It's good to learn from the mistakes of others. After all, if you don't, others will get a chance to learn from your failures. What then, are some of the things you should not do as CIO?
Here is a list of the top 10 mistakes IT executives make. This way, you can avoid them and become better at your job, and even better for your organization.
Not Listening to Your Team: Collective wisdom is seldom wrong. While it's easy to rely on a hunch and your gut feelings, you should not ignore the team's input. If you ask your team to go your way or the highway, this will likely generate uneasiness and lack of buy-in. It could also close the door to better ideas.
Not Enjoying a Diverse Experience: Throughout your career, you've worked hard, stayed abreast of technology, and climbed the career ladder. All that dedication took you to your current position, but it won't take you any further. CIOs generally don't acquire CEO roles unless they work at a tech company. It's people who have been in multiple roles who generally get further up the career ladder. So, be ready to move sideways before moving up.
Buying into Consultant Speak: Consultants are often good at solving problems -- but not always. Most consultants are not researchers or practitioners. They are good presenters and speakers. They don’t have to live with the consequences of their proposed actions. If you work with consultants, their compensations should be tied to your organization's key performance indicators (KPIs).
Continuing the Status Quo: For many years, organizations implemented IT business applications with the short-sighted goal of solving a particular problem. This is a necessity mainly due to the dynamic nature of the business and industry in which most companies operate, and is especially true in the case of small businesses that cannot afford to have overheads like IT governance or a full-time CIO.
However, they miss the lasting implications. Short-term project successes are often achieved at the expense of long-term, enterprise-wide cost and value. Technology is costly; integration is complicated, and if the enterprise IT architecture is not taken into account, we end up with a situation like the picture below.
A CIO is expected to clear the mess, and at the same time, take business forward.
Short-Term Thinking, Long-Term Problems
By focusing only on immediate concerns, CIOs create bottlenecks, overcrowded systems, and an ugly infrastructure that can't handle future needs.
Putting IT Before Business: IT should not get in the way of business. IT is a facilitator, or, at best, an enabler. People love Apple products because they make them feel smart by not getting in their way. IT should be seamless and transparent, helping business achieve their goals.
Not Updating Skill Sets: It's easy to live month to month, quarter to quarter, and forget the most important, but not the most urgent, need to upgrade skills in the ever-changing field of IT. Training classes, workshops, and seminars should be a regular part of your team’s development plan.
Using People to do the Work: People don’t like being used as tools. But this is exactly what they look like from most top managers’ eyes: Human resources that can be used to get work done. On the other hand, there are leaders who take an alternate view of using work as an opportunity to develop people. These leaders get the work done, and they are also loved by their teams. Use work to develop people.
Not Aligning the Whole Organization: IT initiatives are often aimed at something that is bigger than IT -- something that spans the entire organization. Stakeholder management thus becomes critical to the success of the project. Not taking the whole organization into account results in failed IT projects, a poor impression of the IT team, and career risk for you, the CIO.
Focusing on Either/Or: Most business decisions involve trade offs. For example, you can either focus on excellent customer service or lower cost to serve, but not both. That’s true in most cases with departments like marketing, customer service, or sales. Matters within IT are different. IT can do both things at the same time. And we should.
Let Your Best People Leave: Today, most people focus on maximizing take-home pay, instead of looking at total employment benefits. It's difficult to match people’s expectations of significant salary increases exceeding inflation every year, but people can be compensated in other ways: work life balance, development opportunities, job diversity, and other benefits. Losing quality employees is expensive; figure out what it takes to keep them, and come up with programs that deliver job satisfaction.
Have a successful 2013.
— Talha Khalid is a teacher and business manager based in Pakistan.
...there is a wide safety net provided by the government through taxpayers to protect people from not having a roof over their head or food in their stomachs, schools for their kids or healthcare for anyone.
That's big government for you!
Or more seriously, I'm sure you're right about the motivations of the Nigerian community (I did know some members), and you can add to that a determination to send money home to help out family.
Reminds me of a little tidbit I remember from diversity training long ago.
In the US, it's commonplace for managers to single out employees for praise during staff meetings. "Thanks to Bill, who went above and beyond working late to sort out the inventory last Tuesday!" But in some cultures, it's considered bad to be singled out from the group for attention, so that kind of praise will backfire.
Interesting, @Mashka. Without knowing anything about Nigeria in the 1980s, perhaps one reason that Nigerian managers were focused more on financial benefits was that there was a different baseline. In Britain, there's unemployment (the dole), things like Social Security in the US, national health insurance... in other words, although there are homeless people in Britain, there is a wide safety net provided by the government through taxpayers to protect people from not having a roof over their head or food in their stomachs, schools for their kids or healthcare for anyone. I'm guessing that, without income, that is not necessarily the case in Nigeria--or at least in the 1980s. If that's so, you'd obviously care a lot more about earning a lot of money while you can to ensure you and your family can survive for the rest of your life.
I have read a very interesting article about motivation of Nigerian and British managers, who work in Britain- the article is not that new, the reaesrach was condacted in 80s I guess, or may be early 90sю
So the main poit was that Biritish managers were focused on such things as self development, job satisfaction, career opportunities, while the Nigerian managers were mostly motivated by material values such as salary, money bonuses- so the basic idea of this article was that employees from the third world countries were better motivated by material benefits, and for employees from Great Britain were better motivated by life/work balance opportunities, some self realisation opportunities and so on.
Afterwards I talked to different people and it turned out that it's not that simple but I am sure that there should be cultural differences, or people are just people?
If you view job as keeping systems running than you have a myopic view of the business. In order to keep the business running you need to look outside IT like you say.
Working conditions are probably the primary reason that many people. If you are established in some part of your career there is a pay bracket that you will get irrespective of the company.
Working conditions are probably the primary reason that many people. If you are established in some part of your career there is a pay bracket that you will get irrespective of the company.
We did post some results from preliminary data and to describe the project, an ongoing study of University of Miami students and their computer preferences/usage. Since it was based on college students, we worked around the university's schedule and it started well. Occasionally wonder what we might have found out, if allowed to continue!
Looking at IT as a technology rather than a business organization is a key mistake. If you view the job as keeping systems running, that's all the job will ever be, and business managers will look outside IT when they need innovation.
Actually, pay is only one reason that people leave. Another reason -- really the main reason -- is working conditions. Give people challenging work and treat them respectfully, and they'll stick around even if the pay elsewhere is better.
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