Straight to the Top

CIO Leadership in a Mobile, Social, and Cloud-based World

Gregory S. Smith

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118390030
• eBook ISBN: 9781118417461
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Essential reading for IT professionals with aspirations toward the top IT spot, and for sitting CIOs looking to refine their mobile, social and cloud strategies and knowledge

The definitive work on how to achieve leadership success in IT, Straight to the Top, Second Edition reveals how the role of the CIO is changing due to major trends associated with consumer and enterprise products and technologies driving new mobile solutions in today's organizations; cloud computing and the move away from controlled / internally managed data centers to pay as you use and elastic cloud infrastructure and application services; and the impact social media is having on today's complex organizations.

Author Gregory S. Smith expertly coaches existing and aspiring CIOs on building the requisite skills through his observations and experience as a veteran CIO with more than twenty-five years of experience leading IT teams and delivering complex technical solutions in the information technology field.

• An invaluable guide to help information technology and business professionals recognize the qualities, skills, and expertise necessary to attain the role of a CIO or enhance the skills for sitting CIOs
• Equips IT managers, CIOs, and CTOs to strategically plan their career moves
• Packed with encouragement, advice, and essential skills for aspiring and sitting CIOs
• Features interviews with leading IT professionals, CIOs, and executive recruiting professionals

Providing an organized and comprehensive view of the CIO job and its important role in modern organizations, Straight to the Top, Second Edition equips sitting CIOs and CIO candidates with the strategies and knowledge necessary to be successful in the new business normal - a mobile, social and cloud-based world, and how to provide technology leadership as a world-class CIO.

PART ONE

Key Change Drivers and Trends Impacting the CIO Role Today

CHAPTER 1

Why the Role of the CIO Continues to Change

The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

—Arthur C. Clark1

I am honored to have the opportunity to write the second edition of Straight to the Top for several reasons. First, the information technology (IT) market continues to be robust and a constantly changing canvas that allows vendors, consumers, and IT professionals the opportunity to paint their masterpieces with different technical tools and colors.

Second, my editors at John Wiley & Sons and I saw the market opportunity to update the original text, and they had confidence in me to write the succeeding volume in a way that would assist and educate IT and business professionals on the rise.

Third, I am concerned that the chief information officer (CIO) role may be evolving to a dangerously nontechnical role that relies more on business acumen and less on IT experience and knowledge. A less technical CIO role has been a topic in a variety of media outlets for years now, and the volume seems to be rising. In a recent interview with a major media player, the journalist asked me my thoughts on whether the CIO role still needed to be technical. The interviewer suggested rotating other C-level executives through the CIO role on a six-month basis as a way to interject other business knowledge into the role. He indicated that some organizations were experimenting with this unique technique.

When asked whether I supported this process, I answered the question with a resounding no. I went on to suggest that it wasn't a good idea to extend that concept and rotate the CIO through other C-level positions, including chief financial officer (CFO) and chief marketing officer (CMO). Can you imagine what would happen to a CIO rotating through a CFO role during the certification of year-end financials—especially if there are issues and audit management comments? The answer is the possibility of prison.

Regarding the skills that CIOs need today, let me be crystal clear. The CIO must have technical knowledge (practical and theoretical) in addition to solid business skills in order to be able to succeed in today's complex environments and beyond. I have met many CIOs who are well received in the marketplace and who are accomplished in the delivery of several large and complex projects but who lack the technical skills and the trust of their own staffs. In the first edition of this book, I cited a CIO research report finding that more than 40 percent of IT staff members surveyed thought that their CIOs were not technically savvy enough about their companies' technologies to lead their respective departments.2 Today's CIOs need to be technically savvy and business savvy.

Let me be crystal clear with my next statement as well. CIOs throughout this and the next decade need to be IT leaders with tremendous business and technical skills. They need to understand wireless technologies, security, cloud computing, social networking, virtualization, and business intelligence in addition to the “softer” skills like vendor and contract management, communication, financial management, and IT governance. I still believe that those experiences—combined with the right academic mix of a bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or information systems and a master's degree in business—form the killer combination. I'll explore this topic more in Chapter 6, where regional, national, and international executive recruiters weigh in on the skills and experience needed by today's IT leaders.

IT leaders who have great business acumen and experience will undoubtedly need to rely on their subordinates or outside consulting experts for technical skills and IT know-how, but business-only CIOs run the risk of relying on them too much. Concepts in IT networking and operations as well as mobile and cloud technologies—including significant changes in integration technology, software development, enterprise applications, and security—are all fairly technical components inside IT. I believe that CIOs with solid technical grounding are better able to rally their IT departments, gain their respect and trust, and appropriately build a successful multiyear strategy that includes a comprehensive and shared discussion with their subordinates, but not one that is dictated by them due to the CIOs' lack of technical grounding.

An analogy that I used in the first edition stated it clearly and looked at the question of expertise from a different perspective and discipline. Does a CFO need to be well grounded in both financial management and accounting principles? Undoubtedly, yes. Similarly, the CIO needs to be technical in his or her role. Thus, CIO leaders today need to be the full package: savvy in technology and seasoned business professionals.

Since I last penned Straight to the Top, I've been busy expanding my career, building my knowledge on the many changing technologies affecting IT executives today, and learning more about the businesses of the organizations in which I've had the honor of serving. These three accomplishments in continuing education are no small feat. As of this writing, social media is alive and well and becoming more and more important to the CIO strategy every day. No longer is social media just a way for staff members who are bored out of their minds at work to waste time chatting with friends online. Facebook, Twitter, and other technologies are vibrant, are expanding at a mind-boggling pace, and are causing a major paradigm shift in IT strategies today.

In addition, the cloud is no longer an experiment, but rather a viable business model and technical opportunity for organizations looking to roll out applications faster and with more fault tolerance and expandability. Consumer devices are invading organizations at an alarming rate, multiplying with vendor and model variations, and providing throbbing headaches for IT professionals across the globe who adopt them. Old-school technocrats are used to controlled environments and systems. Modern-day CIOs need to embrace and manage a changing technology that includes tablets, new smartphones, social networking (including via mobile), and collaboration in the cloud. These are all examples of disruptive technologies that are maturing and causing CIOs to rethink their strategies and governance models.

Consumer tools like Apple's iPad, Google's Nexus 7, Amazon's Kindle, Microsoft's Surface tablet, and Samsung's Galaxy are pushing the limits of tablet computing and moving more IT organizations into a decentralized heterogeneous mobile environment. This, of course, is in addition to the plethora of personal digital assistants (PDAs) on the market and the behind-the-scenes war of the mobile device operating systems. IT standards and governance are being tested every day with new technology releases and consumer adoption of these devices. Bring your own device (BYOD) to work is having a profound effect on IT departments today. I'll have more to say about that in a subsequent chapter, but the bottom line is that the consumerization of IT is happening, and we can't stop it. Those who put their heads in the sand and ignore this trend may be hailed as security hawks, but they won't be loved by the employees of the organization, many of whom are members of Generations X and Y.

Gone are the days of Internet Explorer–only or –dominant browsers, BlackBerry-only business-grade smartphones, and the fat personal computer that stored all programs, data, and processing power on a synchronized platform of local client machines and centralized servers. Nope—we're in for a new ride now. Organizations are deploying cloud-based and mobile applications at breakneck speeds. The integration of data between cloud technologies and on-premise systems is also changing, adding layers of complexity, especially in terms of stability and security.

I recently spoke at a CIO event in Canada about the changing IT landscape and the drivers that are pushing CIOs to reevaluate their strategies. Although many CIOs in the audience communicated a solid understanding of these drivers—with several able to discuss their strategies in support of mobile, cloud, and social technology—there were a couple who had not developed strategies in one or two of the shifting drivers affecting the IT industry. This perplexed me a bit, but then it hit me months later, when I was in a completely different geographical part of the world.

CIOs have been trying for so long to control their environments through classic governance models with nonflexible standards that some of them have actually been able to stave off disruptive technologies likes the ones affecting the marketplace today. I've spoken to many CIOs who block social media web sites from their staff members at work, block access to personal e-mail, don't allow online shopping during business hours, and don't support or allow personal devices on their networks. For the sake of firm control, these CIOs have sacrificed opportunities for both professional and business growth.

Many of the technologies driving change and innovation today in the marketplace may help our teams be more collaborative, open, and remote or mobile in the goals of driving revenue and i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: Key Change Drivers and Trends Impacting the CIO Role Today
• Part Two: The Modern-Day CIO
• About the Author
• Index