Eye of the Beholder
A few years ago, based on its research, CSC Research Services published CEOs are from Mars, CIOs are from Pluto. Vice president William Koff says surveys showed that the many CIOs seen as being unsuccessful, including the 40 percent living in fear of being fired, were failing not because they couldn't provide cost-effective IT, but because they could neither contribute to business strategy nor communicate with top executives and were ineffective as change agents. (A comprehensive look at this report appeared in the March 2002 issue of CIO or go to www.cio.com.au March '02
CEOs want CIOs who exhibit openness, integrity, commercial awareness and a keen intellect; they want CIOs who have potential to add value to the business, who display leadership, energy, creativity, proactivity, passion and gravitas, and who have insight and action in equal proportions. They also want CIOs who show a propensity to change management, and who have vision and the ability to champion innovation.
"CSC's client executives like Ken Hill, vice president and CIO of General Dynamics, and leading recruiters Whitehead Mann, tell CSC CIOs must now position themselves as the leading change agent in the business," Koff says. That means they must: focus on processes, organization structures and values; develop a well-orchestrated vision and plan; promote the view that systems changes are not enough; challenge conventional practice; and build an innovation strategy.
The future belongs to CIOs and IT leadership teams that can build credibility and respect through consistent leadership practices, Gartner Group vice president and worldwide head of research Mark McDonald concludes. The 2004 Gartner Executive Programs (EXP) CIO survey found just 21 percent of respondents viewed their role as solely that of an IT service provider. The majority said his or her IS organization's role extended well beyond IT services to include business service delivery, business process management or technology innovation. Yet, surveys and anecdotal information indicate that business executives viewed IT leaders as merely technologists who keep the computers running.
The onus is thus on CIOs and IT leadership teams to build credibility by making commitments and keeping them. From this will come respect, as business leaders seek CIOs' opinions, expertise and recommendations on operating the enterprise. "Leadership credibility rests on operational credibility. The IT leadership team cannot be credible when the IS organization delivers poor results," McDonald notes.
But the research also shows another key leadership skill associated with CIOs is an ability to know their own limitations, and to build a team around them against those limitations. "So we find technically strong CIOs have recognized their business connection weaknesses and will invest in strong business relationship managers, and then we find the exact opposite as we find some CIOs who have a better business background obviously getting a CTO or some other group around them. The most recent manifestation of this is that CIOs are building Offices of the CIO (OCIOs) around them to shore up their weak spots and to give them the management capabilities and capacity that they need," McDonald says.
Effective CIO leaders can also abstract the current state of the business in order to improve or change it. Leading CIOs can "rise above the day-to-day grind of the business and its quest for competitive advantage", and recognize underlying structural and systems dynamics that must change in order to improve the business. That demands the CIO have a high sensitivity to the enterprise and its needs, as opposed to those of individual business units. The best CIOs, McDonald says, are highly curious about how elements of the business fit together and can recognize anything that breaks the pattern.
"The other thing we see in effective CIO leaders is that they have a strong project and project management mentality in terms of the drive to completion," McDonald says.
"One of the things we found relative to CIOs is that credible CIOs have delivered really three things over time. One is they deliver dial-tone-like service in terms of the IT services - [IT services] are just always there and they don't break. The other thing is that these CIOs deliver on their commitments to projects coming in on cost and on schedule. And the third one is that they are constantly able to demonstrate tangible connections to the business mission and vision."
When Gartner interviewed 50 high performing CIOs about what made them credible, three factors came through clearly. High performing CIOs say credibility starts with a baseline of delivering results (hence the importance of program project management discipline). It also comes from demonstrating clear alignment with the business and strategy, which makes business skills vital. And no CIO can perform well until they can attract executive attention by identifying the system dynamics and communicating those in business terms.
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