It's wrong to view leadership ability as something you have or you don't, say IT executives known for cultivating leaders among their staff. If a person has the potential to lead, a skillful CIO can recognize this, refine that potential through a set of carefully chosen experiences, and produce a strong leader.
You say we need to move from systems of record to systems of engagement. What's the difference?
While 20-something employees are often a catalyst for bringing new technologies, such as social media, into the corporate world, entry-level workers may lack the decision-making skills necessary for using such tools effectively. It's a deficit that CIOs have to consider when deploying IT, says Tom Murphy, CIO of AmerisourceBergen.
Consumers check in on Foursquare. Your employees chat with customers on Facebook. Everyone tweets. Social media is everywhere, right? Not quite.
Shifting business intelligence and analytics off-premise can make financial sense, as it does with other applications. Instead of buying servers and software licenses up front as a large, sunk capital cost, paying monthly fees from operating budgets can be less expensive over the life of the application. But doing BI in the cloud also carries some particular challenges, one of which is that it can be hard to define in advance every type of report you want to run using cloud-based data.
Your new book is about managing strategy in turbulent times. What factors must a CIO, in particular, balance when responding to a crisis? In different kinds of crises - product, economic, political - one common thread is the information available to executives.
Remember knowledge management? In the 1990s, KM emerged as a way to collect and share expertise across a company. Employees would fill out profiles for a database about their skills and knowledge. Colleagues could query the system to find the best person to help with a project.
Michael Cusumano is a professor of management and engineering systems at MIT's Sloan School of Management and author of Staying Power: Six Enduring Principles for Managing Strategy and Innovation in an Uncertain World.
Remember knowledge management (KM)? In the 1990s, KM emerged as a way to collect and share expertise across a company. Employees would fill out profiles for a database about their skills and knowledge. Colleagues could query the system to find the best person to help with a project.
A person doesn't shop for a mattress too often, and the process takes time. Typically, a customer looks over mattresses on display at a store, asks a salesman a few questions and says she will go home to think it over. The salesman hands the shopper his card and urges her to come back soon.
Herbalife, a $2.3 billion company that markets nutrition, weight-management and personal-care products to 2 million global distributors, made key changes in its sales strategy over the last year that brought with them a big jump in the amount of data the IT group must manage. The info glut-more than 240 terabytes of data-required a new storage and management strategy.
Are today's CIOs more innovative than they were 10 years ago?
The five accomplished executives we induct this year into the CIO Hall of Fame are leaders defined by the drive to test themselves and, in the process, push their organizations to new heights. They combine superb management with technology prowess to produce a line of sustained financial results for the public and private sectors.
Aegon Religare wants to grow its insurance sales in tandem with the salaries of a burgeoning middle class in India. The fastest way to do it, company executives determined last year, would be to sell policies on the Internet-a novel way to market insurance in that country.
As the grid of smart products grows more crowded with cars, appliances and even clothing carrying sensors, Web access and other technology for transmitting data between consumers and companies, the Federal Trade Commission is considering "do not track" policies.