The Accidental Successful CIO

CIOs at banks have a great deal to worry about. Simply because their  companies have so much valuable data and money, the bad guys are always  trying to break in and steal things. 

As though this wasn’t bad enough,  every bank is connected to every other bank. What this means is that if  something bad happened to a connected bank, then your bank could also suffer. 

In order to prevent doomsday scenarios like this from happening, the people in the bank CIO position have come up with a plan. 

So CIO, are you a good manager? I suspect that most of us think that we  are. However, over at the Gallop company they have just completed a  survey of managers. What they discovered is that only one in 10 people actually possesses the talent to manage others.  Ouch! 

This magical 10 percent who have what it takes to be a good  manager frequently realize 48 percent greater profitability, 22 percent  greater productivity, 17 percent greater employee engagement,  5 percent greater customer engagement, and 19 percent less turnover  according to Gallup. 

Are you one of the 10%? Do you have the 5 talents  that every person with the CIO job needs? 

Let’s face it, when it comes to money, people can quickly become very  greedy. When you take a look at institutions like the American stock  market, the potential for people to do a large number of things that  they really should not do becomes very large. 

In order to keep things  under control and make sure that everyone behaves themselves, the  government created the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This organization has the responsibility to watch over all stock and option trading and make sure that nobody is doing anything that they should not be doing. 

This all sounds like a good idea, but what should the SEC’s CIO do when they are the ones who get hacked? 

One of the most important jobs that the person with the CIO job has is to keep the company’s networks and data secure. This means that  they are responsible for implementing systems and procedures that will  keep the bad guys out. 

We purchase and implement products that require  our users to correctly identify themselves before they are permitted to access important company resources.  So far these systems seem to be working fairly well – the bad guys have  not been able to guess how to defeat our security measures. 

However,  with the arrival of quantum computing this may all change. What do CIOs need to do in order to get ready? 

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock for a while, you may not be aware of this thing that is being called the “internet of things” (IOT). What people are talking about when they talk about IOT is the growing number of devices that can be connected directly to the Internet.  

In a typical work environment this can include everything from copy  machines, fax machines, coffee machines, and even video cameras. 

There  are a lot of benefits that come from this connectivity; however, at the  same time the  person in the CIO position need to become very aware of the downsides  that are associated with tying all of these devices to the internet. 

I think that we can all agree that keeping the company’s network secure  is one of the CIO's most important tasks. However, no matter  how many firewalls we put in place or how effectively we implement  two-factor authentication we still need to understand the weakest link in our security system: our employees.  

What this means for a CIO is that we are responsible for training our  staff to not make silly security mistakes. How best to go about doing  this? 

We  had better come up with a good solution otherwise all of the fancy  security tools in the world won’t be keeping the bad guys out. 

If you were the CIO of a major bank responsible for the importance of  information technology, what do you think that your #1 job  responsibility would be? If you are guessing “keep the bank’s systems  secure” then good news, you’d be close, but you’d still be missing the  point. 

It turns out that a bank’s CIO’s most important job is ensuring that the people who have trusted the bank with their money are able to both see and access it.  

Over at the major American bank, Wells Fargo, their CIO has just  dropped the ball and their IT systems were down for two days. This means  that people could not access their money. Not a good scenario.