CIO’s have a lot on their minds – a never-ending stream of priorities both strategic and tactical that must be managed. No matter how hard you work, it’s difficult to get to it all. At least that was my experience…
I recently completed my 2nd acting CIO role. Both were in growing organizations whose products and services were online –making IT very strategic to the business. My biggest challenge was that although I quickly built an IT plan aligned with business goals and a very clear vision of where we needed to head, the urgent and critical task and projects really filled up my day. The list of important, but not yet urgent initiatives was an ever growing pile of work that I could not seem to get to. My staff was out of bandwidth too and not always senior enough to assist with certain items.
As I exited the 2nd role, I wondered…Do CIO’s need HELP?
The CIO job is hard – I think one of the most difficult jobs in business today. Your business peers and management often lack a realistic understanding of the challenges IT deals with on a day to day basis, and the technical depth to comprehend what it takes to meet their needs from a cost, schedule, and labor perspective. This leaves CIOs with a huge job on their hands to both contribute to company’s strategic direction while ensuring ongoing tactical execution. It’s a difficult job.
As a CIO, do you wish you had some senior ‘help’? If you did – what would they do for you?
Here are some things I’d pick:
Execution Assistance: Key projects aren’t moving fast enough – and you don’t have time to drive them. I would like strong, experienced project and program management that can quickly grasp business intent and identify and remove barriers to progress to get projects back on track, completed and deployed.
Progress on those almost urgent priorities: While my team is focused on urgent business and operational priorities, it would be great to have someone giving us forward progress in areas such as Audit Compliance, Disaster Recovery, IT Process Definition, and Product Upgrades.
Strategic groundwork: As CIO you are being stretched in many directions and don’t always have staff members with a strategic perspective. Seasoned assistance on strategic research, financial analysis, process evaluation, and compliance assessments would have really helped me to drive decision making or process change.
Technology alternatives: With all the competing priorities, it is hard to keep up with technology changes. It would be great to have assistance with evaluation and analysis of technology and product alternatives to provide the groundwork for technology solution decisions.
Sounding board for the tough problems: Sometimes I just wished I had some senior talent who knew enough about my business to talk over some of the really tough issues. I just wanted the benefit of someone with a different set of experiences to brainstorm with without political or morale impact.
With this sort of assistance, I believe I could have achieved more of my strategic goals…and spent less time up at night thinking about what I was not getting accomplished.
I would be interested in your thoughts on this and on our new CIO Assist service offering.
Please see our brief at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/598a2cb315d5db14ee3dc2d1/t/598a2e8cfc01552c2f532d3d/1283971058011/CIO+Assist+100908.pdf