Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
Over the years, I have written a lot on the topic of credibility (see sidebar). Over and above delivering great results, building your credibility is necessary to enhance both your effectiveness and survivability as a CIO. It helps you avoid stupid questions, re-work, and endlessly defending your honor (and your budget). After credibility, relevance is…
While mid-tier CIOs face dramatically more resource constraints than their large-enterprise counterparts, the issues and demands they face in delivering and managing IT services are surprisingly similar. This has shown to be true based on years of quantitative data analysis, focal interviews, IT consulting engagements and just common sense. If anything, global pressures on smaller…
The technical speech is one of the most common types of speeches. It often focuses on a singular issue and provides new insight, information, or solutions to that issue. Although it is the main driver of the technical speech, focusing solely on content is not sufficient to keep the audience engaged. This article presents five…
Attention members of the C-suite: your CIO is having an identity crisis … and it’s your fault. That’s what you’d hear if you could be a bug on the wall at a CIO convention: “What do they want me to do? Oil the machines? Contribute to strategy? Take charge of business processes? Save money? Please…
All CIOs depend on having skilled personnel to meet their departments’ objectives. However, when managers are focused on cutting costs and meeting service level requirements with fewer resources, retention can move to the back burner. After all, it’s easy to think that employees feel fortunate just to have jobs in this economy. If you’re not…
Firms in the United States technology sector announced planned job cuts totaling 84,217 in the first quarter, up 27% from 66,312 in the previous quarter. It was the largest quarterly job-cut tally for the sector since 2002, when 133,511 layoffs were announced in the fourth quarter, according to the report released Monday by global outplacement…
In these difficult times, it seems every company is trying to do more with less, and central to that goal is maximizing employee contributions and productivity. While increasing workloads can be a short-term solution, over time it will lead to staff burnout, so organizations must find other ways of addressing their business needs under tight…
As I’ve been writing about this and working with IT organizations, I see that CIO’s fall into two camps regarding taking ownership of IT/business alignment: “Not my job.” Some CIO’s have given me pretty direct feedback that people like me should get out of the way, and stop giving IT a bad rap. And that…
Only 8% of CIOs anticipate adding IT personnel in the second quarter of 2009, but only 6% plan staff reductions in the next three months, according to the latest Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report. The net 2% hiring increase compares with a net 8% increase projected last quarter. The majority of…
Editor’s Note: Katherine began writing monthly columns for CIOUpdate in July of 2004. Since then, she has been providing readers invaluable advice on how handle the often delicate job of employee relations. As editor, I would like to take this opportunity to thank her for her dedication to the site and to wish her continued…