Saturday | 22 November, 2008
Ticked Off at Tick the Box Mentality
Does your executive search firm know the difference between an MIS manager and a CIO, and if it does, can it explain that difference to its corporate clients?
Taking Charge
The CIO Executive Council's Future-State CIO program is more than a tough love speech to the CIO community. The organization, working with internationally renowned executive recruiter and executive assessment firm Egon Zehnder, has created assessment tools that measure CIOs' capabilities in nine core executive competencies
1. Strategic Orientation: the ability to think long-term, leveraging business awareness, critical analysis and integration of information to develop an action-oriented plan
2. Results Orientation: a focus on improvement of business results
3. Commercial Orientation: identifying and seizing opportunities to increase profit and revenue
4. Market Knowledge: understanding the market, including competition, suppliers, customer base and regulatory environment
5. External Customer Impact: serving and building value-added relationships with customers or clients
6. Collaboration and Influence: working effectively with others, including internal customers, who do not work for you to have a positive impact on business performance
7. People and Organizational Development: developing long-term capabilities of others and the organization as a whole
8. Change Leadership: transforming and aligning an organization through its people to drive for improvement in a new and challenging direction
9. Team Leadership: focusing, aligning, and building effective groups in one's immediate organization
The CIO's score constitutes his/her "Executive Quotient", or EQ and indicates the leader's relative ability to be a future-state CIO. In addition, CIO Executive Council members developed a business readiness assessment tool to determine how prepared an organization is to embrace an expanded, strategic CIO role shift. This is important because the CIO's capabilities do not always align with an organization's expectation or need.
A Visual Model
Both the EQ and the Business Readiness scores are plotted on the Future-State CIO Model, which depicts the CIO's allocation of time (or focus) across the three fundamental aspects of the role: function head, transformational leader and business strategist. The higher the CIO's EQ, the more well-equipped he/she is to spend the majority of his/her time as a business strategist.
The difference between the CIO's EQ and the business's readiness score indicates the "Expectation/Capability Gap". Many CIO Executive Council members refer to this gap as "the extreme frustration zone". However, these same members are also quick to note that visual images of the "expectation gap" or "frustration zone" are intended to fuel CIOs into action, not excuses.
Indeed, the goal of the Future-State CIO program is to close the expectation/credibility gap while shifting both the CIO's capabilities and the business's expectations to the right and making way for the CIO to devote the lion's share of his/her time to business strategy.
More about Leader Computers, VIA, Echelon, SAP, Bill, ACT, Chevron, Leader, JD Edwards, H&R Block, Egon Zehnder, Westpac, Wall Street, Westpac
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The Secrets of C-Suite Success
With help from the CIO Executive Council, we tap into research about successful executives. Read on to learn more about the competencies CIOs need to develop to take the corner office, where CIOs fall short and what CEOs expect from CIOs.
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