The Accidental Successful CIO

One of the most important jobs that the person with the CIO job is asked to do is to secure the company’s networks because of the importance of information technology. 

The good news is  that the tools that are available to do this are always getting better  and better. The bad news is that the weakest link in the security chain,  your employees,  seems to be becoming weaker and weaker. Too many CIOs are making it  easy for the bad guys to get in to their network. 

What can a CIO do to  create a cybersafe company?

Let’s face it, one of the most important jobs that a CIO does is to negotiate deals.  

No matter if we are dealing with outside vendors or internal  departments, it sure seems as though because of the importance of  information technology a great deal of our time is taken up with trying  to get the best deal for our IT department. This is a skill that most of  us have learned along the way. 

That’s why it may come as a bit of a  surprise to learn that if we do too much negotiating, it can backfire on us.

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 agree on one thing: the people who work at your firm are smart people. Right? 

There’s no way that they would fall for one of those phishing attacks that we read about in the paper all the time. Or is there? As the  person with the CIO job, one of your biggest issues is that the bad guys  who are attacking your corporate network are getting more  sophisticated, more prevalent, and more dangerous every day because they  understand the importance of information technology. These bad guys  come in all sorts of different forms. Organized criminals attempt to  steal your financial records, terrorists try to encrypt your systems as a  part of a ransomware attack,  and even whole countries are trying to gain access to your systems so  that they can lay there dormant until it suits them. 

What’s a CIO to do?

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.

As is the case with all managers, there are probably some manager skills  that you do very well and other things that you’d like to learn how to  do better. 

The big question that we always face is how can we get the manager training to become better at the things that we don’t currently do well? It turns out that the answer is that we need to learn from those around  us who do these types of things well. How can we do that? 

Guess what – it may be as easy as moving your desk so that you sit close to them.

The reason that an IT department exists within a company is to provide  the company with a way to use the importance of information technology  to provide the company with a competitive advantage.  

The IT department provides the company with the ability to process all  of the data that is collected while at the same time providing the  company’s customers with a seamless experience. In today’s modern times,  IT departments are using artificial intelligence, machine learning,  and cloud computing to accomplish all of this. However, companies are  struggling to adapt to these new ways of doing business. 

Just exactly how does one go about transforming an IT architecture?

If you are a woman, becoming CIO can be a significant challenge.  

However, once you are able to achieve this goal, that is when the real  work starts. As CIO, you need to take the time to network in order to both maintain your position and be effective. However, networking is much harder for women to do than men. There are very few women who achieve positions of power in companies that it can be difficult for women to find people who will sponsor them in order to make introductions and referrals.  

Because of all of this it can be easy for women CIOs to start to believe that there is something wrong with the process of networking.

Let’s face it: our companies are not in business just to keep the IT  department up and running. 

Rather, it’s really the other way around. The IT department exists to help the company stay up and be successful using the importance of information technology. Of course we keep the  company’s critical applications up and running and we spend our time  crunching all of the data that has been collected, but what else should  we be doing? The answer is actually fairly simple: help the company to  get more customers. 

One way that we can go about doing this is by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI).