Not another poke in the ‘I’ for the CIO
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- Written by John Pickett
There’s an epidemic of proposals for a change in the CIO title that’s driving me nuts. Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Integration Officer, Chief Interaction Officer and others, all intended to place a different emphasis on the mandate of IT leadership.
I understand that in using different meanings of the ‘I’ in CIO, pundits are using it to make their point that CIOs should now focus on Innovation or Interaction or whatever bandwagon they’ve jumped on. Indeed, there are legitimate arguments to be made for each, but they are all so narrowly focused that they ignore a broad range of IT leadership responsibilities of equal importance.
Message to management: stop snubbing your CIO
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- Written by Dave Carey
I’ve come to know a great many CIOs over the 20-odd years that I’ve been writing content for the IT executive community in Canada. And quite often when I’m on a company’s web site I’ll check the management team section to find out who the CIO is and whether or not it’s someone I know.
And it’s a source of continual amazement to me how often CIOs are left off the management team list. Doesn’t seem to matter what type of business it is – all industries are more or less equal offenders when it comes to snubbing their CIOs. Try doing a straw poll of company web sites yourself and see what I mean. You’ll probably find that around half the companies you visit have an invisible CIO.
Stop poking the CIO in the I
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- Written by Dave Carey
Pity the poor CIO. Seems like every time you turn around, somebody’s trying to poke his or her ‘I’ out.
The once venerable title Chief Information Officer is now passé – no longer suitable, according to the pundits. These days it’s all about innovation; it must be Chief Innovation Officer. Or it’s all about intelligence; it must be Chief Intelligence Officer. I’ve even heard Chief Imagination Officer, which should only be allowed if you work for The Walt Disney Company.
My Concise Oxford Dictionary has 46 pages of I’s, so this could go on forever.
In order to save us a little time, allow me to cut to the chase and offer up the best new titles for CIO that are likely to emerge over the next decade or so. That way we can play with them now, quickly grow tired of them, and get back to good old Chief Information Officer.
For fun, see which of the following titles fits you best.
The lottery plan for IT organizations
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- Written by Paul Lewis
If I won the lottery, I would move my entire family to Disney World, permanently. My plan is simple: give away and sell all my worldly possessions, from my socks to my house, and recreate a new life in the happiest place on earth.
I would prepay for decades of a complete vacation package in a Magic Kingdom view resort room, with a connected room for the kids. For transportation, WDW would provide busses, boats, and monorails to any location, all included. For food, the included deluxe dining plan would offer me three meals and two snacks per day in hundreds of locations in the 40+ square mile district. I think the entertainment is obvious, however I would likely get the platinum package with park hopper and waterparks to maximize the number options in any one day. For clothing, well, onsite merchandising is unprecedented.
CIO Careers: The power of personal connection
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- Written by Dave Carey
A couple of weeks ago, a CIO and long-time friend of mine sent me an email, letting me know that he’s looking to change jobs after 15 years with the same firm. He knew that I was well connected with the CIO community in Canada and hoped I might be able to help him with his job search.
Good call on his part. As it turned out, I did know of a couple of IT executives on the move and was able to broker a meeting between my friend and one of those departing CIOs. As for the other, his job had already been filled internally.
My friend just emailed to tell me the meeting went great and thanking me for putting him in touch with “an excellent resource and even better person”. Knowing my friend, I’m sure the meeting was mutually beneficial.
CIO Career Advice: Moving Up the Business Ladder
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- Written by Dave Carey
Over the past couple of decades I’ve met many CIOs with aspirations to move out of IT and up the corporate ladder. Some succeeded; many more did not.
Despite the advantage of being an executive with a view across the entire business, it’s simply not an easy task for the CIO to break out of IT. The reasons for this are many: the CIO is a relative newcomer to the executive suite; in many organizations there’s a lack of connectedness between the business and IT; many see IT as a cost centre rather than a strategic tool for innovation and revenue generation; IT has a long history of project failure and underperformance in the eyes of the business; and the list goes on.
CIO Career Advice: Underutilized IT Execs, Get Your Knowledge Working For You
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- Written by Dave Carey
In my recent blog, "CIO Careers: When you’re gone, make sure you’re not forgotten", I wrote about the various ways unemployed CIOs can keep from getting stale-dated and enhance their chances of finding a new and perhaps even better job.
The second blog in my “CIO Career Advice” series speaks not only to unemployed IT execs but also to those with some extra time on their hands (okay, I know they are rarae aves, but they’re out there). Those in either category can enhance their profile, better brand themselves by creating more visibility for their skills, knowledge and ambitions, and perhaps earn some good money in the process by packaging up their specialized knowledge and putting it into the marketplace. Here are a few ways to do this.
Getting started with Big Data (Video)
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- Written by Staff
Roger Moryoussef of Sun Life Financial talks about the company’s entry into the Big Data world and some of the strategies they undertook to help the business gain the greatest value from its data initiatives. Collaboration, clear business objectives, promotion and measurement are some of their key learnings. Sun Life Financial was one of several companies participating in The IT Media Group’s executive Roundtable, “the Economics of Big Data.”
CIO Careers: When you’re gone, make sure you’re not forgotten
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- Written by Dave Carey
Even though the Canadian IT executive community is small, it’s surprising how often CIOs who have been made to walk the plank – often through no fault of their own – sink out of sight with barely a ripple. They may let a few of their close associates know, but the broader IT executive community is none the wiser. By the time they hear about it, it’s several months after the fact.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of very capable ex-CIOs out there who want to continue their careers but who’ve spent too long on the sidelines. They’re now not only unemployed but also stale-dated. If they find a CIO job at all, it will likely be one of considerably less stature than their previous one.
Big Data and Social Media (Video)
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- Written by Staff
As consumers turn more and more to digital channels for purchasing, communicating and researching, savvy companies are finding ways to engage with them digitally through social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, through public discussion forums, and through interactivity on their own web sites. But buried in the millions of conversations and comments are potential insights into trends and preferences that some companies are finding by applying Big Data techniques to their analysis.
While relatively few companies have seriously mined social media for such insights, some of the CIOs attending The IT Media Group CIO Roundtable exploring The Economics of Big Data shared some initial experiences that point to the intelligence value social media promises.
Strategic Insights Report: Marketing IT to the Business
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- Written by Dave Carey
All CIOs face similar roadblocks throughout their careers: internal business partners who distrust IT and want as little to do with it as possible; end users who are resistant to new ways of doing things and frustrated at not being able to use their own devices and apps; and senior management who lack a good understanding of technology and are unwilling to invest in key elements of the IT strategy.
These roadblocks differ from one organization to the next, and every CIO has his or her own way of dealing with them. Improperly navigated, any one of them can send the CIO’s career into a skid, so it is imperative that all CIOs stay abreast of techniques that will help them overcome these obstacles.
Why are so many CIOs stumped by social?
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- Written by Dave Carey
In a recent Forbes article, Oracle Corp. Senior VP Communications, Bob Evans, ranked “Lead the Social Revolution: Drive the Social-enabled Enterprise” number two on his list of “The Top Ten Strategic Issues for CIOs in 2013”.
Evans is right about social being strategically important and he’s right again in asserting that “CIOs who fight this trend will be pushed aside by CMOs and LOB heads who understand social’s potential and know they can’t compete unless that potential is harnessed by the company for competitive advantage”.
Big Data = Big Opportunity for CIOs
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- Written by Dave Carey
As a CIO, by now you’re already smack dab in the middle of the Big Data era. Doesn’t matter what size your company is; doesn’t matter if Big Data has never been considered as part of the IT or business strategy; doesn’t even matter if the words have never crossed the lips of anyone in company.
As IBM likes to remind us, the world is adding 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. To put it in nice round figures, that’s 2,500,000,000,000,000,000. So for all those whose living depends on their ability to manage information, let me offer a few words of advice around Big Data, borrowed from the LGBT community: “It’s here. It affects your career. Get used to it.”
In search of the future CIO
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- Written by Dave Carey
More than any other C-suite executive, CIOs are given to collective self-examination and tireless speculation on the future of their profession. That’s not surprising given the fact that CIOs are relative C-suite newbies, and in many companies, even in today’s digital world, are still not accorded equal standing with their executive peers.
Since IT managers began morphing into CIOs in the 1990s, the role of the CIO has been a moving target, affected by the rapid pace of technology change, huge shifts to the IT service provider market, varying trends in the corporate view of IT, and increasingly demanding communities of customers and end-users. Little wonder that even some of the best CIOs have had difficulty coming anywhere close to hitting the bull’s eye of this moving target.
IT staffing: How to keep your top performers happy
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- Written by John Pickett
The good news: According to Robert Half Technology’s most recent quarterly survey, Canadian CIOs plan an increase in IT staffing activity in the fourth quarter of 2012. It’s a sign of growing corporate confidence in the economy and in information technology as a means to take advantage of it.
The bad news: There’s already a shortfall in the skills most in demand. The Outlook for Human Resources in the ICT Labour Market, 2011-2016, a report produced by the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) working with the Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC), predicted that between 2011 and 2016, Canadian employers will need to hire some 106,000 ICT workers—more than 17,000 per year.
Glass ceiling still tough to crack
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- Written by Dave Carey
Kudos to three leading women IT executives in Canada who were recognized for their outstanding achievements in 2011. In December, Dr. Catherine Aczel Boivie and Susan Doniz were on the Top 100 list of Canada’s most powerful women, released by WXN (Women’s Executive Network), Canada’s leading organization dedicated to the advancement and recognition of women in management, executive, professional and board roles. Two months earlier, Gale Blank, VP & CIO of Wal-Mart Canada Corp, was named one of ten IT executive “2011 Breakaway Leaders” at the Global CIO Executive Summit in South Carolina.
The Changing Relationship Between IT and the Business (video)
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- Written by Staff
John Tolkamp, IT Director at Ainsworth Engineered talks about changes in business and IT that affect how the two interact. His comments were recorded following The IT Media Group Roundtable “Winning Tactics for Hard Times”, in Vancouver, March 27th 2012.
The Elephant in the C-suite
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- Written by Dave Carey
Ever since Nicolas Carr’s famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) article in the May 2003 issue of the Harvard Business Review, “IT Doesn’t Matter”, CIOs have held a mirror up to themselves and their profession, nervously looking for any tell-tale wrinkles that may signal the beginning of their decline.
In the years since Carr’s article, commoditization of IT, cloud computing, Software as a Service and other technologies have become significantly more prevalent, indeed making many aspects of enterprise IT mere table stakes, providing little or nothing in the way of competitive advantage.
CIOs – Defending IT investments
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- Written by Staff
Given the economic uncertainty that still prevails, many CIOs are still asked to manage costs lower than they would like. We asked a group of CIOs what investments and resources they most want to defend when making decisions about cost reduction. The discussion focused on areas that include showing value, quick wins and key people.
Speech therapy for CIOs
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- Written by John Pickett
In 1987 IDG launched CIO magazine in the U.S. In 1993 the Canadian edition, CIO Canada, was born and I had the privilege of serving as its founding editor; a role that allowed me to stay close to Canada’s IT leaders and, to a great extent, share in their experience. I don’t know if CIO magazine actually coined the title CIO, but certainly the magazine and its sister publications that followed in many other countries were and are advocates for the idea that IT in the enterprise is so important, so strategic, that its most senior representative should be a C-level member of the executive team.
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