The Accidental Successful CIO

CIO Strategy Tips From Randy Mott

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 16 May 2012 09:00:46 +0000

Randy Mott is a CIO who knows a great deal about strategy

You wouldn’t think that a CIO who just got fired from his job at HP would have a lot to teach us about IT strategy, but that’s where you’d be wrong. Randy Mott is a CIO who has been around the block a few times. He’s worked for Wal-Mart, Dell, and he was CIO at HP. When HP’s CEO, Mark Hurd, got fired Randy had to go because he was too close to Mark. However, that all doesn’t mean that we can’t learn a thing or two from how Randy runs an IT department when he’s in charge…

IT Projects Have To Deliver Results

The IT department is a cost center, right? This belief is almost built in to everyone’s definition of information technology. It can’t be expected to actually “make” money can it? It turns out that if you make the effort, you can measure the money that the IT department brings in for the company. Mott believes that for the 12 months after an IT project goes live, the benefits of that project should be measured in both hard dollar and intangibles. How to measure the value of an IT project should be agreed to by the business unit leaders and their finance teams before the project is started so that there is buy-in on the numbers.

Technology moves fast. This means that new technology is always showing up and if the IT department isn’t careful, they’ll be seen as a roadblock that is standing between a new technology and the rest of the company.

IT needs to develop processes that allow it to get new technology out into end users hands as quickly as possible. It doesn’t have to be a company-wide rollout, a trial to evaluate the new technology will do. However, the IT department needs to clearly show that they are out in front of evaluating every new technology.

Finally, I think that all IT departments suffer from the same problem – we seem to try to take on too many tasks all at once. Randy Mott believes that this is a key reason why so many IT projects end up failing. His approach is to have an IT department work on fewer projects, but to have them finish them faster. While Randy was running the IT department at HP they were able to get their average IT project delivery time down to 6 months.

Time Can Be An IT Project’s Greatest Enemy

If you can think back to the last IT project that you worked on, at some point in time you probably wished that you had more time. I know that I have. It’s a good thing that we didn’t work for Mr. Mott. He believes that if you give an IT more time to complete a project, you won’t get any higher quality. He also believes that not delivering an IT project on time hurts IT’s credibility with the rest of the company.

Everyone in the company always wants the IT department to do everything all at once. This means that the CIO often has to make some painful decisions – what areas are going to take priority over the others? Randy took a bold path when it came to this: he moved forward in all areas at once. It was his belief that if he chose one area to focus on, he’d end up not meeting the IT department’s customer’s needs. A great deal of risk is associated with this decision, but if you can pull it off you’ll come away with everyone viewing you as a hero.

What All Of This Means For You

Randy Mott certainly has a great deal of experience at how to do the job of being a modern CIO. He seems to have a bit of difficulty hanging on to his job, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t teach the rest of us in the IT sector a thing or two about how to be a successful CIO.

Randy points out that IT does bring in revenue for the company, we just need to find out how to measure it. He believes that it is IT’s job to deploy new technology as quickly as possible and that this should be done by working on fewer simultaneous projects, but finishing them faster. Finally, Randy does not believe that having more time makes an IT project any better and he thinks that taking too much time to make a decision on what to work on can cost the company time and money.

No, you don’t necessarily have to agree with the way that Randy chooses to see the world. However, due to the importance of information technology I do think that we should all understand why he sees it that way. He’s been on the front line of this CIO thing and so he’s got a pretty good understanding of what the job requires. Give it some thought and then keep your eyes open – Randy might be working at your company next!

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

Question For You: Do you agree with Randy’s view that all IT projects should be worked on simultaneously or do you think that they should be done sequentially?

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Why FedEx’s CIO Has His Head In The Cloud

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 09 May 2012 09:00:55 +0000

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Why would a package delivery company care about cloud computing?

When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight, who are you going to call? Probably FedEx, the package shipping company. What you might not know is that FedEx has an enormous IT infrastructure that they use to move all of those packages around. Why would they be thinking about messing with success and moving this mission critical support system into the cloud?

Building A Package Shipping Private Cloud

The situation that FedEx’s CIO Rob Carter found himself in will probably sound familiar to most of us. FedEx’s IT infrastructure was a collection of various technologies that had come and gone over the years. This included everything from mainframes to client server systems. This presented two problems: they were expensive to maintain and each system could only be used by a small set of applications that had been designed for it.

Along comes this cloud thing and all of a sudden Rob gets excited. Forget the hype, he sees this IT innovation for what it is: the arrival of general purpose computing (we may need to update the definition of information technology). In Rob’s own words, all of a sudden the company’s IT infrastructure has the ability to become “workload agnostic”.

If every computer that the IT department has looks like every other computer, then all of a sudden you can move applications around as needed and the machines that you do have will start to get used as efficiently as possible.

What FedEx is in the process of doing is building a private cloud. This new IT infrastructure is going to consist of a virtualized computing environment that’s not going to look anything like what came before it in today’s IT sector.

In FedEx’s case what they’ve done is to build a completely new data center to house new standardized hardware. They’ve also been able to go back and retrofit an existing data center and transform it into another standardized data center. What makes this story so compelling is that this was all done with a very nice return-on-investment (ROI).

Turns Out That It’s All About The Applications

Having standardized hardware is a great start when you are transforming your company’s IT infrastructure into a private cloud. However, it’s not enough. The benefit of any cloud, public or private, is that you can run your company’s applications on any box anywhere. In order to do this, there is some more work that is going to be required.

The applications that your company are running today are going to have to be rewritten. The way that you probably have things now is that you’ve got applications that are written in multiple languages, run on multiple types of processors, and use different types of databases. That’s going to be way too expensive to keep supporting as you move forward.

The goal of this kind of application re-write is do what FedEx is doing: make your applications portable. Once they use a services-based approach and use a common data source along with a common messaging infrastructure then you can run them anywhere.

CIOs need to look at the opportunity to transform their IT operations from the chaos that it is today into a uniform private cloud as being a once-in-a-career event. You’ll have a chance to actually consolidate your infrastructure. The end result should be that your limited IT budget dollars should be able to go much farther.

What All Of This Means For You

If Rob Carter the CIO at FedEx is getting excited about the arrival of cloud computing technology, then shouldn’t you? Cloud computing is a trendy buzz word and so we need to be careful that we’re not getting caught up in the hype.

What we can learn from Rob is why he’s interested in cloud computing. The ability to use this technology transition as an excuse to build a private cloud that consists of standardized components that has a great ROI is key. FedEx has also realized that their applications need to be rebuilt to work with the new private cloud.

Clearly the era of cloud computing has arrived and it looks like it’s going to boost the importance of information technology. Rob Carter is showing all of us the way. We need to take the time to listen to him and understand what he sees in this new approach to technology. Maybe we have all found a way to transform our company’s IT infrastructure overnight!

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

Question For You: Do you think that Rob is on to something or has he gotten wrapped up in the hype of cloud computing?

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CIO Lessons From Zynga: Don’t Manage Like They Do!

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 02 May 2012 09:00:10 +0000

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Sure they are successful, but for how long?

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past year and don’t know who Zynga is, they’re the online game company that has ridden Facebook’s coattails to success. They’ve created very, very popular games such as Farmville and Cityville and generated a great deal of money. However, it’s starting to become clear that Zynga is not very well run internally and this holds many lessons for CIOs…

What’s Wrong With Zynga

How would you like your staff to be describing your IT department in the following ways:

“Poor leadership and communication. Awful work-life balance.”
“Being told by my manager that if i am not at home sleeping, then i am here working. That is how i was welcomed to the team.”
“Long hours even when there is no real deadline.
Insane micromanagement all the way from CEO down”

These are actual quotes from (supposedly) Zynga employees that have been posted at the workplace rating site glassdoor.com. Ouch! What’s wrong with Zynga?

It’s pretty clear that Zynga is experiencing a massive surge of growth and they’re not exactly sure how deal with it. As the company grows and grows, the folks who are running the show are desperately trying deal with all of the business issues and appear to be forgetting what makes a company succeed over the long haul: its people.

We’ve all see this happen in many IT departments. When the department was small, there were a few people working in it who developed a close working relationship. Everything could be handled by someone in the department and there was an understanding that everyone would do whatever it took in order to get things done.

Where things start to go off the track is when the department grows. It doesn’t matter if the growth is organic (the business grows so the IT department grows) or through acquisitions. When the rules and understanding that were in place for that small group of people is extended to cover a larger group, this starts to cause problems.

It’s pretty clear that the folks running Zynga’s IT shop haven’t taken the time to craft a new set of policies that meet the needs of their growing team. This could quickly come back and bite them in the future.

How A Good CIO Could Fix What’s Wrong At Zynga

It’s easy to throw rocks at any organization and especially easy when it’s growing as fast as Zynga is. Instead of doing that, how about if we step back for a moment and see if we can come up with a way that Zynga could fix the mess that they’ve made.

The first step would be to notify the staff that you’ve made a mistake. Letting everyone know that you’ve heard how unhappy they are and that you admit that you’ve screwed up is a huge thing to admit. By making this simple but hard to do gesture all of a sudden you’ll have everyone’s attention – normally nobody ever admits that they are wrong!

Next you’ve got to lay out some very clear goals for the Zynga teams to focus on. What’s most important? Right now it’s pretty clear that nobody quite knows. Is it being profitable? Is it having the most creative games? Is it reliability in the face of unheard of usage? There’s no wrong answer here, you just need to pick one.

Finally, you’ve got to work with the front line managers and come up with a standard set of rules for how the IT workers are going to be evaluated. What’s really important? Is it the quality of the products that folks are producing? Is it time spent in the office? Is it the quantity of the products that are being produced?

So much of Zynga’s problems seem to stem from poor communications from the top on down. This probably wasn’t necessary when the team was smaller. However, now that they’ve grown both how and what they communicate and good communication has become critically important.

What All Of This Means For You

What does this mess at Zynga mean for you? Although you probably don’t currently work at Zynga, you can learn from what’s going on there.

It’s pretty clear that the Zynga IT workers are experiencing some serious growing pains. The reasons for these pains are well understood: the use of outdated processes coupled with poor internal communication has resulted in the situation that Zynga now finds itself in.

Just realizing that there is a problem is not enough. Instead, you need to understand how a situation like this could be fixed. Taking three steps that included apologizing, creating goals, and setting performance measurements would move the organization in the right direction.

With a little luck the Zynga CIO will get the message. Hopefully, they’ll be able to make the changes that the company needs before it’s “game over” for Zynga.

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

Question For You: How could Zynga create a system to get feedback from it’s IT employees to find out if things are changing?

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4 Steps CIOs Need To Take To Make Their Process Improvement Projects Successful

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:00:01 +0000

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CIOs need to know how to keep process improvement projects going

Pity the poor CIOs who gets the idea that what his IT department needs to do this year is to implement a process improvement project. It’s not that these types of projects are a bad thing to do, it’s just that all too often they don’t actually work out. Well, that was before we had a chance to talk about what CIOs need to do in order to make this a good use of everyone’s time…

Why Process Improvement Projects Don’t Work Most Of The Time

There are many reasons why IT process improvement programs that start off with such high hopes never seem to bear any fruit. There always seems to be a big kick off at which the CIO tells everyone just how important this project is to both the IT department as well as the company. It’s soon after that when things start to go downhill…

After a few initial success, the process improvement program continues on. The problem is that it will have been going on for so long that now folks start to get distracted. The very definition of information technology has to do with change and we all stop paying attention when something has been going on for too long. Other tasks start to creep in around the edges and steal their time away.

The outside experts whom the CIO brought in to help the team implement the Six Sigma or whatever program now move on to other things. The team keeps moving on, but their way forward is no longer clear because they now lack the expert guidance.

IT Managers are no longer so open to having their team members spend so much time on this other project. Instead, they start pushing to have their staff complete their “day job” before they spend time on the “special project”. When it becomes clear the process improvement work won’t be showing up on anyone’s year-end-evaluation, the game is pretty much over and the project dies a quiet death.

4 Steps CIOs Need To Take In Order To Have A Successful Process Improvement Project

Things don’t have to turn out this way. It actually is possible for an IT department to run a successful process improvement project – in fact the very importance of information technology means that we need to be able to keep getting better and this type of project is a great way to make that happen.

In order to make this type of project yield results, researcher Satya Chakravorty has uncovered four things that CIOs need to do to prevent a process improvement disaster from happening:

Keep The Pros: No matter what methodology the CIO decides to use to implement the process improvement, outside experts are always brought in. This is a great move. However, all too often the outside experts are dismissed too early. This leaves the IT teams adrift and unsure how to continue. Keep the experts around until the project is completed.

Make Everyone Responsible: a process improvement project will only succeed if everyone in the IT department is working on it. If you are going to ask everyone to spend that much time working on something, then you need to make sure that the project is a part of everyone’s performance appraisal otherwise you’ll be forcing them to make a decision about what to work on.

Not Too Big, Not Too Long: Within IT we have a bad habit of creating large teams to tackle problems. This time around, don’t do that. Instead, limit the size of individual teams to only 6-9 members. Likewise, you need to limit how long each part of the project takes. A section should be able to be completed within 6-8 weeks.

Be Involved: Senior IT executives are busy, but they need to make time to get involved in the process improvement program. Just “supporting” the program or sitting through status updates is not enough. They need to be contributing their suggestions based on their experiences.

What All Of This Means For You

Any IT process improvement program represents a significant investment of time, energy, and capital for a CIO. This means that as long as you are going to make the investment, then you had darn well better make sure that the project is going to be successful.

To make this happen, the IT sector requires that CIOs do the following things: improvement experts need to stay involved for extended periods of time. Project success needs to be a part of every IT member’s annual performance appraisal. Process improvement team sizes must be restricted to 6-9 members and timelines must be no longer than 8 weeks. Finally, direct IT executive involvement is required at all times.

Taking the time to do a process improvement project correctly can make all of the difference in the world. These are hard projects to do. A CIO that can complete one successfully will have finally shown the company what the true value of the IT department is.

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

Question For You: From start to finish, how long do you think a process improvement project should last?

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Post tags: fall back into old habits, maintain the gains, motivation, performance appraisal, process improvement, results, Six Sigma, teams, top executives

CIOs Should Stop Sending Emails – Now!

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:00:40 +0000

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CIOs need to learn when NOT to use email

Those cloning experiments sure seem to have only been able to create more sheep so far – and that’s not going to help overworked CIOs! It seems as though we have more things to do and less time than ever to get them done. Arguably the most important part of any CIOs job is to communicate with your staff. How you go about doing that can be critical to both your overall success and the success of your IT department. I’ve got news for you: if you’re using email to do this, then you’re doing it wrong.

Email Has No Feeling

I don’t care how much of a cold and impersonal CIO you are. Every time that you talk with someone, you include some level of emotions in what you are saying. You may be angry, you may be happy, not matter what – you are something.

The problem with email is that it’s nothing. Your emails are never happy, sad, or mad. The person that you’ve sent your email to can’t tell what you were feeling when you wrote your email.

What this means is that the possibility of a miscommunication skyrockets when we use email. Since we can’t properly let the reader of our email know how we were feeling when we wrote the email, the possibility of getting signals mixed up is very probable.

Email Creates Negative Responses

What do you do when you read an email that has been sent to you? I’m willing to bet that more often than not, you jot off a quick reply to the sender right then and there. Without giving it a lot of thought.

Things get even more tricky when we get negative emails – someone yelling at us or complaining about something. What happens is that we get bent out of shape and our anger wells up inside of us and then comes rushing out through our fingertips as we type out that heated email that we’re going to send back.

We all know what the right thing to do here is (even if we don’t always do it). When we get an email that makes us mad, we really need to stand up and walk away. Don’t reply to that email right off the bat. In fact, if at all possible, don’t reply to it today – wait a day. That will allow everything to cool down and you’ll be able to craft a reply that you won’t regret later on.

Email Creates Debates That Are Not Needed

Because of the anonymous nature of email and because we really can’t figure out what the other people are thinking, debates can go on and on. It’s very hard to stop a debate once it’s stated via email.

Miscommunication and the simple fact that it’s so easy to just flip another email back to the sender contribute to this problem. Even after the primary issue has been resolved, the discussion can go on and on as both parties continue to explore.

Debates are one of the key communication areas that are not well served by email. The back-and-forth nature of this type of communication along with the need to “see” what the other side really means results in the need for face-to-face contact.

What All Of This Means For You

Look, email is a great tool. I use it, you use it, everybody in the IT sector uses it. The use of email is probably included in definition of information technology. The key is to not over use it or use it in the wrong situations. CIOs need to be able to identify when and where the correct times to use emails are.

Email has three distinct problems associated with it. First, it does a lousy job of communicating emotion and this can lead to confusion on the part of the receiver of your email. Next it can cause people to become instantly angry – they don’t take the time to think about what they’ve read before they fire off a response. Finally, email makes it too easy to keep talking about an issue long after it should have been put to bed.

I’m not suggesting that CIOs stop using email. Far from it. Rather, I’d actually like to see CIOs use email as their communication technique of last resort. The importance of information technology is so great that you need to pick up the phone or walk over to someone’s office instead of firing off that next email. You just might end up being glad that you did!

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

Question For You: How do you think that a CIO can work accurate emotion into the emails that you do send?

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Post tags: debates continue well beyond the point of usefulness, email, emotion, emotional intelligence, emotional IQ, EQ, reactive responses, zero latency expectation in digital communications

Why Throwing Leaving Employees Under The Bus Is A Bad Idea

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 09:00:59 +0000

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Under the bus is no place for your former employees to be

There you are, a CIO trying to run an efficient IT department. All of sudden — wham! One of your key IT employees comes and tells you that he or she is leaving. Time to go back the bus up because you’ve got another soon-to-be-former employee who deserves to be thrown under it. Or maybe not. That definition of information technology doesn’t contain the answers that you need here — what’s the best way to deal with employees who break up with you?

The Easy Way: A Bad Break-Up

In the IT sector, whenever we feel that an employee has turned against us, our gut reaction is always the same: I hate you. They know everything about us and how we run our IT department. We just know that they are going to take all of this secret information and go share it with the competition.

The reality of the modern workplace is that employees who announce that they are leaving don’t leave right off the bat. Instead they take (or are given) a couple of weeks to wind things down. It’s what happens during this time period that can be so damaging to our relationship with them.

The very first thing that happens is that a distance immediately starts to grow between us and them. Sure, they’re still there, but it’s almost as though we are pretending that they aren’t. The difficult situation of them getting ready to go on to another job just makes everything worse.

On top of all of this, more often than not, we don’t help things out. We go around and start to bad-mouth the person who is leaving. We say things like “…we don’t really need them…” or “… they didn’t really contribute that much…” As with everything that you say, it always finds its way back to the person that you are talking about.

The Right Way: A Good Break-Up

So if our first instinct on how to handle a key employee leaving isn’t right, then what should we really be doing? The first thing that you need to realize is that business is all social. What this means is that our relationships are the most important part about our career.

This means that even if an employee has informed you that they are leaving, it doesn’t mean that your relationship with them is over. In fact, it’s far from it. Your relationship is simply changing – it’s going to transform itself into something new and different.

What you want to do at this point in time is to take charge of the relationship and make sure that it’s going to keep on growing. This starts by sitting down with the leaving employee and coming up with a plan for how they are going to spend their remaining time with the company.

Let them have a lot of say in this plan. You certainly want them to complete as many of the projects that they are working on, but let them tell you what they think that they can accomplish. What’s going to be important here is not how much they get done in the time that they have left, but rather how good they feel about what they’ve accomplished when they walk out the door for the last time.

Finally, when it comes time for them to take off, throw a party. Use this celebration as a way to congratulate the leaving employee for what they’ve done and to wish them well as they move on. By doing this you’ll have built a relationship that will continue to pay benefits long into the future.

What All Of This Means For You

Managing your staff is one of the key jobs that all CIOs face. Our best laid plans can be thrown into chaos by the announcement of a key employee’s intended departure.

How we react to this news is very important. Our initial instinct is going to be to strike out at that leaving employee. We tend to isolate them and compound the problem by dismissing their contributions when we talk about them with others.

Despite the importance of information technology, what we need to be doing is realizing that relationships are more important than anything else that we do as CIO. That means that even when an employee announces that they are leaving, it doesn’t mean that our relationship with them is ending. Rather it’s preparing to transform. We need to take steps to make sure that this is a positive transformation.

CIOs who are able to do the right thing will be able to build a strong network of social relationships. The ability to build this network using both current and former employees is what sets the great CIOs apart from everyone else!

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

Question For You: How do you think throwing a party for a leaving employee will make the employees who are staying feel?

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

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Post tags: a social world, break up with employees, employees who leave, felt betrayed, leaving, quitting, resentment, take off, the emotions at the time of departure, turned against departing employees

Video: IT Value How To Measure The Revenue Of IT

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:10:47 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEzW2f755Rw

We all know that IT provides value to the rest of the company, but how much value? That’s the question that CIOs are always trying to answer.

Dr. Jim Anderson tackles this issue by taking a look at what HP’s former CIO Randy Mott did. It turns out that he found a way to solve this problem. Dr. Anderson explains and shows you how you can use Randy’s technique.

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Hello CIO: You’re In Politics Now!

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 09:00:39 +0000

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No matter where you stand, you are now in politics

Can’t a CIO just rise above all of the politics? I mean really, with all of the technology decisions that need to be made along with the IT department business processes that need to be streamlined, can’t we all just skip the politics and get down to business? It turns out that we can’t and that means that as CIO you’re going to have to make sure that your team is good at playing the office politics game…

Why Politics Matter

So let’s get to the heart of the matter right off the bat: the political skills that your IT department members have will be key to their ability to build successful IT careers. You didn’t become CIO by chance, but rather by skillfully navigating the political maze that is your company – almost a part of the definition of information technology. Your IT staff needs to learn how to do the same.

Office politics has a bad name – it’s often viewed as using deception to get things done. Nothing could be further from the truth. What’s really going on here is that your IT staff is combining their knowledge of what the IT department needs them to do with an ability to actually get things accomplished. When they can do this, the IT department will benefit.

Politics And Your Staff’s Careers

Having political skills means that your staff will spend their time building personal networks (not the IT kind!) so that they can get both the information the help that they need, when they need it. It also means that they need to be smart enough to not pick fights that just don’t matter. They need to be able to decide if they always want to be right, or they want to get something done.

All too often we IT folks don’t exactly know how to maintain the support of both the folks who work for us and for whom we work. A lot of what it takes to be successful in the world of office politics is for IT staffers to find ways to inspire confidence in others and to build support for their ideas. This means that they need to project self-confidence and a certain amount of force behind their ideas. The last thing that anyone wants to do is to come across as being remorseful – nobody is going to support you if you do.

Sending Signals

Finally, winning the office politics game often comes down to how other perceive you. It turns out that if others are able to view your IT staff as being very focused and clear about what they want to accomplish, then they’ll be successful. They won’t be successful if they seem tentative or unclear about what they are trying to do.

I almost hate to pass this final bit of advice along, but studies have shown one key characteristic of how IT staffers can project power. Those who interrupt signal to others that they have power. Those people who allow themselves to be interrupted are signaling that they don’t have power.

What All Of This Means For You

Due to the importance of information technology, as a CIO, you are going to need to become politically savvy as well as taking steps to make your team politically savvy. Don’t think for a moment that this will be an easy job. You’ve got to do it right or else you risk losing staff to other players in the IT sector.

There are points in an IT staffer’s career where having political skills becomes very important. If they’ve taken the time to develop their political skills, then they’ll be able to continue to rise in the company. If not, then they’ll find their careers being derailed.

CIOs need to take the time to teach their staff how to negotiate the political challenges that every IT department faces in a modern company. Only by doing this can you ensure that they’ll be able to accomplish the things that you need them to get done. CIOs who can teach their IT departments how to use politics to their advantage will become successful CIOs.

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

Question For You: Do you think that formal training on office politics is needed or just constant on-the-job training?

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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!

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Post tags: accomplish through the people around them, building a successful career, career success, conflict, office politics, political skills, politically savvy, politics, power, stress, technical skills, tension

Dr. Anderson Quoted In “CIOs May Be Reluctant to Report Suspicious Activity”

Dr. Jim Anderson — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 15:52:45 +0000

Dr. Jim Anderson was quoted in the April 2012 edition of CIO magazine

The April 2012 edition of CIO Magazine contains an article titled “CIOs May Be Reluctant to Report Suspicious Activity”. In this article, reporter Kim Nash interviews Dr. Jim Anderson to find out why CIOs may not report possibly illegal activity when they encounter it within a firm.

Kim did a nice job on the article and it’s definitely worth the read. How would you react in the situations that she describes…?

Click here to read the article.

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What CIOs Need To Do About Bad Apples In The IT Department

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 09:00:39 +0000

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Just A Few Bad Apples Can Spoil It For Everyone Else

One of the most important jobs that a CIO has to do is to manage the people that work for him or her. I’d like to be able to tell you that all of those people are going to be start performers. However, that’s not the case. Where a CIO can run into real problems is when some of the team are bad apples – lazy, angry, or just downright incompetent. What’s a CIO to do?

Why A Bad Apple Is Such A Big Deal

Doesn’t every IT department have a few bad apples? Isn’t that just something that a CIO needs to learn to live with? Yes, the bad apples exist, but no that’s not something that a CIO needs to live with – it’s too expensive. Nowhere in the definition of information technology does it say that we have to work with jerks.

Robert Sutton has taken a look into just how expensive bad apples can be. What he’s found is that research has shown that just a single bad apple in a group can bring the group’s overall performance down by 30-40%.

It turns out that the behaviors that a bad apple brings to the table, incompetence, anger, and laziness, are very contagious. The reason for this is well knows: Bad behaviors are stronger than good behaviors. A bad apple causes negative thoughts and feelings to occur in other members of the IT team and these last longer than any positive thoughts or feelings that they may receive from positive coworkers.

What A CIO Needs To Do About Bad Apples

The first thing that a CIO needs to do is to make sure that bad apples don’t find their way into the IT department in the first place. The concept is simple, it’s the execution that can be hard to do.

When you are interviewing someone to come work in your IT department, they may appear to be the perfect candidate. They may have gone to a great school, worked for the best companies, and appear to have just exactly what you are looking for in an IT worker. However, they may also be a bad apple.

What you need is some way to detect that they are a bad apple before you actually hire them. One way to go about doing this is to invite them to actually come and perform tasks for your company for a day or two.

By having them perform the work that you’ll be having them do in situations that are realistic, you’ll quickly be able to evaluate their personality. You can find out if they are helpful to others and if they know when to ask for help themselves.

If a bad apple does slip by your new employee screening process and into your IT department, then a CIO needs to quickly take action. There are a number of different options that you have at your disposal. You can try warnings, coaching, and incentives. In the end, you always have the “nuclear option” available to you – physically isolating the bad apple.

Sometimes the bad apple may be one of your IT stars. No matter. The damage that a bad apple can do far outshines the value that a star brings to your IT team. Do the right thing and either transform or get rid of your bad apples. Your department will thank you for it.

What All Of This Means For You

Not all IT employees are created equal. Some are stars and some may be bad apples. The IT sector has as many bad apples as everyone else does. A CIO needs to take immediate action when a bad apple is detected.

A single bad apple can hold back an entire team and reduce their effectiveness. The importance of information technology means hat CIOs can’t let this happen. CIOs need to establish screening techniques that will prevent bad apples from being hired in the first place. If a bad apple does somehow get into the IT department, then the CIO needs to take steps to get them to change – or to leave!

It’s always more fun for a CIO to focus on the star performers in the IT department. However, it turns out that spotting the bad apples and making sure that they don’t get a chance to spoil things for the rest of the department will go a long way to boosting any IT department’s productivity!

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

Question For You: Do you think a CIO should even bother trying to change a bad apple or should they just be let go?

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!

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Post tags: bad apple, coaching, incompetent, jerk, lazy, nasty, negative thoughts, performance of a team, screen out bad apples, slacker, superstars, warnings