The Accidental Successful CIO

When your IT department creates a new website for users to access, how  do they go about securing it? 

If you are like most IT departments, you  require users to make use of a unique username and a password.  That password may be a bit complex: it has to be so long, must contain  upper and lower characters, has to have a special character in it, etc.  However, we keep reading about hackers who are able to guess people’s  passwords and gain access to sites. 

What should a CIO do to stop this?

So let’s pretend for a moment that you’ve switched sides. 

You are now a  hacker that is trying to break into your company’s network because you  understand the importance of information technology, want to get money  from your company, or do something else that you really should not be  doing. How are you going to go about making this happen? In the  old days, you’d create a malicious piece of software and then try to  smuggle it into the company so that it could do your dirty work for you. However, hackers have since moved on. These days they use a more sophisticated attack: social engineering. 

As the CIO are you going to be ready to defend against this?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful new technology that the person with the CIO job is going  to have to learn how to harness because of the importance of information  technology. 

We need to realize that the impact of introducing AI  powered applications into our business will not just impact the IT  department, but rather will impact the entire company.  

What this is going to mean is that the person in the CIO position is  going to have to prepare the rest of the company for the changes that  will be coming their way.

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.

Just a few years ago, the weight loss company Nutrisystem was in a bad place. 

A combination of events had resulted in a decrease  in sales. The global recession along with more competition in the weight  loss market had resulted in sales and profits declining for several  years. Clearly something had to be done. 

The company’s  CIO, along with their CEO Dawn Zier, decided that everyone in the  company had to have a new mindset if the company was going to be saved.

Most CIOs feel comfortable when they are dealing with the things that  they know the best which show off the importance of information  technology: servers, networks, software, firewalls, etc. 

However, in  order to be a successful CIO we also have to be good at dealing with  something else: people. In order to successfully manage  the people who work in the IT department we first need to make sure  that we understand how they think. If we can master this, then we’ll have smoother communication and stronger understanding of what motivates them. 

All of this will be good for our IT department.

I’m hoping that we can all agree that the nature of our IT department’s  workforce has been changing over the past few years. 

It sure seems like  as the importance of information technology grows, the department keeps getting younger and younger and younger. What has been happening is that we have been employing more and more members of the so-called millennial generation.  These employees who were born between 1982 and 2000 now hold the  success of your IT department in their hands. 

Do you know how to manage  them?

As the person with the CIO job, you have a lot on your plate. 

You need  to make sure that the company’s networks are kept secure and you need to  make the right decisions about new technology that the company is  considering because of the importance of information technology.  However, you also have to remember that you are a manager and that the  IT department is your responsibility. 

You need to make sure that your department is running as smoothly as possible. What this means for you is that you need to be aware of the effect of rudeness.