The Accidental Successful CIO

As CIOs, because of the importance of information technology we spend  our days surrounded by servers and making decisions about things like  firewalls and moving into the cloud. 

Is workplace diversity something that we really need to trouble ourselves about? It turns out that creating a diverse workforce can be a critical part  of any IT department’s success and so, yes, this is something that a CIO  needs to spend time on. The trick is to make your workplace diverse and then keep it that way. 

This is not an easy thing to accomplish.

The role of the CIO in the company has been an ever evolving position.  

The people with the CIO job first started out as simply being  caretakers for the IT equipment that the company had purchased because  of the importance of information technology. This role evolved into more  of a strategic partner role for the person in the CIO position who was  called on to help the company do a better job of being competitive.  Going forward, CIO are now positioned to take a leadership role when it  comes to solving some of the biggest challenges that their companies are  now facing. 

Will you be ready to do this?

Once upon a time the CIO job had very little to do with the company that  you worked for. 

Instead of having to worry about what the company was  up to, you could spend your time focused on building data centers,  selecting servers, and installing more storage. What it was being used  for really did not matter all that much. However, now the person in the  CIO position has a seat at the company’s planning table and what the business does is almost as important as how it goes about doing this. 

Nowhere is this more evident than in the business of searching for oil… 

I think that we can all agree that one of the most important parts of the CIO job is the ability to take in and process a large amount of information  in order to understand the importance of information technology. 

It is  our responsibility to determine what is important and what we can  ignore. However, it turns out that the person in the CIO position also  has to have the ability to detect B.S. when it shows up.  In our digital age false information in the form of nonsense, rubbish,  and fake news can show up at any time, we’ve got to be able to detect  it. 

How good are you at doing this? 

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? 

I would like to be more successful. Would you?  

I think that there are several points during the year that we all have  the realization that we’d like to be able to accomplish more based on  the importance of information technology than we are currently able to  do. When one of these times swings around, we make a promise to  ourselves to get more done, become more creative, etc. 

However, it turns  out that we’re overlooking one very important factor: just exactly how  much the time of day matters to our performance. 

Hopefully we’d all like to become better CIOs. 

This is a great goal, the challenge that most of us are facing is that it just is not clear exactly what we need to do in order to make this happen. The good news is that researchers have been talking to the people that work for us and what they have found out is that we are pretty good at sharing information, but we're lousy listeners. You can’t be a good CIO if you are a poor listener. It turns out that doing a good job of listening to the people who work for us is seen as being a complement to them. When we listen to them we’re telling them that we care about them. 

So now the big question is how can the person with the CIO position become a better listener? 

Ah, email. What a powerful tool. What an utter nightmare!  

The person who has the CIO job probably uses email so often that they  no longer really spend that much time thinking about it. However, that  may be a mistake. What we forget is that email is a tool and if we can  learn how best to use it, then we can become more effective.  The good news is that email is something that the researchers have been  spending a lot of time taking a look at. Their goal has been to find  out how we can become smarter about how we use email at work in order to  boost the importance of information technology. 

Let’s take a look at  what their research has uncovered. 

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.