Many IT organizations do not understand what it means to be in IT. The truth is we are not in the technology business. We are in the marketing business.
By Charles Araujo, founder and CEO of the IT Transformation Institute.

Manter 15 minutos por dia de contato com o idioma inglês já faz diferença, diz especialista. Confira a agenda básica de estudos para começar a praticar.


Falar inglês com naturalidade é fundamental para quem deseja crescer na carreira. Em grande parte das seleções para cargos executivos ou oportunidades para trainees, por exemplo, o domínio do idioma é menos um diferencial competitivo e mais um dos requisitos essenciais para participar do processo.

Mas, e quando falta tempo para voltar à sala de aula? A sócia-diretora da Companhia de Idiomas, Rosangela Souza, indicou uma agenda básica para quem não tem tempo de frequentar uma escola de inglês, mas quer desenvolver suas habilidades ainda neste ano. Para ela, apostar alguns minutos diários de contato com a língua já proporciona um salto no domínio do inglês.

“Tente se dedicar pelo menos quinze minutos por dia, de forma disciplinada e focada (sem interrupções ou distrações). Este hábito diário vai trazer bons resultados no final de um ano”, diz Rosangela.

Confira por onde começar e o que fazer dia a dia. As sugestões são valiosas para quem já tem nível intermediário:

Segunda-feira: Ouça

Cursos gratuitos do Coursera, palestras no TED são boas fontes de aprendizado. A gama de temas é enorme, basta escolher o assunto que mais chamar a sua atenção.

“Agregam inglês e informação”, diz Rosangela. É a chance de ouvir pessoas de sucesso falando sobre coisas interessantes. E isto pode ser feito durante atividades rotineiras como o trajeto até o trabalho ou a casa, como caminhada, compras ou até mesmo lavar a louça.

Terça-feira: Fale

Uma refeição do dia conversando em inglês com um amigo, colega ou parente que tenha, pelo menos, nível intermediário é a indicação do dia. “Peça 30 minutos por semana, para que tomem um café da manhã na padaria, almocem ou se encontrem no parque para falarem em inglês”, recomenda Rosangela. Algumas estratégias ajudam a destravar a conversação.

Para quem não encontrar disposição entre as pessoas mais próximas, vale apostar em conversas por Skype ou outras plataformas. Há escolas que oferecem este serviço e é possível fechar pacotes semanais de 20 minutos. “A vantagem é que você será corrigido, além de falar bastante, pois serão só você e o professor”, diz Rosangela.

Quarta-feira: Leia

Escolha uma notícia por semana, em um portal de notícias em inglês. "Mesmo que entenda muito pouco, não desista”, diz Rosangela. A dica é começar por reportagens cujo assunto você já leu em português e, que, portanto, já tem noção do contexto.

“Aos poucos, a pessoa vai adquirindo vocabulário, pois vai relacionar o contexto às palavras usadas na matéria”, diz a sócia-diretora da Companhia de Idiomas.

Quinta-feira: Aprenda (ou relembre) uma estrutura gramatical

Do que ouviu na palestra do TED ou no curso do Coursera, na conversa com o amigo ou do que leu na notícia, escolha uma estrutura gramatical para pesquisar.

“Faça a você mesmo perguntas do tipo: por que ele usou "would"? O que era mesmo o 'have been'?”, afirma Rosangela.

O livro de gramática é o seu “amigo” do dia. “O mais comum é o English Grammar In Use. Mas pode ser outro livro de gramática. Se tiver respostas, melhor ainda”, diz Rosangela.

Sexta-feira: Aprenda cinco palavras

Ao longo das atividades realizadas durante a semana, é bem provável que tenham surgido palavras novas das quais vocês não sabe o significado. Anote-as e pesquise os usos e sentidos empregados. “Tire um tempo para tentar formar frases com elas”, indica Rosangela.

Não se preocupe muito se a frase está corretíssima, diz ela. “O importante é contextualizar as palavras novas, para não esquecer”, diz.

Sábado: Escolha uma música

Use uma música de que você gosta e já conhece faz tempo para aprender vocabulário, estrutura e pronúncia. Estude a letra em inglês, e, se for preciso, consulte a sua tradução.

“Como a melodia e o som das palavras estão na sua memória há anos, será muito mais fácil aprender”, diz Rosana.

Domingo: Mude o jeito de ver um filme

A dica de estudo para o domingo é assistir a um filme americano ou inglês de um jeito diferente. “Tente, por alguns minutos, se concentrar no idioma que ouve, palavras, estrutura, pronúncia, e não apenas ler a legenda”, indica Rosangela.


Fonte: Exame.com

Challenges are everywhere for a CIO, around every corner, creeping up from behind you, even right in front of you. These challenges create risk for you and your company, risks that can cause tremendous loss of productivity, wasted resources, and frustration.

There are literally dozens of bullets and arrows flying at a CIO every day.

In my travels in managing IT organizations for more than 20 years, I’ve found there are 6 key risks a CIO needs to learn how to avoid. In this article, I’ll identify them for you, and I’ll follow-up with a short post on each risk with insight on how to prevent it in your organization.

The 6 key risks a CIO must avoid include:

• Business disconnect – Many studies suggest the over 50% of IT organizations are out of sync with their company’s needs and issues. When this occurs, the company loses significantly in wasted expense and lost productivity. This issue is a key concern of CIO’s and CEO’s alike in surveys every year.
• Project failure – Delivering what you say you will do, when you say it will be delivered and within the cost you say it will cost is paramount, , , it is how you achieve credibility. Several studies find each year that the failure rate in IT projects is quite high causing loss of productivity and money in company after company around the world.
• Losing people – Losing key staff can cause significant challenges for an IT organization. CIO’s need to be able to keep their best people in order to make progress.
• Missing your budget – When the IT department fails to achieve its budget for the year, the CEO and CFO must make it somewhere else. CIO’s need to be very astute about budgeting so they can achieve their financial plan and earn trust from the other executives of the company.
• Downtime – Nothing will get a CIO fired faster than an environment with lots of systems or network downtime. Developing a stable infrastructure is key.
• Security – Technology plays an important role in creating a secure environment for people in the company and for the hardware and software environment created to support the business.

Source: ITLever

Pick metrics to show where IT is going, not just where it’s been.
By Andrew Horne

At the start of the year many IT leadership teams refresh their scorecards, but too often, the result is unusable and quickly forgotten. Scorecards fail for a number of reasons. Last week I wrote about the mechanics of building a workable scorecard and discussed seven pitfalls in collecting and using IT metrics. This week, I will suggest some metrics to include.

One of the first pitfalls is to pick metrics that don’t connect to a strategic goal. Some metrics should link directly to business strategy, but these will differ by company. Other metrics should link to IT’s own strategy, and these may be more consistent as most IT strategies are shaped by the same trends.

CEB’s Future of Corporate IT study describes five shifts that are reshaping IT. Below, I have selected a handful of forward looking metrics from our IT Scorecard Builder tool that can be used to guide IT through the shifts.

• Project Interdependencies – The IT project portfolio is changing. More projects relate to analytics, collaboration, and customer interaction, rather than process automation. This shift leads to more interdependencies, as innovative new functionality relies on foundational capabilities such as data integration or a collaboration platform.
  
  One way to manage these interdependencies is to measure high risk “driver projects”. A driver project has a large number of other projects dependent on it. Progressive companies identify driver projects, assess the risks to the project, and devote additional resources and oversight to reduce the risk. To track progress, the IT scorecard measures the percentage of driver projects that are high risk.

• Service Health – More than 50% of IT teams are adopting end-to-end IT services to identify and deliver on specific business outcomes. If a service truly supports a business outcome, when the service fails the business outcome also fails, so service health becomes critical.
  
  The potential impact of service failure can be measured by looking at the percentage of functionality at risk, divided by the number of levels of redundancy. This can be multiplied by the percentage of employees who use the functionality. The higher the resulting percentage, the healthier the service. Services with low percentages should be the targeted for greater investment and oversight.

• Vendor Performance – The cloud is just the latest of many sourcing options that are gradually reducing the amount of in-house delivery. Reliance on external partners means that it is important to keep a close eye on vendor performance. Some scorecards include metrics such as vendor staff absenteeism or turnover that help predict future vendor performance.

• Complexity – A growing percentage of business leaders provision technology for themselves. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can lead to greater complexity that drives up costs and creates risk.
  
  To distinguish between complexity that is justified by the resulting speed and flexibility, and complexity that is problematic because of cost and risk, some organizations measure progress against a complexity target. IT estimates the acceptable level of complexity in each architectural layer then measures actual complexity against this target. The metric changes as redundant technologies are removed and new technologies are added.

• IT Skills Shortages – The changes faced by IT will lead to huge shifts in skills and roles. While some skills can be acquired through hiring, much will have to come by developing the existing team. To this end, some organizations maintain a skills development index that measures the number of employees who are on track against their skills development goals.

Fonte: CEB IT Blog

By Vaughan Merlyn

Source: IT Organization Circa 2017

By Glenn Weinstein, CTO and co-founder at Appirio

The Wall Street Journal published a piece recently by my colleague Narinder Singh, arguing that the traditional CIO role should be "decomposed" into two separate jobs: a "technology" person, and a "business productivity" person. The former would focus on "cost reduction and maintenance of service levels"; the latter would then be freed up to drive "demonstrable business impact."

I acknowledge the appeal of the idea. Who wouldn't want to shed the more mundane aspects of their job? But actually relieving CIOs of responsibility for core technology would be counter-productive for many of the reasons mentioned below. Narinder and I have had many discussions on this topic over the last few months, and he encouraged me to lay out my argument here as a counterpart to his article. So here goes...

• You Need Power. The essential purpose of the CIO role is to use technology to deliver business value, typically in the form of information flow. By removing ownership of the technology, you deprive the CIO of the power base they need to deliver.
  
• You Need Accountability. Without oversight of the technology, the CIO would lose an important check-and-balance that moderates the temptation to make grandiose promises without having realistic plans to deliver. Unfortunately too many business leaders underestimate the complexity of getting technology to actually work; we rely on the CIO as a reality check.
  
• You Need (Public) Cloud. The largest reason CIOs and their IT departments continue to commit around 70 percent of resources to "run" activities (operations, maintenance, keeping the lights on) is because they are so infrastructure-intensive. By largely shifting responsibility for servers (hardware, operating systems, networking, application software) to public cloud providers, CIOs can flip the model, and commit 70 percent of resources to "build" and "innovate" activities. This is the right way to free up the CIO's time to focus on innovation. Splitting the CIO role is a noble but, in my opinion, misguided answer to this problem.
  
• Execution Matters. The decomposition idea implicitly relegates the overseer of "commoditized technology" to a secondary role. But day-to-day service is what employees and customers actually see from IT. All the innovative ideas in the world are worthless without the ability to execute and deliver them to the end user, every day. At the C-level, you have to deliver both big ideas, and actual execution.

A good CIO should focus a large portion of their time and energy on differentiation, and improving business productivity. And they can augment these efforts with strategy consultants, innovation teams, pilot projects, and industry surveys. But this can't be the full definition of the job. Ultimately, "idea people" need to meet up with "execution people." And the CIO cannot afford to camp with just the "idea people" - their key role is to join up these two groups, and actually deliver!

So what do you, our CIO readers, think? Which side of the fence are you on?

Fonte: Appirio

By Ahmad Al Mulla

I have been in the I.T. field for over 24 years of which over 15 years in various managerial positions. During this period I have made my share of mistakes. Though I cannot recall how many, I came to realise many of them in retrospect. It was only when I started sharing them with my fellow CIOs, I came to the realisation that I wasn’t the only one – many of them have made similar mistakes. I thought of sharing the most common mistakes that CIOs make, in my view. I have a list of over 100 but I will only list the top 5 that can be easily addressed. These are in no particular order of preference or priority.

• Celebrating success too early: It is not unusual that celebrations take place on the day of the “go-live” of a project or immediately after. While this might make sense logically (as finally at this point the output is seen and visible), practically, it is the worst time to celebrate. The reason being this is the starting point of change management from the users’ point of view and they from this point onwards need to undergo a period of anxiety and discomfort till the learning takes place and the new system stabilizes. It is amazing how CIOs make such mistakes while emphasizing the importance of change management at the same time.
  
• Not speaking the right language: I have seen CIOs fluctuating between two extremes when it comes to the language they use. First is the use of technical jargon that scares the business people and the other is not providing any technical details at all. Striking the right balance is quite important and unfortunately, most CIOs do not seem to find this balance.
  
• Missing the big picture: In making decisions, many CIOs seem to miss the big picture (taking business into consideration). This eventually results in not being able to present the justifications for investments in a convincing business context. In other words, decisions must be ably supported with business reasoning rather than limiting them to technical enhancements or features. CIOs must consider the business with the macro level in mind at all times. It can be argued that a CIO's business skills are more important than his or her technical skills.
  
• Undermining the technical knowledge of business people: While it is true that the IT field is fast evolving and very difficult to keep abreast of, this does not mean that the business people cannot keep up with the latest developments. As a matter of fact, for this same reason, you might find it surprising to see that many business employees know a lot more about I.T. than those within the I.T. field itself.
  
• Forgetting their own department: Many CIOs do not have metrics and KPIs for their own I.T. departments linked to the business. Even those who have them seem to measure means rather than ends. This is really astounding and I have seen it in almost all companies.

It is said that "Experience comes from what we have done. Wisdom comes from what we have done badly." As Steve Goodier put it, wisdom is what the school of life gives us with every poor report card. Wisdom is hard won, and it is often birthed in the ashes of failure.

I really don't worry about the things I've done badly. If I pay attention to what went wrong and why, then even my most spectacular failures gave something priceless back – they taught valuable lessons. Sometimes wisdom can't be gotten any other way.

Source: LinkedIn

By Peter Kretzman

It’s time for me to speak up. Not that I haven’t before, here and here. But sometimes I just have to shake my head. I read certain IT-related articles on the web, or tweets by some colleagues, and they’re so out of sync with IT reality that I feel like it’s Opposite Day.

Here’s what I mean. Let’s look closely at the latest item of this ilk that has spurred my head to swivel: this rather stunning recent Forbes interview with Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research at Gartner Executive Programs. At core, McDonald is touting and praising, and with much reasonable-sounding eloquence and assurance, an abandonment of common long-standing lessons in IT. In fact, such an abandonment is being presented as the only path to goodness, success, and truth; traditional areas of focus for IT are deprecated as being either of lesser importance, or even as the veritable hallmark of a clearly backward CIO who just doesn’t get the new order.

This isn’t to pick on Gartner alone. As I said, similar views can be found every day. Sometimes this view is couched as IT needing to take a “journey” through different “generations” — where the stated ultimate goal is to actually to eliminate the need for an IT strategy altogether. In the Gartner interview, the terminology used, however murkily, is that of CIOs being “rich” or “poor”. Underlying this deprecating and generally anti-IT attitude is the belief (explicitly stated by Gartner) that business people are superior to technologists: “It’s always easier to teach a business person technology than a technology person business.”


So to Gartner, not only is the very educability of the technology person at question, but these hapless tunnel-visioned technologists are even going about it all the wrong way: for example, by misguidedly focusing on properly managing IT resources: “The poor IT organizations believe they create value by properly managing IT resources.” If they emphasize enabling the business, that’s wrong too: “If you define your IT organization as enabling the business, that’s an indication you’re headed in the poorer direction.” And, it turns out, the real secret to success is to throw over the IT people altogether when it comes to management: “the real determinant [of a “rich” CIO] is that many of [the “rich” CIOs] come straight out of business.” And again, it’s not just Gartner; elsewhere on the web, we can find similar statements, such as “many [IT] projects disappoint because they’re “too focused on timescale and budget”.

If you step back from being sucked in by this golden shimmer of an IT-less future, devoid of drudgery and tedium and all the traditional IT messiness, these haughty, ludicrous statements pretty much rebut themselves. As one Twitter contact of mine put it in reaction, “It’s only hubris which allows one functional area (IT incl) to think the other’s domain is simple.”

And hubris is the right word here. Yes, much about the underlying recommendations sounds reasonable on the surface: we should emphasize business value above all, and we need to focus on enhancing the revenue, profits, and value of the company. Those specific points are inarguable, to be sure. But it’s quite revealing, the way that the discussion is typically framed: it’s both enormously judgmental and dismissive, using words like “rich” vs. “poor”, or it makes grandiose claims that “with innovative and enterprising CIO leadership, a company’s strategy for investing in change will come to fruition and not apparently be about IT at all!” Or the statement that “running IT is not a valuable use of [the next generation of CIOs’] time, talents and energy”.

The obvious implication there, of course, is that if one still believes in the critical (indeed, strategic) importance of a well-managed IT function, even amidst a necessary focus on business value, then one clearly isn’t “the next generation” of CIO. This isn’t simply arrogant; it’s flat-out wrongheaded and dangerous. It leaves hard-learned practical lessons behind while presenting a fine-sounding, lofty, but ultimately fuzzy theory that promises to lift the CIO (and by extension the company) above the standard oh-so-trivial concerns of delivery and technology. It redefines basic words in order to depict a kind of transcendence of the mundane and dreary. Dismissing the importance of basic IT facets such as proper management of resources, or adherence to time and budget, or technology itself, is akin to pitches that promise weight loss without dieting, or language learning without memorization; such pitches feed on the fears of the already discouraged. Let me be utterly blunt: it’s snake oil; I don’t buy it, and neither should you.

Recommended take-aways for the CEO and other senior management:

• Don’t leave the valuable lessons of the past behind in your desire to evolve to some kind of higher plane in IT. The lessons still matter; in fact, they matter more than ever.
• Rather than striving to leave technology behind as a lesser concern, look for ways to integrate it and leverage it in everything the company does, centralizing and standardizing those things that matter as you go.
• Recognize and extend what technologists bring to the table, rather than pushing them back into their own ghetto and belittling their contributions and concerns.
• Don’t reject the need to carefully manage IT resources at a senior level. Despite what you may be told by masters of theory, those resources really don’t just manage themselves, and the risks involved in their mismanagement have become greater, not lesser. Does anyone really need to debate this?
• Continue to insist that IT spend wisely (and continue to focus) on both new work and ongoing operations. The potential for financial mismanagement, if covered by a blanket excuse of “oh, we’re focusing on value now” is simply huge; it’s unwise and unnecessary to shrug that risk off as passé, or to relegate its oversight completely to junior managers.

In this day and age, the health, revenue, and growth of your company quite likely depend on the degree to which it can successfully leverage technology, both in a day-to-day sense and for strategic initiatives. Effective strategy is critical, but excellence in operational execution can often be a key differentiator. Above all, and for either, it’s not the time to step away from thinking that technology matters.

Source: CTO/CIO Perspectives

No matter how high you are on the corporate ladder, there’s always a value in having a mentor or a trusted partner who can help you navigate through the twists and turns of your career. Even accomplished CEOs say they need a helping hand or some good advice every once in a while. But how to you know if a mentor or respected peer is the right kind of advisor for you?

In the recent book, "The Business of Wanting More: Why Some Executives Move from Success to Fulfillment and Others Don’t" (Barnegat Press/Available in October), author Brian Gast examines these relationships in-depth. Gast advises executives to align themselves with an accountability partner or mentor based on your goals. How can you avoid making the wrong choice? Gast offers the following questions that you should ask yourself before moving forward.

Gast is president/founder of Quadrant Corp., an executive coaching/leadership development firm that has worked with clients such as Cisco, Stryker and Roche Pharmaceuticals.


1. “Is this person reliable and accountable?”
Productive, career-focused strategy sessions only work if both parties show up and give it their best.




2. “Does he have skills that I want?”
Well-roundedness is admirable. But your professional growth demands more than a “one size fits all” approach.




3. “Is he capable of meaningful conversations about topics that are relevant to my performance?”
In addition to the right kind of experience, your mentor must be able to effectively articulate lessons learned.




4. “Can he relate to your experiences?”
If he expresses complete disconnect with what you deal with day-to-day, it’s not likely the right fit.




5. “Do his accomplishments inspire you?"
Don’t be overly influenced by status. Look at what the potential partner has actually achieved that you’d like to emulate.




6. “Can you articulate firm, concrete expectations with this person?”
Setting concrete goals with timelines helps frame conversations and anticipate progress.




7. “Can he take complex problems and find their essence?”
It’s that “wise outsider” perspective that will help you more readily tackle what once seemed impossible.




8. “Does he see problems before they happen?”
If so, he very well may keep you from making mistakes that will damage your credibility.




9. “Does he take smart risks?
”Well-researched, calculated risks are the fuel of disruptive innovation.




10. “Does he tell you what you need to know – as opposed to what you want to hear?”
Enablers of bad thinking often transform promising leaders into failed executives.




Fonte: CIO Insight

The CIO role spans and must influence all parts of an organization without directly controlling them. Today’s trends — global, mobile, data-driven virtual business — increase the stakes and make CIO influence not only important for the CIO’s personal success but for the success of the company as well. This requires skills and competencies that may not come naturally to many IT leaders.

There are two main trends that are driving a shift in power in IT.

First is the ongoing integration of information technology into all aspects of business, from the way work gets done to the very products companies sell. This is causing massive changes in both business and operating models, affecting people, process and organizational structures, according to a recent study by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services (note: this is a PDF file). As a consequence, a lot more people have a lot more to say about what happens when it comes to IT.

The second trend is the consumerization of IT. Technology is everywhere. Both employees and customers – especially younger ones – transact and interact through mobile devices, easy-to-use applets and social networks. In the process, they have come to expect a certain type of experience – and they increasingly want the choice to be their own.

While these trends in one sense have a kind of democratizing effect, that does not mean decisions about and management of IT are any easier; quite the contrary. To the average consumer, technology seems simple – and that’s a good thing. But as any CIO knows, achieving simplicity in the technology world is not simple at all.


With technology more central to business operations and outcomes, IT has a greater responsibility for company performance and results. At the same time, there are more stakeholders involved, so IT has less direct control over the decisions that will determine those results. IT leaders must learn to lead through collaboration and influence.

Influential leaders share three common traits:

• Credibility: They have built credibility with business colleagues and employees by first and foremost delivering the fundamentals. Successful CIOs refer to this as “table stakes” – the price to get into the game. If you haven’t been able to deliver services reliably and securely, no one’s going to listen to or be inclined to go along with your ideas. Credibility is increased when CIOs engage with colleagues’ most important business challenges and successfully devise solutions to help them meet their goals.
• Trust: Influential leaders have earned the trust of their colleagues by doing what they said they would do – everything from meeting project deadlines to delivering the right capabilities and results – again and again. Trust is deepened by sticking to commitments even when times are tough.
• Relationship: Influential leaders develop strong relationships over time. These relationships are certainly enabled by credibility and trust, but it takes more than that. They also require the less tangible elements of identification and liking. Various studies support the idea that people like and prefer to work with people who are like them in some important way. If you can’t find common ground with your colleagues – if IT is viewed as somehow different and separate from the rest of the business – your work will be that much harder.
  
  Fostering positive feelings of liking in this context happens by showing people that you’re interested in their goals, problems and lives – and that you can relate to them on a human level – because – no surprise – people tend to feel kindly toward people who like them! One of the most fundamental laws of human behavior is that of reciprocity: If you like me, I’m more inclined to like you. And if you do something for me, I’m more likely to do something for you in return.

The pace of change today is hurricane force – and IT is right at the center of the storm. The goal no longer can be for IT to keep up with business or end users or customers – things are happening too fast for that – but to make the journey together. Sometimes one group may be out ahead, sometimes another, but in a strong relationship based on credibility and trust, the CIO will always have a leadership role to play. It just may not look like what you expected.

Source: Lundberg Media

Your goal isn’t to ensure every employee is great; it's to ensure that collectively they'll be great. (There’s a big difference.)
By Jeff Haden (@jeff_haden)



We all know what makes a great team: Great people, right?

That’s true — as long as you define “great” correctly. That’s a definition many business owners, and bosses in general, often get wrong.

Years ago I worked in a manufacturing plant where productivity was all-important. We spent significant time and effort working to improve efficiency, reduce waste, reduce downtime... typical improvement initiatives. As supervisors and managers we also spent a lot of time competing with each other. (Hey, you are what you measure, right?)

One manager decided team performance could be predicted and improved by quantifying the attributes of a great machine operator. He felt that if you could determine the key attributes, and measure potential team members against those attributes, that he could select and create a great team.

I was there when he tried to identify those attributes. During the brainstorming session he filled up 12 easel pad sheets with key skills and attributes. The problem was, great operators possess a dizzying array of qualities. Many attributes were hard to quantify, like “self starter” and “team player.”

So afterwards he focused on attributes that could be quantified. One was mechanical aptitude. Plenty of tests evaluate and measure mechanical knowledge. And intuitively it made sense: Machine operators run machines, so mechanical knowledge must be important. Off he went, in short order creating a team filled with mechanical aptitude superstars.

Yet my team — most of us with limited mechanical aptitude (based on testing, my mechanical aptitude was the worst) — consistently outran his team by a wide margin.

Where did he go wrong? Faced with too many variables, many of them intangible and hard to quantify, he picked an attribute he could put a number on: mechanical aptitude.

Never mind our plant’s equipment failed less than 4% of the time. Never mind we had skilled machinists who were seconds away if we needed help. Mechanical aptitude could be measured in a way hustle, teamwork, drive, and work ethic could not, even though those qualities were much more important than mechanical aptitude.

So he went with mechanical aptitude because it was something he could “know,” instead of focusing on other qualities that were more difficult to assess. That’s a simple, and all too common, mistake.

Here's how you can avoid it. The key is to recognize that every employee brings different skills and attitudes, so your goal isn’t to ensure every employee is great; your goal is to ensure that as a team those employees can collectively be great. (There’s a big difference.)

To build a great team:

Decide what key attribute you must have.

Forget about the stereotypically well-rounded employee for a moment. If you could only pick one attribute, what would you choose as the most important skill or quality a great employee needs to have to succeed in the position?

Maybe it's attitude, or interpersonal skills, or teamwork, or a specific skill set... whatever it is, that attribute is the foundation for individual employees and for your team. Training can fill in the gaps, but this is the attribute almost every employee must possess.

Decide what key attribute you can't have.

This one’s easy. Just complete this sentence: "I don't care how great he is, I don’t want him on my team because he…" Typically your answer won’t be skills-based; it will be something like terrible interpersonal skills, a horrible work ethic, or a larger than life ego. Just identify the attribute you can’t live with and make sure it stays off your team.

Determine your threshold point.

You may not be able to build a team where every member possesses your most important attribute. In our case a crew was made up of six operators. We had room for one operator who wasn't quite as fast on job changeovers but was a great leader. (In fact, he could serve as the poster boy for my definition of a remarkable employee.) The rest of us bridged his speed gap and we all benefitted from his leadership skills.

Could we have afforded two operators on the team like him? No, probably not. Decide how many individuals who possess your most important attribute will be enough to make things work. If you can find more, that’s great. If not you’re still okay.

Put together the rest of your puzzle.

Knowing your threshold point frees you up to build a team with complementary skills. You can take on a great team player who is technically weaker, or a loner who is an outstanding problem solver, or a person with limited experience who possesses incredible hustle and drive.

Never assume the only individual attributes that matter are attributes that can be measured. In some cases, when individual contributors work alone and largely outside the scope of a team, quantifiable skills may be all-important.

But where teams are concerned, success is almost always the result of intangible qualities. Focus only on numbers — especially on the wrong numbers — and you build teams that on paper should perform well… but in practice never do.

Fonte: Inc.com

By including a careful consideration of process, technology, people and culture in every new implementation, you can ensure that all stakeholders -- from the top executives to your end-users -- are equipped to maximize your new solution. Unfortunately, the mistake that many organizations make is that they approach such changes in the context of system upgrades and departmental solutions, with the idea that this is how to achieve their stated goals. Most organizations overlook the fact that any new technology implementation represents an opportunity to review, improve and/or streamline the underlying processes.

A successful, large-scale technology implementation, such as an Enterprise Performance Management or Business Intelligence rollout, has the potential to fundamentally alter the ways in which your organization conducts business, how decisions are made, and how people work. The success of any new implementation relies upon the right balance of business and technology. Effective change management is one of the critical -- and most often overlooked -- components of every new implementation.

Successful change management requires equal attention to these four components:

• Process
• Technology
• People
• Corporate culture

By including a careful consideration of process, technology, people and culture in every new implementation, you can ensure that all stakeholders -- from your C-level executives to your end-users -- are equipped to maximize your new solution.

Unfortunately, the mistake that many organizations make is that they approach such changes in the context of system upgrades and departmental solutions, with the idea that this is how to achieve their stated goals. Most organizations overlook the fact that any new technology implementation represents an opportunity to review, improve and/or streamline the underlying processes.

With every implementation, the criteria and goals are unique to each organization, but we can identify some very broad, basic commonalities for implementing any change. These usually involve finding ways to improve efficiency while reducing the effort required to complete certain tasks.

Sounds simple, right? Guess again.

The best approach to any technology implementation begins by evaluating how to improve current ways of doing business. You can't manage what you can't measure, so understanding which elements you want to manage, and how you want to manage them, is critical.

Let's use the finance world as an example. Stakeholders in this arena are keenly interested in the quality of budgets and forecasts, accurate reporting, and optimized costs. Technology improvements can offer tools to deliver quality, accuracy, and reduced costs, but technology can't govern the people responsible for the quality and accuracy of the data and reporting.

A successful change management initiative relies upon the right balance of business and technology. The desire for change is most often driven by business needs, and IT is involved in defining the goals to make sure the proposed solution is feasible, supportable and scalable. If business needs and supporting technology are not aligned, the organization ends up with siloed information and mismatched goals.

For example, let's say one of the goals of your change initiative is to reduce your company's order-close cycle from seven days to three days. Achieving this will probably require streamlining, upgrading and/or improving the technology being used. But that's only part of the equation. To determine the best way to achieve this goal, your organization will need to review the process, as well as the technology, to see how both can be improved simultaneously. In order to do this, the CFO and CIO need to work hand-in-hand to eliminate silos between the business units and IT.

In any change management initiative, the CIO must understand the "what," "why" and "how" of the information that the business units need. This requires stepping out of the safety zone of technology and asking these eight questions of your business users:

• Where do the data come from?
• What is the timeframe for information delivery?
• How does the information need to be delivered-e.g., via Web, static reports, or spreadsheets?
• What are people doing with the information?
• Who has access to what information when? For example, are there periods when data is available to a broader audience and other times, such as blackout periods, when it is restricted to a smaller group?
• Do the users need to be involved in the process?
• Are they adding value to the process?
• Can the process be streamlined by bypassing select people and delivering information directly to the individual who needs it?

By asking these questions, you can establish a roadmap to achieve the goals of the change initiative. The answers to the questions above will help you determine what investments are required, as well as what process changes are needed. You'll also understand how these factors redefine what people do and how they contribute to the process. Once you have a complete picture of the organization landscape, you can create a new vision for how technology, process, and people can work together to achieve project goals, and how your company's culture can adapt accordingly.

People and culture are most often the points of failure for any IT implementation. Involving stakeholders in every step of the process is the key to any successful technology implementation. Understanding two of the most common underlying causes of these failure points will help you as you approach your new technology initiatives.

By their nature, most people are creatures of habit and the prospect of change is almost always accompanied by fear. Oftentimes, this fear is focused on loss of their own livelihoods. A common question from users is: "If the technology, processes, culture changes, will I still be valued in the organization?"
Users will not change themselves. If what they've been doing meets the understood requirement of their job, then they'll have no incentive to change.
As CIO, you may have to assume the role of a project management officer, soliciting feedback from users, allowing them to critique current processes and providing new options for how they can perform their tasks more efficiently and effectively than was previously possible.

Whenever possible, you want to make sure user participation is occurring closest to the source of responsibility. You want to grant ownership of information at the point of origin, because this is where you will get the most clarity about the value of the data involved.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Robust User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and end-user training are necessary components of successful change management. Planning for these needs to take place at the outset of your project. These activities represent a chance to isolate defects prior to going live; they also provide a chance to uncover and overcome any cultural resistance to the change long before it can adversely affect business operations.

Here are three steps you can take along the way to lay the groundwork for effective UAT and user training:

• Identify key stakeholders at the outset that will become members of your project team.
• Throughout the project, invite these key stakeholders to corporate headquarters for open discussions, system prototyping, and design reviews in order to gather feedback and make corrections.
• Train the team. When it's time for training, don't try to cut corners with a train-the-trainer approach. Instead, have all key stakeholders from the project team go to each worldwide site as a group to train people on how to use the applications. This gives regional users the chance to ask questions that are relevant to their specific job requirements and to provide feedback on the new system and procedures. It also gives your project team a chance to make sure the new system worked globally and locally and would be accepted by the users outside of corporate line of sight.

This three-pronged approach to training and UAT can save your operation time and money in the long run. It gives your project team the opportunity to learn about and assess any problems that arise, to gauge whether they are local or company-wide problems, and address them accordingly. If questions raised during UAT delay your go-live date, you'll still have your old system to fall back on. Business can continue as normal while corrections to the new implementation are made. Without a UAT process, you're likely to discover deep problems only after going live, at which time the options available for solving the problems that arise may be very expensive or simply not viable, leaving you with a costly, failed project.

Effective change management is about giving people an inside view throughout the course of your project. This may require you to move outside of your own technology comfort zone in the interest of managing change from the diverse perspectives of your users. As difficult as it is at times to involve your users in the process, when you listen to and consider their concerns and solicit their feedback it will ultimately bring you the buy-in you need to make your project a success.

If what you are delivering does not resonate with your users, they will not adopt it, no matter how amazing the technology is. If you understand the user's perspective on how any change is going to impact their jobs, remove the focus from technology, and be mindful of the corporate culture, you'll find that your technology changes will be seen as welcome improvements to the organization.

Source: CIO Insight

I believe IT professionals truly want to help others. However, we tend to focus on the technology, not the client. As CIO and former Library Director at Assumption College in Worcester, MA, I propose that a great customer service model may actually be found in libraries.

In many organizations, IT gets a bad rap mostly due to a perception of poor customer service. Clients feel poorly treated and share this with colleagues whenever they get the chance. IT’s reputation suffers -- as does your own as CIO -- and everyone’s unhappy.

Upon studying this further, I believe it’s primarily a communications-related problem that has two dimensions:

• Communication with clients and other stakeholders during the problem-resolution process is lacking.
• IT professionals often use “geek-speak,” which few souls outside of IT understand.

Naturally, this frustrates everyone and makes non-IT folks feel inferior.

I believe IT professionals truly want to help others. However, we tend to focus on the technology, not the client. We believe our job is to fix problems, and we expend considerable time and effort doing so. Unfortunately, IT professionals often spend little time communicating with clients (and sometimes even with their CIO) during a problem resolution process. As a result, your clients incorrectly assume that nothing is being done and they become frustrated. Once they start complaining to peers, the organization’s perception of IT takes a hit.

In addition, workers have become accustomed to using and managing their own consumer-grade computing devices at home, and often fail to understand that the solutions used in business settings are typically more complex and sophisticated than their personal devices. This ease-of-use perception can make workers skeptical about the amount of effort required by you to support their business technologies, adding a feeling of defensiveness that can carry on into future help requests.

As CIO and former Library Director at Assumption College in Worcester, MA, I propose that a great customer service model may actually be found in libraries. IT departments and libraries are similar in that they are both service organizations, which also, simultaneously, manage large collections of things: hardware and software, or books and databases, respectively. Librarians have had a couple of hundred years to build their reputations for being service-oriented, while the field of information technology is still only a few decades old.

Let's consider the librarians' approach. Reference librarians focus their work around the library's users, rather than around the information materials they provide. Instead of solving the information questions of users, librarians try to teach patrons how to do their own research and assist them in using library technology. A key component in this work is communication, both face-to-face and through the marketing of library services.

A primary skill of librarians is being able to conduct the “reference interview.” This is how the librarian endeavors to find out the patron’s real question or information need. Before any answers are provided, a reference interview helps librarians set the groundwork for communicating with users. Throughout the reference transaction the librarian checks in with the user and, when the information need is satisfied, the librarian will typically ask if there is anything else that he or she can do for the user. The user will leave the library with his or her problem solved and, as well, with the idea that he or she can always return to that librarian for assistance in the future.

While the majority of problems brought to IT are addressed to the satisfaction of their clients, there are some common scenarios that stand in the way of a successful outcome. For example, it sometimes happens that IT clients think they know what the problem is, and IT acts immediately on that assumption. Often times, the problem is misdiagnosed and requires more time for resolution. Alternatively, IT technicians may disregard the client’s assessment of the problem, leaving him or her out of the resolution process and feeling foolish. In some of these cases, though, the client may actually be correct in their assessment of the problem.

Unlike librarians, IT workers are more likely to be communicating via phone, email or texting, and won't have as much time or opportunity to communicate with each individual face-to-face. However, it's still possible during the initial engagement for IT professionals to conduct their own version of the librarian's "reference interview."

During this "technology interview," the client should have the opportunity to explain his/her understanding of the problem, and to receive acknowledgement—though not necessarily agreement. Although the client may be desperate to get his or her computer fixed, the “technology interview” will be time well spent: it will serve to speed problem resolution and help to build a constructive relationship between user and IT.

Source: CIO Insight

Your IT organization doesn't have to love you. They don’t have to think you are the most brilliant leader in the world. What they must do, however, is believe is that you have a good plan.


What does a CIO need to be successful? We each have our own answers. Some may say that technical excellence and knowledge count most, others might place the emphasis on business awareness, relationships or just hard-core ambition. Certainly, all of these are necessary to reach a certain level in an organization. But to take the final step and be accepted as someone who is truly a member of the C-suite, you need one more thing: influence. This is the fourth in a series of articles on how to position yourself as an influential leader in your organization. The first installment was CIO Career Killer: Lack of Influence; the second was CIO Careers: Why IT Gets No Respect; the third was "Winning Over Business Users When You Don't Have a Dime."

As you work toward attaining the level influence with your business counterparts that you need (and deserve), you'll encounter what may be the greatest test of your commitment. This test will require a strong heart and a tough stomach, because your ego is likely going to take a bruising. Have faith, because the rewards of getting over this hurdle will pay long-term dividends.

I’m talking about the challenge of establishing credibility with your entire IT organization, from the top of the IT org chart to your network administrators and support technicians. While it may be obvious to some, this concept of organizational credibility bears clarifying. Before you can expect to have credibility and influence with the executive suite, you absolutely must have genuine and real credibility with your own people.

Your IT organization doesn't have to love you. They don’t have to think you are the most brilliant leader in the world. What they must do, however, is believe is that you have a good plan. They need to believe that you know where you are going, and that you know how you are going to get there. They need to be able to articulate and support your basic vision and strategy for IT.

Some of you reading this are likely thinking: “What is he talking about? Of course I have credibility with my people. They all work for me. They are part of the IT organization.” Well, here's a reality check: You may think you have credibility with your people, but the facts tell a very different story.

Over the course of the past 18 months, I asked 150 IT professionals (from networking managers to business analysts to senior directors) a set of questions with the purpose of uncovering whether or not their boss has real credibility with them. Here are highlights of what I found:

• 70% of respondents could not articulate the IT strategy and vision
• 54% didn’t think there was an overall plan for IT
• 60% felt that the IT leader was too caught up in politics
• 57% said that the IT leader was focused on the wrong issues for the business

Ouch.

CIO Credibility: Still Skeptical?

Here's a simple test to further prove the point: Think about your own personal experiences before you became the IT leader or area head. What did you think about your boss's ideas and plans? I am not asking whether or not you liked your boss as a person. Maybe you liked the guy who promoted you into your current job. But, think back over your career: What did you really think about the ideas and plans of the various CIOs under whom you have worked? Did they enjoy real professional credibility with you by virtue of their vision and leadership?

We all have blind spots, especially when it comes to honestly seeing ourselves as others do. But it’s incumbent on every IT leader to get to the truth. You have to know that you have real credibility with your people, not just corporate follow-the-leader.

I’ve been consulting to major corporations for more than 20 years. And I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times when a senior executive (IT or otherwise) really knew how his/her people felt about their ideas.

OK. Now comes the hard part: Are you willing to find out the truth about where your credibility is with your people? Are you open to seeing numbers like the ones above?

Have faith

Before you shy away from the challenge because you fear the results, I have some really good news: Although your results may look a little dismal at first, the situation can be quickly repaired. In nearly every case I have followed, the reason for initially low numbers was due to a communications shortfall rather than a genuine lack of belief in the CIO. Most IT leaders simply do not communicate with their people regularly. They don’t share with their people the key information necessary to sustain their credibility. Once they do, things turn around really quickly.

To get started on your path to credibility, I suggest you begin with an anonymous survey of your team. To give you a jumpstart, below you'll find the list of 11 questions I used in my study—and continue to use today. (All questions are presented as declarative statements and answers should be provided using a scale from 0 – 9; 0 for no agreement and 9 for total agreement.)

1. I understand my IT leader's strategy and vision for IT
2. I can articulate my IT leader's strategy and vision for IT
3. I know what the overall plan is for IT in our organization
4. I know what the overall plan is for my area of IT
5. The IT leader is too involved in details
6. The IT leader is too focused on the big picture
7. The IT leader is too political
8. The IT leader focuses on the most important issues for IT and the company
9. I don’t know what the IT leader does most of the time
10. The IT leader knows me personally
11. The IT leader knows what’s important to me

But wait, there's more. Don’t ask only for a number rating; also leave room for general comments under each question. The comments are often the best part...

Source: CIO Careers

It’s up to you to make the focus on user experience a priority for your team. It’s up to you to create an awareness in your team about the importance of working side-by-side with business colleagues on the system issues that are most important to them.

While you are working on last week’s “assignment” and figuring out how much credibility you have within your IT organization, it's time to turn the discussion back to jumping IT budget hurdles.

IT budgets are tight and they are likely going to get tighter as corporate America battens down the hatches for another recession. But, truth be told, this happens to be an unlucky coincidence. You can expect to face tight budgeting environments a number of times over the course of your career as a successful CIO.

Businesses, industries, countries and even whole economies go through cycles. When times are good, IT has the budget to undertake new projects. In lean years (which, for IT is usually half of the time, if not more) projects are scaled back or eliminated, and IT leaders struggle to engage stakeholders. You might as well use today’s economic environment to learn the ropes. It’s an skill set that will help prepare you to withstand future budgetary drought.

Substituting time for money


When we first looked at the issue of building influence when you haven’t got a dime, I proposed a basic approach, i.e., to shift your focus to investing time in place of money. It's essential to regard your time, the time of your key people, as your most precious resource, one which needs to be carefully allocated to your company’s most important challenges and opportunities.

I know your next question. I get it all the time. It goes something like this:

It’s a fair question and often a real problem for many IT leaders.

The good news is that there is a solution; one that not only gets you and your team the time and attention of your business colleagues, but will also enhance your influence throughout your enterprise.

Getting back to IT basis


Let’s agree on a very basic premise to start: Users judge IT systems from the top down. In other words, based on:

• The front-end interface, i.e., the look and feel.
• Their experience navigating through the system and using it to perform their work WITHOUT any training.
• Whether or not the functionality they envisioned automatically appears at just the right time in just the right way.
• The data accuracy
• The speed and responsiveness of the system.
• Whether or not they need to call tech support even though they never attended training.
• Everything else that went into building the system and delivering it to them.

In short, it’s all about the user's experience with the system.

They don’t give a hoot about all the work that went into building the back end of the system—the guts of it all. They couldn’t care less about the data model, the special interfaces or the customer de-dupe algorithms your team spent months perfecting. All they care about is their experience as users. And if that experience feels awkward or unintuitive to them, then they will conclude that there is something “wrong” with the system.

Let’s put aside for the moment whether or not the way users judge systems is justified and appropriate. (We all know the answer to that anyway.) Let's not jump to a defensive position because of the user communities’ unrealistic expectations. Let’s, instead, admit that IT doesn’t always do the best job when it comes to engineering a crisp and engaging user experience. We don’t typically spend enough time understanding how the system fits into the users' workflow. And finally, working within the constraints of time, budget and the software package we often sacrifice user engagement and experience on the alter of “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

In the vast majority of cases there is great room for improvement in the user experience, unrealistic user expectations notwithstanding.That gap between the desired user experience and where things are today is exactly where you and your team have the opportunity to engage with the business community.

The answer is found in the battlefield, not in HQ

Given how important user experience is to your business colleagues, I guarantee you will find an open door and warm welcome when you tell your colleagues that you want to work on improving the user experience of the systems. The first step in the process? To get your people walking in the shoes of the users; to get them to experience firsthand what the users experience. No secondhand relating of problems. No change requests. I'm talking about real-life, side-by-side, user experience evaluations. Send your IT staff out into the workplace as if they were anthropologists sent to document human behavior.

Focus on User experience

I’m sure you remember those types of experiences from your early days in IT. It’s really what our job as IT professionals is all about. Unfortunately, when it comes to large projects, outsourced vendors, complex organizations and so on, it's easy be distanced from the real action, where the rubber meets the road. Here's where your job as the CIO comes in.

What happens next?
If your organization is like most, user experience reviews are going to uncover three types of issues:

• Quick-hit wins that can easily be implemented through minor configuration changes or with targeted user training
• Long-term issues that require significant budget but which have a real and meaningful payback
• Nice-to-have features that aren’t valuable to pursue

You know exactly what to do. Go for those quick hits. Work with the business to “find the budget” over time to meet the high impact goals, and manage expectations on the “nice-to-haves”—standard blocking and tackling for IT managers.

The result?

A renewed focus on improving user experience, facilitated by the IT leadership directly, is just the sort of initiative that tells the user community that, even when budgets are tight, you are there to work on the things that are most important to them. This builds influence and credibility like you can’t imagine.

Source: CIO Careers

By Don Desiderato (*)

At this time of the year, the typical CIO is in the middle of a firestorm. Projects are deep into the delivery phase, project and operational issues are inevitably emerging, and requests for late-stage and unplanned projects are cropping up with end-of-year completion demands.


So, what should you be doing now? Thinking about next year. Yes, that's right, thinking about next year. Your leadership team is fully capable of managing these complex day-to-day issues (with your guidance), so looking ahead is precisely what you need to be doing right now.

Most companies begin the annual budget process in August with a conclusion in the November/December time frame. Within this financial context, September is the time to look forward with a clear mind and strategically assess your organization. Now is the time to assemble a small group of smart internal people to assist with this thought process.Here are some suggestions on who to bring into the team:

• Enterprise architect. Typically, your enterprise architect will help paint a picture of what investment is needed in technology.
• Portfolio manager, PMO or project manager. This executive will help you understand your demand -- and therefore, your long-term staffing needs.
• Human resources. HR will help you re-assess performance issues and high-performing employees
• IT leadership. These executives will help contemplate any organizational changes needed
• Budget manager. This executive will help you confront the realities of the upcoming budget cycle.

Why is this so important? Because it allows you to do two things:

• Make mid-year course corrections; and
• Keep you focused on what's important -- the long-term future for the IT organization.

Course Corrections: Mid-year course corrections are important and often ignored given the high workload. This is the time to re-assess any HR issues and high-performing employees. If you have poorly performing staff members, you owe it to them, and yourself, to provide timely feedback on their progress. High performers need to be continually assessed for promotions or more challenging assignments. This is also the time to assess your current budget run rate, whether you need additional (or fewer) staff members, or need new project approvals. Any and all of these areas may result in course corrections.

Focus on the Future: The CIO's primary responsibility is to plan and guide the future for the IT organization. Business leaders expect this, and IT organizations crave it.

The CIO should always be working on two "live" documents.

One of these is the State of Technology document, which is your view of the technology's current state and the needs for the future based upon business aspirations. This document will give executive leadership confidence that IT can grow and evolve as the business grows.

The other document is the Year in Review. This should track the successes and failures of the year, share the lessons learned, and detail how the organization performed based on objectives and metrics set in place in the previous January.

Both documents should be maintained throughout the year so that they can be distributed in early Q1.

All of this strategic planning will result in a well-crafted strategy for 2012 by mid-Q4 2011. At that time, you will be able to communicate the future of IT with confidence -- to both executive leadership and your own IT organization. Happy planning.

(*) Don Desiderato is Principal with Novarica and a regular contributor to CIO Insight.

Source: The CIO's Calendar: BizTech