Mark Settle, the 7 time CIO and author of the recent book Truth from the Valley, a Practical Primer on IT Management for the Next Decade, joins Lauren to discuss data mining, (and regular mining), how to recognize your constraints, the importance of performance management, and much more.

3 Takeaways:

• Data mining is a lot like drilling for oil: You don’t unlock value by looking where everyone else is already looking. You unlock value by coming up with a new “play concept.”
• It’s important to recognize your constraints. By recognizing trends you can work within your constraints to affect positive change.
• Great performance requires aggressive performance management. Moving people out of positions where they can’t perform well is ultimately a good thing for everyone involved.

Key Quotes: 

• “ A lot of times people talk about the CIO role with all due respect to my colleagues. They sometimes almost attribute too much power and influence to it. In the real world, what you can do as a CIO is constrained by lots of things.”
• “Traditional IT is now shadow IT because it is the dirty jobs primarily, that IT worries about these days. Things like data management, security, and some of the integration activities, those are all behind the scenes things.
• “When I look back, I think one of the areas of personal improvement that I would have counseled myself about was to just be more aggressive in performance management.”

Guest Bio:

Mark Settle is a seven-time CIO with broad business experience in information services, enterprise software, consumer products, high tech distribution, financial services, and oil & gas.  He has led IT organizations that supported the global operations of Fortune 500 companies; maintained the R&D infrastructure required for software product development; and hosted customer-facing delivery systems for commercial products and services. He has received multiple industry awards and is a three-time CIO 100 honoree.

He is the author of Truth from the Valley, a Practical Primer on IT Management for the Next Decade and Truth from the Trenches: A Practical Guide to the Art of IT Management which will be released in the fall of 2016.  Settle’s formal training is in the Geological Sciences. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from MIT and a PhD from Brown University. Settle is a former Air Force officer and NASA Program Scientist.

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