What’s small, shiny and keeps CIOs up at night? The CEO’s personal devices.

CEOs are like every other employee. They love tablets, smart phones and apps. The glaring difference is that the CEO’s personal devices put the company at much greater risk than the gadgets of virtually all other employees combined. CIOs must  include chief executives in conversations as they grapple with putting BYOD security policies and procedures in place.

Many CEOs criss-cross the globe carrying the company’s most sensitive information—trade secrets, delicate details about employees, financial projections, etc—in the palms of their hands. At any given moment, the CEO could lose her data-laden device on a plane or in a coffee shop. Or possibly, a hacker on a mission to harm the company intentionally swipes the device’s information when the CEO isn’t looking.

If those risks weren’t enough, there’s also the potential for the CEO to lose her precious personal files by forgetting a password or unintentionally mishandling information.

Take what happened to the CEO of an email management provider recently. He was vacationing with his family when his five-year-old tried unsuccessfully to access Dad’s smartphone five times. The firm’s Mobile Device Management (MDM) system kicked in and wiped the CEO’s vacation pictures. Luckily for the CIO the CEO couldn’t blame anyone but himself since he was instrumental in setting the company’s BYOD usage policy.

In this instance, the CEO-sanctioned system erased pictures in the event the device was compromised because employees often take pictures of their whiteboard brainstorms. This is an example of where a business decision to guard trade secrets had a personal impact on the CEO that he probably didn’t anticipate.

These devices are extremely risky to the company and personal to employees. So it’s crucial that CIOs have meaningful conversations with employees, including the CEO, about the responsibilities of managing their own personal devices and the ramifications of BYOD usage and security policies and procedures. (see Building a BYOD Ready Infrastructure) CEOs often get special privileges, but CEOs certainly shouldn’t be allowed to muscle exceptions to BYOD rules or miss the opportunity to have a say in shaping the company’s security strategy.

Scenario planning using real-life possibilities and demos helps IT paint a vivid picture for senior leadership and employees about the risks of BYOD. My colleague, Jim Guinn, stresses the importance of employee education to protect the business and the personal interests of employees in his new cyber security video.

You have to educate people on what they are doing and what their exposures are. Not only to the corporation: You have to teach them what the risks are to them personally. It’s all about training and education and tying them to real-world issues and incidents.

Mike Phillips, CISO, CenterPoint Energy, agrees: “People get very upset if you change the functionality of their device. And the reality of it is if you are going to put something on it like a secure container or encrypt the email you might have to change the email client and the minute they connect with you you’ve changed it.”

You can view the entire conversation between Jim and Mike here.

The last thing a CIO wants is to upset or frustrate the CEO. Or worse, fail to protect the organization from the obvious risks of BYOD. Make sure the CEO understands exactly when IT will be accessing his device, for what purpose, and what could happen as a result. Make sure she is backing up her files and knows what will transpire if the device is lost or stolen. Giving the CEO a heads up and ongoing guidance will avoid heartbreak and headache.

Have you had the “BYOD talk” with your CEO? Share your best practices and concerns below.

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Do CIOs need to engage and evangelize public social media networks to effectively lead their organizations in social media initiatives? Or is facilitating connection and collaboration among employees and clients enough? Who is most responsible for cultivating a social corporate culture?

These are the questions I asked myself after reading the news that only about 10 percent of CIOs in the Fortune 250 are using public social networks. According to harmon.ie’s research, a paltry 4% maintain blogs. Sadly, most of the LinkedIn profiles of the CIOs who were researched are populated with fewer than 100 connections.

All of you know that I’m an avid user of social media. I strongly advocate for CIOs to engage in social activity through the CIO Twitter Dashboard and other lists and forums. So, it might surprise you that I answer this question with an unapologetic no. I don’t think that CIOs need to use social networks to effectively lead social media initiatives.

I reviewed the list of the top 25 most social CIOs in the Fortune 250, and read David Lavenda’s strong stance that CIOs need to walk their talk, or more accurately, tweet their tweets. As I did, I thought about the CIOs I know who are silent on social networks, but successfully leading social media initiatives. And I contemplated the reverse, the CIOs who are tweeting, but not leading.

To help illustrate my point, I compared the most social list of CIOs with this new list of the most social Fortune 500 companies. The organizations with the greatest followings–Verizon, Southwest, Starbucks, Coke, McDonalds, Walmart, Target, Nike and Kohls, do not have CIOs who are on the most social CIOs list. The only exception is Google.

In an ideal world, corporate CIOs would blog compelling content consistently, tweet numerous times a day and chime into a few well-chosen LinkedIn discussions on a regular basis.  This would serve multiple purposes: help to engage his employees in the public forums, build corporate brand, build personal brand and increase the firm’s attractiveness to new recruits. However, that’s not realistic for most corporate CIOs. They are simply too busy. Just because a CIO doesn’t engage in social media we shouldn’t discount her opinions or direction on how to orchestrate social media initiatives in the firm.  You don’t need to be an avid ERP user to lead an ERP-driven transformation.

Recently we asked 489 business and IT executives in our Digital IQ survey to tell us the most important characteristic of a successful CIO.

A CIO’s ability to be an innovative thinker and apply IT to relevant business problems was paramount. CIOs don’t need a public presence on social networks to track what people are saying about their brands over social networks or to foster communication between their firms and customers.

Sound off: Do you think it matters if the majority of CIOs are MIA in social media? Who do you think is the most responsible for setting an example at a company with a strong social media presence? Does it even matter?

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Recently I was discussing a history project with my son.  He was writing a paper about the inconsistencies in access to clean water in all parts of the world and their causes.  In researching the history of urban water access, he came across the story of the outbreak of cholera in the mid-1800′s in London and the impact it had on modern medicine. A young doctor, John Snow, proposed that cholera was carried in contaminated food or water, not through the air as most diseases were believed to be transmitted at the time. He plotted the reported cases on a map which also showed the location of the city water pumps.  Through this visual plotting of data, he noticed that the cases in a particular area near Broad Street were clustered around one, but not all of the pumps.  Further investigation showed that the water fed to the pump in question came from a location downstream from the city and likely contained sewage.  As simple as this analysis seems, layering the data in context on a map, important and relevant questions jump out – something impossible with a list or table of data. Snow’s data analysis was also studied in one of visualization guru Edward Tufte’s books, Visual Explanations.  Looking at Snow’s map with my son reminded me of similar innovative way to look at data on a map, albeit more recent.

David Kobia, identified by MIT as a top young innovator, responded to needs in his native Kenya in 2007 by building a Google maps mashup to track events during political unrest by mapping SMS messages from phones in the hands of people on the streets.  His mapping visualization platform, Ushahidi, has now been used during many natural disasters to help prioritize and channel releif workers and supplies.

While both of these examples are about layering data on a map, they have a key difference – time.  Snow’s cholera map summarize historical data over several days or weeks while Ushahidi plots real-time text messages. Think about the power of adding realtime cholera outbreak information to Snow’s map or using the data from Ushahidi over time to study where to stage releif workers or build a clinic.

When considering data visualization, think about both the realtime and historical aspects.  Both will help you see things faster and with more clarity than you ever could using traditional means.

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Roughly 20-30% of the population is acknowledged introverts and it’s no secret that IT has its fair share. One of the more famous is Steve Wozniak who dreamt up the first Apple computer in solitude. It’s highly unlikely that this quantum leap of imagination that changed the world would have bubbled to the surface in a boisterous brainstorming session. That’s because introverts like Wozniak excel in low-key environments and crave quiet to create, as Susan Cain, author of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts,” noted recently in her TED talk.

Cain’s reminder that introverts respond to stimulation differently than extroverts couldn’t come at a better time. Social collaboration is catching on like wildfire across companies and sectors. Businesses are literally and figuratively tearing down walls between employees, partners and customers to openly communicate and constantly innovate. In short, a lot of brainstorming is happening in offices and on social networks.

In the midst of this collaboration celebration don’t forget that a portion of your workers need quiet contemplation to draw forth their most inspired ideas. If you don’t take this in account, you aren’t fully harnessing the power of all your people. Even worse, a noisy work environment could push talented introverts right out the door.

Integrating Introverts into Highly Collaborative Work Cultures

One way to maximize the potential of your introverts in a highly collaborative work environment is to offer them the opportunity to write down their ideas ahead of brainstorming sessions and have them read their ideas to the group. This ensures that they will be heard after they’ve had time to think quietly about the challenge or opportunity on the table. Introverts aren’t shy. Their style is to jump into conversations after first mulling things over in their minds.

If you’re looking to transition your office to an open floor plan with lots of glass—an increasingly popular trend these days—design with the introvert in mind. Include pockets of secluded space where she can freely explore her inner landscape in quiet.

Introversion is not about being reserved or shying away from making judgments. Rather than pulling their inspiration from others, introverts simply tend to tap their inner power to make their contributions to the world. Give them space to dream in solitude and reap the rewards.

Have you made adjustments in your workforce for introverts? Do you think it’s important? I’d like to hear from you. Please share your thoughts in the comment box.

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Guest post by Sachal Lakhavani

Does your organization have a whiteboard culture?  When faced with complex problems or collaborating with people with different perspectives, do the people in your organization draw to communicate in a dynamic and visual way, or do they rely solely on verbal explanations and static Powerpoint slides?

I recently attended a panel at SXSW that was instructively entitled “Shut up and Draw.” The panelists, Dan Roam, Sunni Brown and Jessica Hagy, made a very compelling case for why you should cultivate a whiteboard culture in your organization.

Pictures have high information density

This is particularly important in an age of information overload, when people are striving for more efficient ways to consume information.  This is one of the driving forces behind the success of image based information sharing such as Pinterest, Instagram and infographics.

Visual communication is more effective than verbal communication in getting people on the same page

“If you want to convince someone, draw them a picture,” said Roam. “It works much better than words.” According to Roam, the more you talk with people who don’t see things your way, the more you will disagree with them, but a picture can instantly unearth common ground.

This is supported by research that has shown that communicating political information visually is more convincing in “reducing incorrect beliefs” than using the equivalent words.  Ironically, the research paper itself makes little use of visualization to make its argument.

Drawing helps to clarify thoughts which are not fully formed in the mind

Personally, I’ve found drawing to be so effective in helping me build out half-baked concepts into robust ideas with action plans that I have two whiteboards in my apartment for use in my personal life (much to my girlfriend’s chagrin).

My theory is that writing your thoughts on the board requires you to keep less information in memory, so you can concentrate more cognitive effort on solving the problem at hand.  This is supported by an experiment that Daniel Kahneman mentions in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow“, in which he observes that individuals asked to perform calculations perform more poorly when they are also required to remember other numbers.

Also, it’s easier to correct and redraw your thoughts on a whiteboard than it is in Powerpoint, Visio, mind mapping apps, etc.

Benefits for CIOs

During the panel I couldn’t help but think about the how the benefits on a whiteboard culture are specifically relevant to CIOs.

More than ever before, technology organizations must effectively partner with other functions such as marketing, legal, risk, HR in order to address a dizzying array of challenges.  These include initiatives such as social media, mobile, BYOD (bring-your-own-device), cloud computing, etc.  Given that people in technology are often criticized for speaking a different language than others, perhaps drawing would help get past differences in terminology and culture so that people are conceptually on the same page.

Southwest Airlines’ original “business plan”

During the session, the panelists very insightfully communicated some of the key barriers holding individuals back from “shutting up and drawing”.  Obviously, not having whiteboards or markers is one problem, but we’ll focus on the others:

1) People who aren’t artists are sometimes insecure about drawing – Drawing for visual thinking is not the same as art.  The purpose of visual thinking is for the viewer to understand something.  The purpose of art is for the viewer to feel something.  As Sunni Brown said, when drawing for visual thinking, “perfection is not the point, clearer thinking is the point”.  Understanding this will help people understand that you don’t need to be a good artist to be great with a whiteboard.

2) People are visually illiterate – Many people struggle with articulating a complex idea in a visual way.  Like certain letters are strung together to make sounds and words, particular types of images are used to convey different categories of information. For example, if you’re trying to communicate the “how” of something, you need an image structure that will follow the flow of a process.  The perspective of the panelists is that people can be taught best practices for how to communicate visually; starting with what Dan Roam has coined Vivid Grammar.  It is understandable why someone would be hesitant to stand up at a whiteboard in front of their colleagues if they were not confident they could express themselves clearly, so helping the people in an organization learn and practices visual literacy is foundational.  Resources such as the blogs and books of the panelists (Dan Roam, Sunni Brown, Jessica Hagy) are certainly a great place to start.

Where to start with Whiteboarding

When I first joined the company, Chris Curran spoke with our start class and gave everyone a copy of Dan Roam’s book, “The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.”  The book convinced me of the value of whiteboard culture, which I’ve in turn made a point of instilling in my team (with the help of instant stick on whiteboards from Whiteyboard).

A good example of how whiteboards can be used effectively was described in a recent article in Harvard Business Review on “The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs” (Jobs was a huge fan of whiteboards “because they gave him complete control of a situation and they engendered focus”):

“When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After a few weeks of product review sessions, he’d finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew a two-by-two grid. “Here’s what we need,” he declared. Atop the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on four great products, one for each quadrant. All other products should be canceled.”

In what kind of organizations do you think whiteboard culture can add the most value?  Is a whiteboard culture right for your organization?  If so, what actions have you taken or are considering taking to foster it?  What are the barriers you see in instilling a whiteboard culture?

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