All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Why would a CEO hire a CIO, anyway?

My friend and colleague Mike Benz – a talented CIO himself – answered this question in a recent LinkedIn post, providing ten reasons it’s a good idea.

But with all due deference to someone who knows the subject well … and someone I hope is still my friend after reading what follows … I think Mike’s asking the wrong question.

From the perspective of most CEOs, “CIO” and “the poor, sorry zhlub I hired to run IT” are synonyms, so their answer to “Why hire a chief information officer?” is, “Well, someone has to run IT, and I sure don’t want to do it.”

Which leads to this week’s question: What, if anything, is the difference between “CIO” and “Poor, sorry zhlub”?

You can find one answer in the Management Compass, which I introduced way back in 1997. As you can see from the diagram, CIOs lead and manage in four directions: North, to the company’s top executives, east, to their peers in other parts of the business, west, to those who make use of IT’s services (no, not “internal customers”!), and south, to IT’s employees.

As a general rule, poor, sorry zhlubs focus most of their leadership time and energy on IT’s employees and making sure IT takes care of its service recipients … southwest on the compass, that is.

They focus on delivery.

CIOs, as an equally general rule, face nor’east more often than not. In doing so they can, if they aren’t careful, put their southwesterly priorities at risk through inattention.

Poor, sorry zhlubs, also known as IT directors, do their best to make sure IT gets the job done. But it can be the CIOs, who pay more attention to their peer and executive relationships, who get IT the respect and resources it needs to get the job done.

And while they’re at it the CIOs in this admittedly simplistic portrayal enjoy more career success than their southwest-oriented brethren – something you’d expect for folks who cultivate their skills at managing up.

The obvious resolution to the dueling IT leads conundrum is for whoever sits in the head-of-IT chair to consciously and deliberately pay attention to all four compass points.

In addition to being obvious, this solution has the added benefit of being right.

But there’s a catch (isn’t there always?). The catch is the head of IT’s comfort zone. “Yes,” you can imagine a southwesterly IT director saying. “I know I should be building and maintaining all of these relationships. But the executive leadership team alone has a half-dozen members, and they’re all busy without giving me time for relationship-building. And my calendar is already full before I try to schedule these meetings.”

Which is to say that with all due respect to Star Trek, space isn’t the final frontier. That honor belongs to time.

Bob’s last word: And one more thing. In theory, or at least in a lot of what you’re likely to read about such things, CIOs, in contrast to their IT director brethren, are strategic thinkers and bring their strategic thinking to the executive suite.

Me too. There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project includes clear guidance that IT ought to be leading company strategy.

But then there’s the guidance provided in an earlier book, Keep the Joint Running. It points out that before IT gets to be strategic, it first has to be competent.

CIOs, that is, might be better at sitting at the strategy table, but wearing their IT director hat might be what gets them there.

Now playing on CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “4 hard truths of multivendor outsourcing.”

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|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

It was a moment of weakness.

I was facilitating a client meeting, trying to get the group to a consensus. I asked everyone to suggest key points or insights the solution should be cognizant of, and wrote each point on a flip chart.

One participant had a point, and he made it. Over and over and over again.

I paused the discussion, and in place of a bullet marker I wrote a number next to each point on the flip chart, instructing everyone that, to save time, if they wanted to make a point that was already on the flip chart they should just speak the point’s number.

The next time the participant in question started to make his point again I interrupted him. “9?” I asked. When he continued, I wrote “9” on the flip chart and asked for any additional thoughts that needed inclusion.

As a counterpoint, in one of his essays Richard Feynman wrote, “It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best—summing it all up—without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.”

Which brings me, briefly, to this week’s dilemma: The most important event of the week was, without a doubt, Donald Trump’s indictment. Given its importance, and that events involving current or former POTUSes often lead to more broadly applicable leadership insights, a part of me figures I ought to be applying the KJR treatment to the situation.

But then I tried to come up with anything I might say that hasn’t been said by at least a dozen professional opinionators, not to mention the Internet commentariat echo chambers.

I didn’t succeed. So please accept my apologies for not covering the story here. But I promise you this: If you bring up your browser and type “Trump indicted” in the search box, you’ll find everything I might possibly have written somewhere on the list.

Advanced Placement Exercise: Do this same with ChapGPT.

Speaking of repetition, this just in, from McKinsey & Company: “For IT to become a real driver of value, both business and IT must work together as partners according to McKinsey’s Oliver Bossert and Björn Münstermann.”

Let the ridicule begin, starting with an observation: Saying that both business and IT must work together as partners suggests it’s possible for only one or the other to work together as partners. Or, as they might have said, “Either the business or IT must work together as partners.”

Let’s agree to forgive this lapse. On to the next one: The sub-head in McKinsey’s emailed synopsis adds this wisdom: “Treat IT as strategic capability.”

It’s advice that might have been valuable had it been offered a decade ago, when “digital” first started to become a noun, and mainstream business leaders started paying attention to IT beyond its traditional role as scapegoat and necessary organizational evil.

Oh, wait. Treating IT as a strategic capability was offered as advice back then. Were McKinsey’s scholars serious about all this they might have read Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology, which offered similar insights in 2009, or There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project, which covered this territory more thoroughly four years ago.

But here in the KJR institute our goal is to offer useful advice, not just to whine about McKinsey & Company taking credit for our good work. So here’s some advice you can use: Forward the McKinsey & Company essay to your company’s executives and point out that, thanks to your visionary thinking, your company is years ahead of the industry.

Bob’s last word: Speaking of what we won’t whine about here: Gartner has, following its usual pattern, introduced a new catch-phrase so as to claim ownership of what many of us have advised for decades. The new catch-phrase is “citizen developer,” which Gartner defines as “An employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are not actively forbidden by IT or business units.”

Gartner’s advice: IT should support citizen developers.

KJR’s advice: As a steadfast KJR subscriber you’ve already been taking this advice for the past 20 years or so (for example, “Preventing value prevention,” InfoWorld, 1/20/2003; or search KJR for “shadow IT” or “Value Prevention Society”).

Now available on CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide:“4 hard truths of multivendor outsourcing.” Of every aspect of managing an IT organization, outsourcing probably has the worst book smarts to street smarts ratio. Here are some street smarts to help you along.

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