The Accidental Successful CIO

Why Do None Of The Other Kids Want To Play With The CIO?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 04:01:09 +0000

Why So Sad Mr. / Ms. CIO?

Just imagine that amazing moment in the future when you finally become the CIO! Now imagine yourself all alone – none of the other “C” level executives want to play with you. What’s going on here?

Not An Equal Among Peers

Something is seriously wrong in the world of CIOs. In most companies they are not being treated as a member of the senior management team. Instead, they are viewed as being simply viewed as technical specialists. Dang, what’s gone wrong here?

If you take a moment and talk with the other senior managers who are actually running the company you’ll start to hear the same things over and over again. CIOs just aren’t seen as having enough of the general management skills that it takes to participate in the process of running a company of any significant size. Other managers view the CIO as more often than not lacking both the strategic vision as well as the basic interpersonal skills that it takes to be a true leader.

What makes this a bit of a double whammy for a CIO is that the very skills that got you to this top spot in IT may be the ones that are holding you back now. Although this doesn’t really seem fair, there is good news here.

It turns out that the skills that a CIO needs in order to succeed can be learned (have I mentioned that Blue Elephant Consulting can help in this area?). The key is to understand just exactly what skills you will need.

That Leadership Thing

A classic CIO is someone who waits around to be told what to do instead of taking the lead. This skill is the way that most projects are run within the IT department – we get requirements from the customers / end users and then we apply our IT knowledge to solving their issues.

However, in the real world of business things don’t work that way. The CIO needs to be out in front showing true leadership. He / she needs to be uncovering the issues that are holding the company back and then showing the rest of the company what parts of solving that problem can be handled by IT and how the rest of the company has to lend a hand.

Are You Thinking Strategically?

Since the world of IT is often insulated from the world outside of the company, most CIOs have never had to think about how their actions (and now the IT department’s actions) impact the company’s competitive posture.

For that matter, most CIOs probably don’t know what the company’s current strategy is. It never mattered before. Once you become the CIO these things start to become very important. The key question that the CIO needs to be able to answer (every day) is what is the IT department doing to implement the company’s strategy right now?

It’s Not About Information, It’s All About Knowledge

As though staying on top of everything that is going on in the world of IT wasn’t enough, CIOs also have to be aware of what’s going on the rest of the company as well as in its marketplace. Needless to say, it can be easy to become overwhelmed with lots and lots of raw information.

In order to be able to contribute to the management of the company, CIOs need to be able to take all of this information in and process it. The ability to synthesis lots and lots of inputs and then make solid well-thought out decisions is what the rest of the management team is expecting the CIO to be able to do.

What All Of This Means For You

Gone are the days when a CIO could afford to be a wallflower in the executive boardroom. IT is too critical to how every company hopes to succeed to allow the CIO to not be a vital part of the company’s management team.

In order to make this happen when you become CIO, you’re going to need to make sure that you have the skills that the other senior managers are going to be expecting you to have. This will include the ability to lead, to think strategically, and to process large amounts of information.

Although this may all strike you as being just a bit scary, don’t be put off. Everything is doable and now that you know what will be expected of you, you can get a head start on learning what you need to know…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: What do you think the #1 skill that a CIO must have is?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’m not sure if this is going to make you feel any better, but it turns out that most CIOs are showing up for work only partially dressed when you consider what skills they are missing. Maybe we’d better have a talk about this…

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Hey CIO: Would You Like A Wiki?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:01:30 +0000

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CIO's Need To Learn How To Use Wikis

One of the biggest challenges that you are going to be facing when you become a CIO is managing an IT workforce that is made up of multiple generations. Each has its own set of views and skills, and yet you have to somehow come up with ways that they can work together. How hard could that be?

Can’t We All Just Work Together?

An IT department is made up a whole bunch of different types of workers. The reason that you’ll have such a challenge in getting them to work together is that they all see the world differently.

In order for your IT department to be successful, they are going to have to be able to successfully complete large IT projects. The secret to doing this type of work well is to engage in what the experts call “task sharing”. This is no more complicated than taking a single large task and breaking it up into a series of smaller tasks.

IT teams that can do this have the ability to solve very large problems by working together. The ones who can’t are the ones who exceed schedules and blow through budgets.

Welcome To The World Of Wikinomics

The term “wikinomics” was coined by Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams in their book “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”. They point out that for the first time ever, technology, demographics, and global economics have come together to make change and innovation easier than ever.

The use of Internet based tools like wikis finally has provided CIOs with the tools that they need in order to get their IT teams to do the one thing that will make them more successful: exchange information. No matter what generation a given worker is, the use of web-based communication tools is the common factor that will allow them to both send and receive the information that they will need to do better work

What All Of This Means For You

As CIO you will be faced with many challenges. Potentially the greatest of these will be finding a way to get your entire IT team to work together as a single smooth flowing unit.

The arrival of web based collaboration tools such as wikis may be the silver bullet that you need. All of a sudden it has become very easy for everyone in an IT department to both send and receive knowledge.

Just having the tools to exchange information is not enough. As CIO you are going to have to find ways to motivate your teams to use the tools that are available. That’s why being a CIO is such a tough job!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: If you provided your IT team with a Wiki, do you think that they would actually use it or would you end up having to bribe them to use it?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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3 Letters That Show A CIO How To Add Value: BPM

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 04:01:26 +0000

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Can A CIO Help To Find A Better Way To Do Budgets?

If you’ve spent any time being in a leadership role on a firm, you know that there is one annual task that nobody likes to do – budgeting. It’s a pain in the butt, you’re pretty much just guessing, and the final results never seem to have anything to do with reality. Hey, if everyone thinks this, then is it possible that this is an area where a CIO could step in and make a difference?

What’s Wrong With The Way We Do Budgets Today?

A great deal, actually. In most firms today at the individual department or team level managers create their annual budget using Excel spreadsheets. These spreadsheets are then collected and put together to create division budgets. Once again these are combined to create company budgets. The whole process seems to take forever and is often riddled with inaccuracies.

This whole process takes forever and is seen by everyone doing it as a chore. Once the budget is created, it is as though it was written in stone – it can’t be changed because to do so would take too much effort. Clearly this is not a good situation for any business that wants to think of itself as being dynamic and market driven to be in. Seems like a situation that is ripe for a CIO to step into and lend a helping hand.

Say Hello To Your New Friend: BPM

Business Performance Management (BPM) is a strategy that a company can undertake in order to use management methodologies along with IT technology to create a way to help them ensure that they are meeting their strategic goals. A simpler way of saying the same thing is that BPM allows you to create a real-time budget for the firm.

A BPM enterprise application allows budgets to be entered using web forms by all participants. This automates the process of “flowing upward” the individual budgets into an overall corporate budget. No longer can clever managers hid behind budget numbers and over promise while under delivering. Using a BPM system requires accurate forecasting on everyone’s part.

Welcome To The Real-Time

The use of BPM systems allows a company’s budget to become a much more dynamic real-time tool that can be constantly changing as you move throughout the business year. The use of both automated dashboards and scorecards allows individuals throughout the organization to see how they are doing relative to their budget at any point in time.

Once a company gets use to having a dynamic budget they’ll start to discover the other advantages of having a BPM solution such as having instant access to operational analytics.

Careful Does It

Although CIOs can quickly see how important a BPM system can be to a company, they need to move very carefully. It is all too easy to get caught up in the planning and execution details of implementing a major enterprise application and forget about the people involved.

Moving to a BPM solution requires a great deal of change within a company. CIOs need to understand that not everyone embraces change as easily as IT pros do. Instead of changing everything in one fell swoop, it is generally a much better idea to make a series of smaller changes. This allows a new way of doing business to be introduced gradually and gives the end users a chance to get use to how things are being done before more changes occur.

What All Of This Means For You

As CIO you always need to be on the prowl to identify ways that the IT organization can help the rest of the company use technology to operate quicker and better. Automating the annual budgeting process using a BPM solution is one way to accomplish this.

A BPM solution will allow web technologies to be used to enter individual budgets and will allow multiple budgets to easily be combined into a single corporate budget. Once a budget has been created, it can be monitored in real-time using dashboards and scoreboards.

CIOs need to take into consideration the human side of any such large-scale change. There will be resistance to such an automation project. However, the CIO who takes the time to understand worker’s concerns and then slowly rolls out the new system will win over the staff and just might single handedly make the company run a lot smoother.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that a company would know what to do with a real-time budget if they had one or is this beyond their skills?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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What Do CIOs And Rupert Murdoch Have In Common?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 04:01:55 +0000

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Yes, You Can Be A Media Mogul Just Like Rupert

Times they are a changing. Once upon a time a CIO only had to worry about making sure the email servers stayed up and everyone thought that he / she was doing a great job. That’s no longer enough. Now CIOs are viewed as being the hub of a company’s new media activities – generating, transmitting, storing, and ultimately archiving more and more information. Do you know what you need to be doing?

You Don’t Get To Pick And Choose Anymore

Although there are lots of types of new media, the one that seems to cause the biggest headaches for CIOs is the arrival of corporate video. It’s so cheap to create that now everyone is doing it.
As CIO you’re going to be responsible for assigning various parts of the IT department to both do and manage the whole video production process. This could quickly turn into a staffing nightmare for you if you’re not careful.
The one thing that you need to keep in mind is that new media video is still a very dynamic area and you can’t actually hire someone with a very rigid set of skills. Basically everyone is going to need to be able to do everything when it comes to creating new media. They don’t have to be perfect at it, they just need to be willing to jump in and give it a try.

It’s Not All About Pretty People

Talk about non-technical decisions! As CIO you’re going to find yourself in the somewhat awkward situation where you’re going to have to pick people to appear in internal corporate videos. Who to pick?
Your gut reaction may be to go with the good looking ones. Well, you might have some slim pickings there (sorry IT staffers, you know that I love you), but the good news is that physical attractiveness is really the wrong criteria to use for this job.
What should you be looking for? What you really want is to find staffers who have the ability to be dynamic on camera. You don’t want them to be squirming the whole time, instead you’re going to be looking for people who can be comfortable on camera and who will be able to communicate clearly.

So Are We Talking About Hours Of Video Here?

Nope, the experts out there such as Amada Congdon of ABC News video fame say that when it comes to new media, shorter is actually better. Remember, most of the people who will be watching the corporate video will be consuming it on their PCs or laptops (or maybe even on cell phones) – not the most comfortable place to watch video.
The experts recommend that you keep your videos short – I mean really short. Your target should be in the 2-3 minute range. Any longer and you risk losing your audience and they won’t be willing to watch your next video creation.

In The End, What’s Really Important?

There are a lot of unique aspects to creating and dealing with new media that any CIO can find themselves getting caught up in. However, the key is to find out what’s really important and spend your time making sure that the IT staff gets that part right – everything else will just be window dressing.
Just about everyone agrees that when it comes to videos, the quality of your sound is what your viewers will remember. All of those millions of videos that you can find on YouTube generally have really poor audio quality and that’s what we have all come to associate with cheap, homemade videos.
Since you want your company’s productions to come across as professional, take the time to do it right and hire people who know something about sound to get you set up correctly from the start.

What Does All Of This Mean For You

When you become CIO, you are probably not expecting to become the next Rupert Murdoch, but you will face many of the same issues that he does. The era of corporate video has arrived and as CIO you are going to be living at its epicenter.
This means that you’re going to find yourself staffing the team that is responsible for creating, distributing, and storing much of that video. You’ll need to understand how to choose the right people to run the show as well as to appear on the show itself.
In the end, if you do all of this right, the company will be able to harness this powerful new communication tool. Who knows, your corporate videos might be so good that you’ll get invited to walk the red-carpet at some world premier events…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: How big of a role in the actual production of corporate video do you think that a CIO should play?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Time’s Running Out For You To…

Dr. Jim Anderson — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 20:23:15 +0000

Time Is Running Out To Sign Up For The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter

I’ve been telling you about The Accidental Successful CIO newsletter for awhile now, have you signed up? If you have, then good news — you’ll get the first edition on Tuesday.

If not, then what’s holding you back? The dang thing is free so it sure can’t be a cost issue. Look, there are 50 different skills that you need to have if you want to have any chance of becoming (or staying) CIO some day. The newsletter is where we’ll talk about each of these skills and how you can master them.

Unless you are the luckiest person in the world and are currently enrolled in a CIO training class as you read these words, then you’d better do something if you want becoming CIO to be more than just a pipe dream.

You are reading these words now — click on the link below and sign up for the newsletter…!

Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

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More IT Regulation: Is It A Good Thing For CIOs?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 04:01:44 +0000

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Could more laws actually make a CIOs life easier?

Software is all around us. CIOs depend on it to keep the company up and running. If for some reason, a company’s critical applications stop running, run incorrectly, or divulge private data to bad guys, there’s a good chance that the company is going to quickly have a new CIO. If only there was some way to make software more reliable so that CIO’s could spend their time focusing on the things that really matter…

3 Possible Futures For Software

You would think that CIOs would have already used their collective influence to get software vendors to do the right thing. However, as system outages that still exist today clearly show – this has not happened. Thomas Smedinghoff is a lawyer who studies science and technology law. According to Smedinghoff, there are three possible futures for how software vendors are going to be required to do a better job of supporting CIOs:

Increased legal obligations for software vendors to do a better job of ensuring that their applications and associated communications are secure.
A much bigger responsibility to tell the world when there is a security breach.
Defining just what is meant by “reasonable security” and then ensuring that every application provides at least this level of protection.

What’s Coming Down The Road

This of course leads a CIO to the next question: which one of these future possibilities is going to happen (or will it be all of them?) Smedinghoff points out that little by little, the responsibility to disclose when a personal data breech occurs is getting written into laws in each state.
Legal scholars are predicting that within the next 10 years or so CIOs should expect that their IT vendors will be required by law to improve both the security as well as the quality of their software applications. Toyota’s recent car troubles may end up representing a first step in this direction.
Where does all of this lead to? Once again those legal scholars are predicting that by 2015 we should expect software vendors to find themselves being required to clearly specify their products capabilities as well as their limitations. What will give these words some bite is that they will have had to be verified by 3rd party certification firms.

What All Of This Means For You

When you become CIO, running an IT department will be much different than it is today. While that is good news, it also means that you’re going to have a different set of tasks that you’re going to have to do.
Gone will be the days in which you had to spend so much time and energy just keeping applications up and running not to mention secure. Now you’ll be spending a lot more time during the selection process doing double checks to make sure that each vendor’s product truly has been verified and certified by reputable 3rd party firms.
Yes, your life as a CIO will have become much more manageable because you should experience fewer fire drills. However, you had better start getting ready to become a good fact checker so that you choose the right vendor after all the rules have been changed…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: Do you think that these new IT regulations will cause the cost of software to increase?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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4 Tips For Making Analytics A CIO’s New Secret Weapon

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 04:01:08 +0000

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Will Numbers Make The CIO More Valuable To The Company?

When you become CIO, how are you going to get your seat at the company’s strategy planning table? All too often today’s CIOs are basically second class citizens in the company’s C-suites. Something’s gotta change…

Say Hello To Your New Best Friend: Analytics

Thomas Davenport is a really smart guy who has written a book called
Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning. It’s all about how companies can use analytics to become more successful.
Sure we’ve all heard the term, but what does it really mean to use analytics? Davenport says that firms that do this are using numbers to both outthink and to outexecute their competition. Hmm, that sure sounds like something that a CIO would want to be a part of…

Just How Can A CIO Use Analytics To Make The Company

Successful?
The companies that are using analytics to become successful are the well-known names that we’re all familiar with: Amazon, FedEx, Capital One, and Hannah’s Casinos to name a few. Davenport has studied these firms and he says that they are all doing four things that are allowing them to dominate their markets:

Capability: the firms are using their analytic know-how to support a distinctive strategic capability
Wide Net: the use of analytics is not limited to just one department. Instead these firms are making analytics available throughout the entire company so that multiple departments can use them.
Support: the use of analytics is not a skunk-works project. Instead at the most successful companies it has the support of the senior management.
Good Bet: the company is putting its money where its numbers are and has made a significant investment in its analytics capabilities in order to beat its competition in the marketplace.

Future Trends

Sure the use of analytics requires a CIO to set up the IT infrastructure that is needed to crunch the numbers that the company collects as a part of doing business. However, even more is going to be required in order to remain competitive tomorrow.
Forward looking firms realize that unstructured data such as blogs and wikis are where additional golden information now lies. The CIOs at those firms are busy creating the tools that will be needed to go out and mine the Internet in order to get the feedback that they’ll be needing in order to remain competitive.

What All Of This Means For You

When you become CIO, you’re going to have to find ways to make the company more competitive if you want to be part of the company’s strategy team. This means that you’re going to have to start using analytics.
Using the four techniques that we outlined will be a good place to start to use analytics. However, as time progresses you’re also going to have to develop new tools in order to get additional inputs for your analytical engines.
CIOs that can find ways to turn mountains of data into actionable intelligence are the ones that will be best positioned to become successful and to help their companies become market leaders.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: What kind of IT staff do you think a CIO will need to hire in order to be able to start to make the best use of analytics?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If for some reason, a company’s critical applications stop running, run incorrectly, or divulge private data to bad guys, there’s a good chance that the company is going to quickly have a new CIO. If only there was some way to make software more reliable so that CIO’s could spend their time focusing on the things that really matter…

The 5 Secret Characteristics Of A Truly Great CIO In all honesty, there are a lot of people who...

Is Your CIO Resume Blackberry Ready?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:01:51 +0000

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How Will Your Resume Look When Viewed On A Blackberry?

When you go hunting for your next IT job (and it may be sooner than later), will your resume be up to the job? Come to think of it, when was the last time you dusted off and updated your resume? Do you still have that quaint “objective statement” or “career goal” hanging out at the top? If so, you may be in for a shock – that’s not going to be the best use of resume real estate when it’s being reviewed on the hiring manager’s Blackberry…

The Need For A New Resume

Parting is such sweet sorrow… or so the classic line goes. Look, when did you first create your resume? Awhile ago? Even if it was only a couple of years ago, the world has changed dramatically since then and it’s time that you (and your resume) kept up with it. It’s time to say goodbye to your old style resume.

About that “objective statement” up at the top – ditch it. The next company that will be hiring you really doesn’t care about what you are looking for. Instead, they are facing pain right now and they are looking for someone whom they can hire to come in and make that pain go away. That’s what really matters.

This means that we’re going to have to make some changes to your current resume. Prepare to get out the sharp knife.

Length

How long is too long? How long is too short? This rule of thumb has not changed even in the 21st Century – a resume should be two pages max. In fact, it’s really only the first 25% that you can count on a hiring manager reading so that’s where you’ve got to really shine.

If you’ve had some amazing IT department experiences that you think would really help your case, then feel free to include them – as an addendum. This extra stuff can be anywhere from 4-12 pages long; however, remember that there is no guarantee that anyone is going to read it.

Skills

Are you the world’s best Cobol / Fortran / Java programmer? Drop it. Look, you’re going for a IT leadership job and it’s really your finance and people management skills that are going to get you the job – not your programming chops. Use your limited resume real estate to explain how your leadership skills have made your past departments successful.

Skip The History Lesson

A resume is designed to tell your next employer about how you’ll perform in the workplace. This means that pretty much anything that does not have to do with the workplace should be dropped. This list will include civic accomplishments, professional associations that you belong to, charity work, etc. Use the freed up space to provide more details about your most recent job and how it relates to the job that you are applying for.

Say No To Descriptions, Yes To Accomplishments

I must confess that this has been a mistake that I’ve made in the past and I found it hard to stop doing it. Instead of providing your work biography by listing every single job you’ve ever had, use the space instead to list your accomplishments. Ultimately this is what your future employer really cares about. Don’t worry about all of those “title only” promotions that you’ve gotten over the years, instead just focus on the teams that you’ve managed and the challenges that you’ve mastered.

What All Of This Means For You

Everyone has a resume. However, not everyone has a resume that will work for them. In this day and age of everyone having too much to do and too little time to do it in, you’re going to need to shape your resume to be scanned quickly on your future boss’ Blackberry as he/she dashes off to their next meeting.

What this means is that you’re going to have to cut to the bone and get rid of everything that doesn’t pertain to how you would do in your next position. Detailing what you’ve accomplished in your most recent leadership positions is what that Blackberry scanning hiring manager is going to be looking for.

Take the time to craft a new resume that is tailored to read quickly in digital form and you’ll be one step ahead of everyone else who is applying for the same job. If you make it easy for them to see why you are the perfect fit for the job, then you’ve just shown them why you’re the type of IT talent that they need to hire…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: If a hiring manager is only going to scan the first half of the first page of your resume, what do you think that you need to put there in order to land the job?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

CIOs are learning that they need to develop the staff and tools that are needed in order to start using analytics to make the company more competitive…

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The British Are Coming, The British Are Coming – Lessons From BT

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 04:01:20 +0000

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BT Exact Had To Transform Its IT Department In Order To Survive

Anyone can be a successful CIO – you just have to master the basics: understand what business you are in and find ways to use technology to allow the business to move faster and do more. A great example of this is BT Exact: the IT branch of British Telecom (BT) – the UK’s largest phone company. Back in 2004 they knew that they had an IT problem, but they didn’t know how to solve it…

Too Much Of A Good Thing

Every CIO has to deal with a fundamental problem: how to structure the IT department. Back in 2004 BT was ducking this problem: they didn’t have a centralized IT function. Instead, each of their business lines had their own CIO and IT staff. You can just imagine how many different IT projects were going on with little or no communication between them.

Realizing that they had a problem, BT Exact reached out and hired Al-Noor Ramji who was at the time the CIO for the U.S. based Qwest telephone company. Just imagine the mess that Al-Noor walked into on his first day on the job…!

Right Sizing

When Al-Noor arrived at BT there were approximately 4,300 IT projects going on. Since they were all operating in their own silos none of them had coordinated delivery dates and in fact many of them had no related business case to back them up.

Clearly it was time to put an end to the madness. BT undertook a massive effort to evaluate just what it was working on in its IT department. After it had halted unnecessary projects and combined similar efforts, they were left with only 29 projects.

Legacy IT systems that had been created by past projects were another problem. BT was paying to keep 3,000 such systems up and running. Al-Noor had them take a look at what each system was being used to do and in the end they were able to decommission 700 of these systems.

What Have You Done For Me Lately?

All of these changes were just a lead in to what Al-Noor was planning on doing. As we all know, often IT projects can take a long time to implement. When these projects run on and on for a long time, it’s very easy to lose sight of what we were trying to do in the first place. At BT they’ve come up with a solution to this problem.

They’ve implemented a 90-day project management review cycle for all IT projects. This means that a set of agreed on metrics are established for each project at the start of every 90-day cycle: customer satisfaction, ROI, etc.

At the end of a 90-day cycle, each project team reviews how well they met the goals that had been established at the start of the cycle. If the goals are met and the project meets its objective for that cycle, everyone on the project gets a bonus for their work.

This sound all fine and dandy, but in the early days there weren’t any bonuses being handed out. However, things have changed since then. Now BT has seen the cost of projects go down by 19% and they’ve seen their IT productivity more than double.

What All Of This Means For You

When you become CIO you may find yourself walking into a mess as complicated as the one that Al-Noor found himself in. With a little luck, you’ll be able to use what he did to fix things quickly.

Getting rid of IT silos and eliminating projects that aren’t going to have any business value to the company is a great way to start. Implementing an effective project management system that will allow everyone to keep their eyes on the prize is also needed.

Once again, becoming a successful CIO is not impossible. Taking the time to make sure that you know where the company wants to go and then shaping the IT department to get you there is exactly what a successful CIO does.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: Do you think a 90-day cycle is too long or too short?

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Happy Independence Day — Take The Week Off!

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 04:01:22 +0000

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Take A Week To Celebrate Your Independence

Loyal readers & subscribers, here’s hoping that this upcoming week is a great week for you — I’m taking it off! Blogging will resume next week…

For my readers in the U.S., you know that this week is all about family, fireworks and general celebrating. The cause for all of this celebration is the signing of the U.S. deceleration of Independence. Now if only the work that we do could have the same type of impact 234 years later on!

For my international readers, pretty much all of the United States will be taking time off this week to celebrate the decision of our founding fathers to make their own decisions. For better or for worse, it’s what has gotten us to where we are today and we think that that’s a good thing.

Have a happy and safe week no matter where you are and we’ll talk next week.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

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