CIO Skills by Jorg

There are thousands of books about management. And I must admit that I’ve read quite a lot of them in the last years. I’ve always had a burning imperative to be a good manager that stands in front of his people. A manager that people can trust!

It has not always been easy, I must say. When reading about so many tactics, financials and numbers, human resources policies, etc,  it is sometimes easy to forget the most important part of being a manager; you’re the captain on your ship and the ship has to arrive at the port. Simple as that.

To achieve this goal, you’ll need a lot of people on the ship doing their tasks. No better example than a flight carrier, where thousands of people run around and everybody is doing what is expected from them. Different roles, different goals!

Your main task as manager should  be that everybody understands their own role and the goals that come with it. If everybody knows what to do, you don’t have to run around to tell everybody constantly what to do and to keep them busy.

The next task is to check if goals are being finished correctly. Two things can happen: It’s done right or it’s done wrong. Simple as that.

If someone has accomplished his goal in the right way, compliment him immediately and be specific on what he did right. If someone has failed to complete his goal, reprimand him and tell them how you (really) feel when it has happened and be specific on what he did wrong.

Don’t make the mistake that 80% of managers all make; don’t wait until it’s time for the yearly review of the employee to tell them what they did wrong in the last year. Tell people what’s wrong and especially good when it happens! This way they can learn and change.

What’s written above is the most important part of being a manager. You can be a manager who can make beautiful spreadsheet, present like the best and communicate like Steve Jobs. But if you fail to write down goals for each employee and check up on these goals, you already failed.

There you have it! You just saved thousands of dollars on books and courses. Now, go pay attention to your team!

Famous Trust Experiment

During my professional career, starting as a junior IT employee at Atos Origin until my business consultant work I’m doing now, one thing I’ve seen too little is trust. Somehow it seems that trust is something you’ll have to earn and which comes after years of hard work.

Because I work at a lot of different places for my consultancy work, I don’t have time to lose for building trust. I just GIVE trust. Some people find this strange. They come to me and tell me that I shouldn’t just trust employee X with this and that because he has done this and that in the past. The simple question I ask back is: And how do you want to change this person, if we don’t give him a change?

Two things can happen when you give trust to people: it works out or it doesn’t. If it works out, you’ll have the best supplier, most productive employee, most loyal customer. If it doesn’t work out, you will have to say goodbye.

Problem is that most people find it hard to say goodbye. And there is the trick; don’t make the road to long. You have to be clear that you give trust and what you expect back. For example: ask someone what their work is really about and what they are responsible for at work. They will have a small story to tell, but they don’t have any clear goals written down, which their manager knows about and agrees with.

If you give trust, it must be clear trust. Tell people what you expect of them and what they can expect from you. Write it down, so that you know and more important that the other person knows what you expect.

Two books that helped me a lot with building confidence to give clear trust are ‘The Speed of Trust’ and the ‘One Minute Manager’. Both really recommended reading!

Stop worrying that one day you will lose your best employee! It will happen anyway. Instead prepare you workforce for the future and start using the real power of the knowledge worker.

Start preparing your organization for the future of management: use your people as resources when you need them. Build a big pool of excellent knowledge workers.

The days that you had a complete team on your payroll are over. Even better: you don’t want a complete team of knowledge workers on your payroll at all!

Payroll workers are people who want stability and insurance. People who don’t want change. And you as a CIO want people who put their energy on the table. Who believe in what they are doing and dare to speak their mind. You don’t want cogs, you need intelligence!

Everything is a project these days, so just take what you want and don’t agree with a big bag of fruit, but only accept the shiniest and best pieces from the big basket! Be selective.

The excuse that it’s cheaper to have people on the payroll instead of hiring a freelancer is out of date! I’ve seen good freelancer do the work of 5 payrollers with a lot more visionary insight and energy then all of them together.

Choose: pay more and know that the job gets done with minimum interaction from you side, or pay less and pay for the consequences.

Don’t accept that company X provides you with a MCSE guy from the pool when you need him. Demand that you get the right guy!

One of the biggest mistakes in management is to try to treat everybody the same. The message I’m bringing now is that you should differentiate between people.

The biggest difference between workers in your business that is most known to managers, are the production workers and the knowledge workers. Were production workers are being managed by time, knowledge workers should be managed by result, but are rarely so.

As a CIO your team consists of knowledge workers, people who have studied so they could start working. A big difference with other kind of people. These people are professionals and willing to perform.

It’s your job to make it clear what the vision, mission and strategy of the company is and how the team plays an integral role in it. If professionals know what to do, they take action and do it.

Now, don’t make the mistake that many other managers make! Don’t walk in front of your professionals trying to control and see what they are doing. Just agree with each person or team what the deliverables are and be there for them when they have questions. For the rest of the time; mind your own business, unless asked.

Of course this sounds all like a perfect heaven but in business not everybody who is in the function of a knowledge worker IS a knowledge worker. Recognize and act on that! If you see that the person can become a knowledge worker, coach him. If you see that he can become a knowledge worker but that it may take a long time, give him another function or be clear and help find him find another job.

It’s so important to have a team that performs, but if you tackle the problem of creating highly productive professionals that work by result instead of hours, you will find that your team will do okay automatically.

Gartner presented their top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. These technologies are chosen because they will drive significant change, modification or disruption to the CIO’s strategy. So below is the list that represents the most likely, but not exclusively, strategic technologies that will make the biggest impact in business for the coming 12 to 36 months.

1. Cloud Computing

Already a big hype in 2009, but with the current development of clear standards for sure 2010 will become even bigger for cloud computing. Especially with the development of private, public and hybrid cloud standards were enterprises can start to experiment internally with cloud computing technology. For sure not every business process is ready to be taken into the cloud, but it’s going fast!

2. Advanced Analytics

Not just gathering with business intelligence but also predicting with advanced analytics is the future. Besides the big breakthrough of real-time in business intelligence, businesses want more; they want to predict the future.

3. Client Computing

Using the Windows operating system is not always the best solution anymore. There are other mature options emerging and CIOs have to keep an eye on them. There are some very interesting Linux versions emerging together with the highly powered Google Chrome edition. Of course the maturity of virtual desktops and thin clients also help.

4. IT for Green

Were last year the focus was still for Green IT, where everybody was busy making the IT components as Green as possible, now the game has changed. While businesses are not happy to spend extra money on Green IT, they are willing to spend money on IT to get the business more green. Think about things like document management, telepresence, teleworking, smart buildings, etc.

5. Reshaping the data centre

There are some big developments going on were massive cost reductions can be applied into the data centre. Chiller-free datacenters, follow the moon zones, solar power, highly efficient power supplies will form the basics. But virtual infrastructure will be an all other game that will be involved in this group.

6. Social Software and Social Computing

Internal social software like Wiki’s and portals become more and more important for collaboration purposes. Also the use of public social networks like facebook and LinkedIn set their footprint in businesses everywhere. The latest Chatter functionality from Salesforce gives a good insight where we are going too.

7. User Activity Monitoring

From a security point of view it stays very important to know what users are doing within your network. What they bring inside, how they use resources, predict what is needed. There will be a need for some very specialized software that can bind all these kind of variables together in one user activity monitoring system. It’s not only about detecting anymore, it’s about predicting.

8. Flash Memory

By 2012 the cost for a gigabyte of flash memory will be down to 16 cents, which will make Terrabyte flash drives very interesting. The end of hard disks is near and I personally predict a bad future for solid state disk, because they will be catched by the flash memory with regards of getting cheaper and bigger with storage.

9. Virtualization for Availability

The maturity model for virtualization reaches a new high. Not only will virtualization be used for getting a higher load on your resources and spreading risk, but due to new technologies that are already here, it will also be used to reach high availability. The possibility to freeze a system at a certain instruction, port it to another system, and continue with the next instruction will be common use. This teleportation function of virtualization will be a new selling point.

10. Mobile Applications

More and more business processes must be available on your mobile phone/client. Three platforms are clearly emerging: SMS, mobile web and native applications. Native applications costs to develop are of course much higher than the other two, but it’s clear that ease of use and customer interaction will be higher.

Besides being a good manager, there is one big thing that seperates a good CIO from any other. And this is exactly the part where the men will be seperated from the boys. CIO’s need to do it for love of the game. The game to know what is going on in ICT land and what is going to happen.

And exactly this point is were most CIO’s will fail eventually. Where senior IT people get promoted and become a CIO, their main focus in the first years will still stay tech. But somehow after walking around years in the management world they will loose touch with their business, with the passion for ICT, and they start focusing more and more on financial data and base decisions on key performance indicators (KPI) and balanced score cards.

Exactly at that point it’s that the CIO becomes just another manager. Don’t loose the passion for IT if you want to be a good CIO. Know what is going on on the work-floor. Ask your team what tools they are using, let them demonstrate it too you. Ask for information. Be an information sponge!

Each morning I get up at 5am. The first 2 hours are spend gaining new IT knowledge. I use google reader and my 280 RSS feeds. I use twitter, friendfeed and linkedin. I read books and magazines. It’s a lot of work! But if you love it, it isn’t work anymore.

After my first post I already got some questions from friends. As my blog is called CIO Skills, some of them wondered what a CIO exactly was. And even if they new it meant Chief Information Officer, they didn’t exactly know what responsibilities were attached to that title. So, it is a good idea to first tell about the role of a CIO.

In a company, small or big, there is a senior person who has responsibility for everything related to the information technologies and computer systems need for business.  In small businesses this is sometimes the most senior systems engineer or even the director (CEO) himself, but in large businesses most of the time this is a separate role filled in by an ICT manager, Information manager or the title that enterprises use the most, CIO.

The CIO looks at ICT from a business perspective. There are processes within a business that can be optimized and automated and for some of them it’s possible to use a bigger truck and for others it’s by using a new version of some software.

From a strategic point the CIO delivers vision and clarity about how the company can evolve into the future with the use of upcoming ICT technologies and what has to be done pro-actively to guaranty uptime of their business processes and keeping an eye on the ICT budget.

The CIO has some interesting tasks:

• Develop and maintain ICT strategy
• Prepare and defend ICT budgets
• Project Portfolio Management (PPM)
• Operational Excellence
• People (Knowledge Worker) Management

In the upcoming posts I  will go into more detail in the 5 tasks above and the future of CIO’s and their jobs.

A new blog by me, Jorg Jansen. Yes, I know I’ve already got a few, but they are all about my hobbies and somewhat related to my work but they are not about my professional work. You know; the work that pays for my house, food and upcoming Christmas tree!

And while its fun to write about new SaaS, cloud computing and data centre developments on another blog, that’s just about IT itself. My professional work consists looking at business processes and to see how we can automate this in the best way possible. Of course with a clear vision of where IT will be going to, so that we won’t make any wrong investments and with a clear eye on the financial part of it. In short and as you may guess from its URL: it’s all about my role as a freelance CIO and the stuff I learn and experience.

You can expect 2 updates every week with, at least for me, interesting topics with regards to business technology developments, management skills, business process optimizations, ICT visions and strategies. For some I use real life examples and others more the story behind it in a general way. And while the primary objective for me is to give back and spread knowledge, this blog also tributes to my personal brand and hopefully to a broadening of my network and clientele.

Hope you enjoy it and if you’ve got some questions or remarks just leave a comment! I try to answer everybody personally.