The Accidental Successful CIO

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.

Think about the car that you are currently driving. 

What components go  into it? If you guessed metal, glass, and plastic then you would be  correct – but you would have missed one key ingredient. Software.  More and more the cars that we drive are being controlled and run by  software. The problem is that the traditional car makers are good at  bending metal, but not so good at creating software. 

Can their CIOs change things so that they’ll be able to create the cars of the future?

As the person with the CIO job at your company, you are constantly under  pressure to understand the importance of information technology and to find ways to allow the company to do more things quicker.  

You’ve probably already done the simple things such as deploying a  group chat application, installing an ERP suite, and, of course, putting  in countless firewalls to keep the whole operation safe. However, now the people running the company are going to be asking you to do more.  They want you to find ways to automate the back office tasks that are  being done that don’t bring a lot of value to the company. 

Looks like  you are going to have to learn about RPA.

So let’s make sure that we all understand what we are talking about when we bring up pay transparency. 

Right off the bat, pay transparency sounds like a really good idea.  In a company that has pay transparency, every employee knows what every  other employee is making. There can be a lot of benefits to doing this:  it can motivate employees,  it can close gender gaps, and it can attract new talent that will  understand the importance of information technology by showing people  how achievement at the company is rewarded. 

However, the person with  the CIO job needs to understand that there is also a darker underside to pay transparency…

The person with the CIO job realizes that their company has a significant problem when it comes to hiring people. 

They can’t always trust that the resume that the person has given them is truthful.  The traditional way of trying to make sure that the company is getting  the straight story is to run a background check on each candidate.  However, this can be an expensive and time consuming task. 

The arrival  of a new type of technology, the blockchain, holds out the promise of being able to provide a company with the assurance that they are looking for.

If you are like most CIOs, you always have too much to do and not enough  time in which to get it all done. 

Most of us deal with this challenge  by creating lists of the things that we need to get accomplished so that we don’t forget anything.  Creating a list and then marking things off as we complete them is what  most productivity solutions are based on. The problem is that our to-do lists just seem to keep on growing and there are things on that list that we know that we’ll never have a  chance to get to do. 

People with the CIO job need a better way to get  things done.

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?

CIOs have known for a long time that their firms are under assault from outside forces.  

Your company has developed a vast warehouse of valuable information  that outsiders would love to be able to get their hands on. As the  company’s CIO it is your job to prevent this from happening. 

However, in  order to perform this task successfully you are going to have to make  sure that you are aware both of the threats that you are facing as well as the ways that you can defend yourself.

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?