Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
For some, the role of CIO is the career peak; for others it’s just an outcropping on the side of the mountain. Career advancement for the one is a matter of holding and defending the position. For the other, it’s about anchoring a cam in the next crack of opportunity and muscling past icy obstacles….
Having a strategic plan is a vital aspect of any successful organization. While many CIOs believe they only have moderate influence on the company’s strategic plan, in reality the CIO and the IT department are the powerhouse behind it. So, even though the CEO leads the strategic plan, the CIO is both a strategy creator…
The role of CIO has morphed faster than Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde — with about the same amount of agony. Not so long ago CIOs were respected misunderstood master geeks who were often software developers and programmers themselves. More recently, they’ve been shackled to securing and supporting a hodge-podge of bring-your-own-tech and often derided…
Despite the changing role of CIO, one thing remains the same: the CIO is expected to be the king (or queen) of tech knowledge. It just will not do to be ignorant about a new technology the millennials are bringing to work, or slow to address the perennial “adopt or not to adopt” question in…
Virtualization isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a technology that can potentially help to save thousands of dollars for CIOs and enterprise IT managers. To properly harness the economic benefits of virtualization, furniture retailer Slumberland teamed up with Cisco Systems and its Unified Computing System (UCS) platform. The move to UCS-based virtualization has saved Slumberland’s CIO…
Great leaders are hard to come by so we’d like to recognize the best of the best in this year’s CEO Vision Awards. Do you know of a CEO that goes above and beyond; leading by example in a way that brings out the best in others and promotes their business and brand in novel…
On this past Friday I had the good fortune of spending the afternoon at a big local CIO event called TechTomorrow hosted by TechColumbus. Of the 350 or so attendees, it appeared that most of them stayed for the afternoon’s main session: the CIO Value Forum. As you can infer the main topic was value….
Some love a few of them. Many hate a whole lot of them. And some that used to love just one now detest them (or vice versa). Yes, it is a thin line between love and hate when it comes to the CIO and the software vendors they depend on. One possible approach is to…
Stupid obstacles often come in the form of people’s opinions, corporate policy, changes of direction, fire drills, conflicting goals, delayed decisions, unclear strategies … shall I go on? In IT, this is particularly challenging because no one outside of IT really understands IT. You do important heroic stuff that keeps the company running, and no…
As I pointed out last month in my first article, to become a master communicator you need to first become a master listener. One of the challenges to becoming a master listener is being fully present. By filtering what is being said through your own conceptual conditioning your IT leadership abilities will be reduced. Why…