Tuesday | 14 October, 2008
How CIOs Can Benefit From Having Dual Roles
More CIOs are being asked to take on responsibilities outside of IT. And it's not just the business that benefits. Expanding your job description can be good for your career, too — provided you master the politics and rethink how you run IT
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Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for $US44.6 billion 02 February, 2008 08:35:01
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Overcoming Resistance
Most CIOs who take on another role don't feel diminished by it. But for members of their staff, it can take time to adjust to the new reality. "It was confusing for my team initially," says Gibson. "But now I think they feel like they're coequal members of my larger team. In this role, I can do a better job of having the business make clear what they want to pursue with technology; I can actually make the lives of IT people a little better."
Drouin says the IT group at TRW has been supportive of his add-on role. "Generally, they have seen it as strong support from the top that we have made significant progress as an organization."
Individuals on the business side can take longer to come around. When Coleman arrived at Sloan Valve, he inherited an IT role previously filled by a dictatorial personality: "That had created a lot of resentment, so I had to be careful about coming across as all-knowing." When he decided to take on additional responsibility outside of IT, he knew he had to tread even more gingerly. "In the early stages, a lot of people wondered what my real agenda was. They assumed I wanted to take over their department or become the next president of the company," Coleman recalls. Coleman made it clear he had "zero interest" in running the show.
"Clearly there can be resentment if somebody feels they have been passed over for a role and the CIO does not have the requisite 'business credentials,'" says Gordon. "It may be a misunderstanding of the CIO role that causes people to be on guard, not considering IT to be 'part of the business.'" Being seen by those in the business as more than "just" the CIO takes time. When Michael Hites was CIO and vice president of planning and IT with New Mexico State University, "everyone from the 'past' [would still ask] me about the latest BlackBerry or how to fix their website," he says. "It's my responsibility to be known as 'the strategic planning guy,' not theirs. My actions need to clearly show that." Hites, who began a new job in March with the much larger University of Illinois system as associate vice president of administrative IT services for the university administration, which includes Urbana-Champaign, Chicago, Springfield and Global Campus, says his experience outside of IT helped him get the job.
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CIO Live Podcast #79: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires Part II 05 October, 2007 06:00:00
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CIO Live Podcast #78: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires 28 September, 2007 17:34:25
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CIO Live Podcast #77: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part III 21 September, 2007 07:00:00
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CIO Live Podcast #76: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part II 14 September, 2007 07:00:00
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CIO Live Podcast #75: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part I 07 September, 2007 07:00:05
Part one in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance.
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IBM, Secret Service, others study identity/cybercrime issues 09 October, 2008 10:09:00
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Strange account management at Amazon 09 October, 2008 09:51:00
A careless login led to the discovery of some strange ccount management practices at one of the Internet's largest retailers.Via the RISKS mailing list comes an interesting tale of poor online account management at a major online retailer. According to Graham Bennett, accounts with Amazon display an odd behaviour that doesn't seem to have attracted much attention in the past.
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Lock It Up With Maxtor BlackArmour, Hardware Encrypted Storage Provides Government Grade Security For Consumers 10 October, 2008 09:04:00
Pitney Bowes MapInfo Launches New Version of AnySite 10 October, 2008 05:58:00
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