, down lost time means money lost for stock traders.  The person that they are going to be holding responsible for their  losses will be the CIO who is in charge of the systems that they use.  This was recently a big problem. 

What are CIOs to do to prevent events  like this?

Just about everyone knows who Volkswagen is. 

They are the German company  who makes cars – remember the Beetle from the 1960’s? Well, they are  still around and they still make cars. The person with the CIO job has  been studying the car market and has seen the rise of Tesla in the  electric car space. VW would like to enter this market also. 

However,  despite their years of experience in making cars, it turns out that it’s been software that they have been struggling with as they try to enter this new market.

Ok, so let’s have a talk here for just a moment. 

The managers that CIOs  are putting into place these days seem to becoming younger and younger.  Maybe it’s because there are so many millennials now working in the IT  department, but it sure seems as though the pool of candidates that we  can promote to manager no longer have any gray hair. This is causing a  problem for the person with the CIO job. This new breed of manager lacks some basic training.  

In order to ensure that this new generation of IT managers is going to  be successful dealing with the importance of information technology, is  this the time for the person in the CIO position to turn to robots to  keep track of how their new managers are doing?

In the post pandemic world CIOs are facing a major challenge: where should everyone work? 

There are those people who have been just waiting for permission to return to the office because they like the environment and the interaction with all of the different people. However, on the other hand there are the people who actually prefer to work from home and who might leave the company if they were forced to come back into the office. CIOs are going to end up with a hybrid work environment with some workers in the office and some remote. 

How is this going to work out for everyone?

As all CIOs now realize: the world has changed. 

The Covid-19 pandemic  changed everything for everyone. After having spent a year working from  home, most companies have now once again opened their offices. However,  not all of their workers have come back and in fact many of their  workers don’t want to come back. This means that the office environment  that we once knew where everyone clustered in a shared environment has  now gone away forever. Say hello to the “hybrid environment”. 

How can  CIOs make this new work environment work for everyone?

CIOs need to understand that things have changed. 

The workplace has  undergone a once-in-a-lifetime change and now the number of workers who  are working from home has skyrocketed. What the person with the CIO job  needs to understand is that many of those workers aren’t going back  anytime soon. A survey of corporate leaders found that in the future,  82% plan to allow remote working at least some of the time; 47% said  they intend to allow full-time remote work going forward. A recent  survey of managers yielded the same result: 82% said they will have more  flexible work-from-home policies after the pandemic. CIOs need to  quickly learn lessons about the varied necessities of remote work, from  appropriate tools to new styles of management. 

Here are five rules that  every CIO needs to adopt.

All CIOs understand that if they are going to help their companies become more successful, then they are going to have to find ways to introduce new technology into how the company performs its processes.  

It turns out that in China CIOs are under a great deal of pressure to successfully accomplish this task in order to help their firms and their  country achieve national goals. 

How are Chinese CIOs going to pull their companies forward using the latest technology?

As a CIO I suspect that you are well aware that there are a number of  different ways that your IT teams can go about developing software (and  doing a lot of other things). 

There is the classic method that has been  used for over 40 years called “waterfall”. Then there’s the new upstart  in town that everyone seems to be flocking to called “agile”. All of  these options can place a CIO in a difficult place. 

Which way is the  best way for our teams to create products?

Every person with the CIO job wants to have an IT department that is  quick and nimble. 

We want our staff to be able to anticipate what is  coming and make sure that the company is ready when it arrives. CIOs  also realize that in order to be able to do this, they need to make sure that their IT department is diverse.  

However, even though much has been said about the importance of having a  diverse and inclusive IT workforce, when it comes to promoting  ethnically and racially diverse people to senior leadership positions,  CIOs continue to struggle.

Although we like to think of the CIO job as being a technology job where we spend our time trying to communicate the importance of information  technology, there is a lot of human contact required. 

With the arrival  of the Covid-19 virus this part of the job, which was never easy, has  all of sudden become that much harder to do. 

In this new era of social  distancing, how can CIOs build the human networks that they need?

CIOs who are responsible for their company’s factories are starting to understand that they will be spending far more on data management and  analytics tools in the aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak, and will  be using those tools for deeper insight into operations, sales and  supply chain disruptions. 

The reason that they will be doing this is  because they understand the importance of information technology and  they want to be able to enhance their ability to remotely monitor plant  equipment, which engineers had limited access to during the pandemic.  All of this is going to require a lot of changes. 

What will CIOs have to do?

As CIOs we will eventually go looking for our next CIO job. 

When we  do this, we need to be prepared to answer plenty of questions on various  technology, business and personal topics. However, before any  employment meeting ends, it’s always a good idea for you to toss a few probing questions back to the interviewer.  Keep in mind that as the potential employer seeks to ensure that you’ll  be able to perform professionally and productively, you’ll be risking  nothing less than your reputation and future career path on commitments  made during this interview. 

What types of questions should we be asking  during our CIO job interview?

As the person with the CIO job, it’s your responsibility to make sure  that the IT department is successful. In order to do that, you need to  be able to lead the department in the right direction in order to  realize the importance of information technology. 

What this means is  that you have to plan, organize and launch new strategies and  initiatives. Changes in business trends, security issues and increasing  government oversight of many IT activities, combined with a seemingly  never-ending series of disruptive technologies, make it essential to be thinking about tactics and goals all the time. 

How should a CIO go about doing this?

As though CIOs didn’t already have enough to worry about with the importance of information technology, it now turns out that within their  own company there may be a shadow IT department at work. 

What has  happened is that there is a growing demand for software and this has  given rise to pseudo-programmers who, though not professional  developers, build applications that help their business lines. These  so-called “citizen developers” (cit-devs) build apps because the IT  department is not willing to build the software they require when they  require it. Clearly this is an issue for a CIO. 

What are we supposed to  do about this new army of developers who don’t work for us?

Every CIO understands that the pandemic was a major disruption to their  business and the importance of information technology. 

Their workplaces  went from being filled with people to being deserted. Now that vaccines  have become available, those workers are starting to trickle back in.  However, the workplace as we used to know it may never exist again.  Instead, it’s going to be transformed into a new environment. Not all of  our workers are coming back and not all of the ones who are coming back  will be there all the time. 

How is a CIO going to secure this new  hybrid work environment?

Being a CIO is an exciting job. 

Starting a new CIO job can be both  exciting and just a little bit daunting. When the person with the CIO  job gets ready to start a new job, they need to make sure that they are  going in with a clear plan. Hitting the ground running can be key to  establishing themselves at a new firm and laying out a path to success  so that the company can realize the importance of information  technology. 

What you are going to need is an 8-part plan for the first  100 days.

Right now every CIO seems to be talking about the customer experience (CX). 

What CIOs have been told is that if you don’t get customer  experience right, you may leave yourself vulnerable to competitors who  do. However, CIOs who focus only or mostly on customers are forgetting  something just as important: the employee experience (EX) .  The basic formula is: You can’t have customers that are happier than  your employees no matter how well you understand the importance of  information technology. 

Here’s how CIOs can fall short of providing  employee-facing technology that helps rather than hurts productivity, morale and the bottom line.

As CIOs, some jobs are tougher than others. 

One of the most demanding is when you find yourself taking on a troubled IT department.  This isn’t a job for the faint of heart. Your job will be to repair  damage and put things back in order so that the company can realize the  importance of information technology. This will require a great deal of  time and effort on your part. The good news is that if you succeed,  you’ll be lauded as a hero. 

The bad news is that if you fail, your  washout could haunt your CIO career for years to come.

Modern CIOs need to understand that Business Intelligence (BI) leverages software and services to transform data into actionable insights that  inform an company’s strategic and tactical business decisions. These BI  tools access and analyze data sets and present analytical findings in  reports, summaries, dashboards, graphs, charts and maps designed to  provide users with detailed intelligence about the state of the  business. 

In IT the term business intelligence often also refers to a  range of tools that provide quick, easy-to-digest access to insights  about an organization’s current state, based on available data. 

The  challenge that CIOs are facing is how best to make use of these new  tools?

As more and more CIOs move their company’s IT infrastructure into the  cloud, the importance of the cloud is becoming more and more important.

I’d like to be able to tell you that all of that work that you put into  selecting the right cloud provider for your company is a “one and done”  type of activity. However, that’s not the case. For a variety of  reasons, you may decide later on down the road that you want to switch  cloud providers. 

When this happens, the person with the CIO job needs to  make sure that they have the flexibility to do this when the time  comes, without significant negative impact to the company.

As CIOs are busy creating projects to move more and more of their IT  infrastructure into the cloud, they are always looking to other firms in  order to get direction on what the best way to go about doing this is.  

We all know that Amazon offers one of the most popular cloud products  and so it can be very easy to assume that it has always been easy going  for their move into the cloud. It turns out that this is not the case,  Amazon had their own issues as they moved into the cloud. 

CIOs need to  pay close attention to the challenges that Amazon had to deal with and  how they went about solving these challenges.

CIOs who think that BYOD (bring-your-own-device) is a fad that is  starting to fade away are wrong. 

CIOs who think they can abandon the  practice of creating BYOD polices risk upsetting an important and  growing constituency of their workforce: millennials, who are also known  as GenY. 

Attracting this type of worker has become a part of the  importance of information technology.

As your company’s CIO it is your responsibility to understand the  importance of information technology and to use it to secure the company’s assets. 

What this means on a daily basis is that you are  probably installing firewalls and creating white lists for who can  access what applications and servers. However, as life become more and  more complicated, you may also be dealing with the arrival of image-recognition filters for everything from screening online content and people arriving at  your company’s buildings. 

It turns out that these new AI driven  systems can be fooled…

The CIO job is the one that everyone in the IT department eventually  wants to get. 

It can be a real challenge to line up an interview for  this position and even more of a challenge to get selected for it. 

What  everyone wants to know is what they need to be doing in order to someday make this happen for them so that they can share the importance of information technology with the rest of the company?

Every CIO starts out a year with a clear set of goal: things that we  want to get done because of the importance of information technology.  

However, and this year has been no exception, things have a habit of changing on us.  When these changes happen, CIOs are faced with two choices: make no  changes and hope for the best or adjust their plans to match the new set  of realities that they find themselves dealing with. 

With all of the  changes that CIOs have experienced this year, they had no choice but to  create a new set of priorities in order to make it through the year.

Guess what: CIOs are humans also. 

Just like everyone else we have grown tired of living in a world that is trying to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.  We miss the way that the world used to be: the routines, the people,  the interactions, the dealing the importance of information technology.  It’s entirely possible that as the months have dragged on you have  become worn down. The good news is that you are not alone – everyone  else is feeling the same way. 

What we all need are ways to get our  second wind. How can we get the energy that we’re going to need in order  to get through this thing?

Guess what: CIOs are humans also. 

Just like everyone else we have grown tired of living in a world that is trying to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.  We miss the way that the world used to be: the routines, the people,  the interactions, the dealing the importance of information technology.  It’s entirely possible that as the months have dragged on you have  become worn down. The good news is that you are not alone – everyone  else is feeling the same way. What we all need are ways to get our  second wind. 

How can we get the energy that we’re going to need in order  to get through this thing?

As the person with the CIO job, you understand that having a diverse  workforce is key to having an IT department that can solve today’s  complex problems. 

Diversity is something that we’ve always worked at and  in the past few years it has only increased in importance. The  importance of information technology requires that we have a diverse  workforce. However, with the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic and the  upheaval that has swept through every company, 

CIOs have a new problem  that they have to deal with: they are losing their female employees.

Let’s face it, the robots are taking over. 

All people with the CIO job  are aware of the advances that have been made in robotic technology over  the past few years. It goes almost without saying that CIOs have spent  the past few years looking at how their company does things with an eye  to finding places where robots, who represent the importance of  information technology, could be used to do things quicker, more  accurately, and at a lower cost. Given that we’ve already made this  investment, you wouldn’t think that there would be a situation where a CIO would take a step back and decide to not deploy robots, do you? 

Well guess what, it’s happening.

There is no way that any of us could have seen the Covid-19 pandemic  coming our way. 

This is something that none of us have ever experienced  before and in fact the people who taught us how to do our job had never  had to deal with anything like this either. Yes, there are things that  we could have done that would have allowed us to be better prepared, but  there was nothing that we could have done to be completely prepared.  

This is exactly how one CIO now feels…

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, all of sudden everyone who had been coming into the office started to stay at home. 

That left a lot of workspace wide open.  This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity got the people in the CIO position  thinking. How could the workplace be made better for everyone in the IT  department so that they could share the importance of information  technology? In the past few years a lot of organizations have adopted  the “open office” organizational approach. 

However, is there a better  way to set things up?

CIOs who work in the oil industry are used to seeing ups and downs sweep  through their IT departments. 

However, nothing could have prepared them  for the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic. This virus caused everything  to shut down and send all of their workers home. 

Now, after cutting  thousands of jobs during the coronavirus pandemic, oil industry CIOs are  accelerating their embrace of remote drilling and fracking, changes  that will reshape its workforce permanently.

I’m pretty sure that I don’t have to tell CIOs that they have a real  problem on their hands. 

Due to the way that demographics work, there are  a lot of skilled IT workers who are just about ready to become eligible  to retire. When this happens, all of sudden a great deal of the  knowledge that allows the IT department to run smoothly is going to walk  out the door. When that happens, the CIO has to have a plan to keep the  lights on and the databases up. 

What will you do?

So if you look back on the day that you become a CIO, you need to  remember that nobody ever told you that this was going to be an easy job  dealing with the importance of information technology. 

One of the  reasons that being the person in the CIO position is such a tough job is  because of all of the important decisions that you are expected to make.  The impact of your decisions will affect the lives of everyone who  works in your department and may impact the company for years to come.  There is a lot riding on what you decide to do. Feeling any pressure  yet? 

What are the biggest decisions that CIOs are expected to make and  what are the best way to make these decisions?

Wow – that cloud thing is a powerful tool for the person with the CIO  job to use. 

Think about it, we have access to almost unlimited storage  and the ability to spin up new servers anytime that we run into the  need. Life sure has gotten better than it used to be. However, it turns  out that moving to the cloud comes with its own special set of  downsides. 

What can happen is that after we’ve moved our corporate data  to the cloud, we may have ended up leaving it exposed for the world to see.

CIOs who are excited about their jobs and who are ambitious often like to act like they know everything.  

This kind of behavior becomes very visible to everyone that they work  with. As they move on in their career, these CIOs often start to realize  that, despite the importance of information technology, just how little  they actually did know. Acting this way can be a severe career limiter  for CIOs. 

What we need to do is to understand what it looks like when we  are acting like a know-it-all and what we can do to stop this kind of  behavior.

CIOs who work for grocery store chains are undergoing some significant  changes in their lives. 

It used to be that being a CIO who worked in the  grocery business allowed you to focus on such issues as the delivery of  items to stores, current inventory levels, and the tracking of food  shipments when a contamination was detected. However, that has all been  changed. Every year in the U.S. consumers spend over US$800B on grocery  store food. More and more of that spending is starting to go online.  

Grocery store CIOs need to understand the importance of information  technology and adapt to this change or risk being left behind.

As the person with the CIO job, it is your responsibility to provide  your company with guidance on how they can be successful. 

In order to be  able to provide good advice, what we need to do is to take a look at  other companies that have learned to use IT in order to be successful  and take lessons from them. Good examples of such companies who realized  the importance of information technology include Amazon, Google,  Microsoft, and Facebook. 

If we take a look at how they have become so  successful we’ll quickly start to realize something: they invest in their own technology.

I’m pretty sure that just about every CIO has heard about artificial  intelligence (AI) by now. 

This technology is starting to revolutionize a  lot of the ways that we live our lives. AI is showing up in our cell  phones and helps us to remember to do things, shows us places that we’d  probably like to go based on places that we’ve been in the past, and can  even recommend people that we might like to be friends with. At the  same time AI is working its way into our homes via devices such as  Amazon’s Echo products. 

What the person with the CIO job needs to  realize is that their company needs to be involved with AI right now or  else they stand the very real chance that their competition is going to  end up passing them by.

So just exactly what is this “friendship” thing? 

For that matter how  important is it? For most CIOs, friendship is very important. We’d all  like to have as many friends as we possibly can. However, in this day  and age we often indicate our friendship with someone by “friending”  them in online social media sites. 

As both you and I know, friendships  can change over time and so that brings up the big question: should we  friend people at work if we may just end up un-friending them online  later on?

As your company’s CIO you have a responsibility to make sure that the IT  department is staffed with the skilled workers that it will need in  order to remain both competitive and secure. 

Among other things, this  means that because of the importance of information technology you are  going to have to hire the cybersecurity experts that you’ll need in order to keep the bad guys out.  However, this is where CIOs are starting to run into problems. It turns  out that there simply are not enough cybersecurity experts out there.  This is creating real problems for CIOs. 

What should we do about this?

So the people with the CIO job who work for the big cruise lines have a  bit of a problem on their hands. 

It turns out that when people are  planning on traveling, they generally don’t plan on taking a cruise.  Right now less than 4% of Americans take a cruise each year. Worldwide  the global cruise industry accounts for just 2% of the world’s hotel  rooms. 

This sure looks like the kind of problem that technology can fix…

As is the case with all CIO’s, you’d like to be the best boss that you  can possibly be. 

There are a lot of characteristics of good bosses: they  treat their employees with respect, they give good directions, and they  praise people when they accomplish something significant. However, even  if you are able to do some or all of these things and support the  importance of information technology, is it possible that you are still a  bad boss? One characteristic of a bad boss would be one that wastes other peoples time. 

Could you be doing this and not even be aware of it?

If you are the person with the CIO job, the rest of the company is looking at you for help in making your company more competitive.  

What this means is that the company needs to always be improving how  they do things – they need to become quicker, better, and faster. This  all sounds great and we know that if we use the power of information  technology we can certainly make some of this happen. However, what the  person in the CIO position needs to find out is how all of that data  that they are collecting can be used to help the company teach itself  how to become better. It turns that this can be done. 

The secret lies in  models.

When the bad guys go after a bank, because of the importance of  information technology it is the responsibility of the Bank’s CIO to  keep the bank’s networks and electronic assets safe. 

However, this is  not something that they can do by themselves. Banks need to know what is happening at other banks so that they can learn from them and better prepare to defend  themselves. 

In order to accomplish this, bank CIOs need to share data  with other banks and this starts to raise some interesting privacy  concerns.

Let’s face it: it is becoming harder and harder to keep the company’s IT assets and its network safe from people who want to do you harm.  

The threats are relentless and they just keep getting stronger and  coming at us from all directions. Additionally, what could happen if the  bad guys do get in can now be disastrous because of the importance of  information technology when you consider how much customer data can be  lost, how many corporate secrets can be lost, and then the threat of  lawsuits because of the breech. 

As CIOs we probably should not be  sleeping very well at night and here are the reasons why.

When a member of your department does a good job, all of a sudden you  find yourself in a difficult position. 

You’d like to show this  individual that they did a good job and that you appreciate it. However,  the big question is often how best to go about doing this. There are a  number of different things that you can do: you can hand out awards,  give them an office that has a coveted window, or increase their scope  of responsibility. 

However, what a lot of CIOs don’t realize is that by  doing these things, they are actually causing a great deal of damage.

One of the most challenging jobs that the person in the CIO position has  to deal with is trying to recruit the best workers. 

In addition to the  importance of information technology, there are a number of different  things that can cause a young person just out of college to decide to  either join your IT department or not, but one of the most obvious is  what they think of your work environment. In the past, CIOs have added a  number of “cool” things to the office such as pool tables or even craft  beer dispensers. 

However, now the challenge for the person with the CIO  job is to find a way to make sure that the outside world knows how cool their office is. 

Based on what we’ve all be reading in the newspaper and seeing online, I  think that it’s pretty clear that anyone who is aware of the importance  of information technology knows that Cybersecurity is a big priority for the person with the CIO job.  

The number of hacks of companies has been on the rise as has been their  scale. The possibility of your company being disrupted by an electronic  theft is starting to seem more and more likely. Unfortunately for all  of us, the line between state sponsored attacker and independent  operator is also starting to become blurred. 

Clearly this is something  that CIO’s need to deal with, but how? 

Having the CIO job is tough. Because of the importance of information  technology, the company expects you to be able to accomplish a great  deal.

 The world in which you work, IT, is constantly changing and it can  be quite difficult to keep up with everything that is going on. This is  why you need to have the best team of people working in your IT  department. Finding those people, getting them to agree to join your IT  department, and then convincing them to stay is a full time job on top  of everything else that you are expected to do. 

Recent studies have  shown that if you want your staff to stay, it have more to do with the managers that you have working for you than anything else. 

 Let’s face it, as CIOs we’d all like to be liked. We enjoy the parts of  our job that are fun and which have to do with the importance of  information technology. 

It makes us happy when another large IT project  is successfully rolled out. However, life is life and part of our job is that when there is bad news to be delivered,  we’re the ones who have the job to share the news with the people who  work for us. Nothing that I can tell you will ever make this an easy  thing to do. 

However, it turns out that there are ways that you can  deliver information like this in ways that turn out to be less stressful  for you and, perhaps, just a little bit more comforting for the people  that you have to deliver it to. 

The world in which we live is currently changing. 

Over the past few  years, as the importance of information technology has grown, the  internet has become a bigger and more important part of both our  personal and professional lives. Every IT department makes extensive use  of the internet these days to run apps, handle storage, and  communicate. The revolution that is currently going on is occurring  because more and more devices are being connected to the internet for the first time. 

What will the impact of this be for CIOs? 

As CIOs we are faced with a complete set of problems that we need to  solve. 

These can be small, simple problems that we can solve just by  thinking about them for a moment and then telling someone what to do in  order to solve them or they can be the really big problems that we have  no clue how to go about solving. It’s these big problems that can cause a  CIO real headaches. 

It turns out that that in order to solve the really  big problems, CIOs need to use a different way of thinking about  problem solving in order to come up with solutions that will really work  for them. 

Being the person with the CIO job is hard work. You try and you try and  you try to do a good job but it always seems like you are somehow  falling further and further behind. There is so much work to do in  regards to the importance of information technology that you only dream  of being able to do all of the things that you should be doing in order  to make your IT department as good as it could be. 

In cases like this,  it might be helpful to take a look around in the world of high-tech and see if there is anyone who is getting all of this stuff correct. Does anyone know how to run things correctly? 

It turns out that the answer is yes – Adobe. 

As the person with the CIO job, one of your main tasks is to assign work to the various people who work for you.  As the number of people grows and the amount of work that has to be  done seems to get even larger, this task that once upon a time appeared  to be simple, can quickly get out of hand. 

Over at those fancy new  startup companies that like to refer to themselves as being part of the  “gig economy”, they believe in the importance of information technology  and have started to use both apps and algorithms to assign tasks to the  self employed workers that they use. 

Is this something that you should  be doing? 

CIOs at banks have a great deal to worry about. Simply because their  companies have so much valuable data and money, the bad guys are always  trying to break in and steal things. 

As though this wasn’t bad enough,  every bank is connected to every other bank. What this means is that if  something bad happened to a connected bank, then your bank could also suffer. 

In order to prevent doomsday scenarios like this from happening, the people in the bank CIO position have come up with a plan. 

If you were the CIO of a major bank responsible for the importance of  information technology, what do you think that your #1 job  responsibility would be? If you are guessing “keep the bank’s systems  secure” then good news, you’d be close, but you’d still be missing the  point. 

It turns out that a bank’s CIO’s most important job is ensuring that the people who have trusted the bank with their money are able to both see and access it.  

Over at the major American bank, Wells Fargo, their CIO has just  dropped the ball and their IT systems were down for two days. This means  that people could not access their money. Not a good scenario.