The Accidental Successful CIO
By Jim Anderson
“I don’t embrace excuses about why an IT department is not being successful, I embrace solutions.”
Over the last 25 years, Dr. Anderson has transformed failing CIOs worldwide. Dr. Anderson will turn these nervous executives into powerful leaders.
Welcome to the premier podcast for learning how to think and act like a successful CIO – both if you are a CIO today or if you hope to be one in the future.
The Accidental Successful CIOMay 08, 2019
CIOs Start To Redesign Their Web Sites To Meet The Needs Of Older Customers
As the person with the CIO job, you have a lot on your plate.
You are the one who is responsible for securing the companies network, you have to roll out new servers and storage, and you have to worry about getting everyone to reset their passwords every 90 days. However, it turns out that you are also responsible for something else that you may not be aware of: the usability of your company’s web site. Sure we all take a look at the website to make sure that it’s running ok.
However, it turns out that you need to take a look at it through the eyes of an older visitor.
European CIOs Come Under Fire When Their Systems Fail
The one thing that stock traders want to be able to do is to trade their stocks.
However, if the IT systems that they use to make this happen have a fault or an outage, then all of a sudden something that is normally always there can vanish instantly. When this happens, down lost time means money lost for stock traders. The person that they are going to be holding responsible for their losses will be the CIO who is in charge of the systems that they use. This was recently a big problem.
What are CIOs to do to prevent events like this?
CIOs Start To Deal With The Loss Of Encryption
CIOs who are following what is going on in the world of security and encryption know that things are about to dramatically change.
A new type of computing, quantum computing, is being developed. This new type of computing is going to be perfectly suited to breaking the types of encryption that we are using to secure our networks and our corporate data today.
Within 10 years these new quantum computers are going to become available and CIOs need to be getting ready to deal with them now.
VW’s CIO Looks For Ways To Catch Up With Tesla
Just about everyone knows who Volkswagen is.
They are the German company who makes cars – remember the Beetle from the 1960’s? Well, they are still around and they still make cars. The person with the CIO job has been studying the car market and has seen the rise of Tesla in the electric car space. VW would like to enter this market also.
However, despite their years of experience in making cars, it turns out that it’s been software that they have been struggling with as they try to enter this new market.
Do CIOs Need Robots To Manage Their Managers?
Ok, so let’s have a talk here for just a moment.
The managers that CIOs are putting into place these days seem to becoming younger and younger. Maybe it’s because there are so many millennials now working in the IT department, but it sure seems as though the pool of candidates that we can promote to manager no longer have any gray hair. This is causing a problem for the person with the CIO job. This new breed of manager lacks some basic training.
In order to ensure that this new generation of IT managers is going to be successful dealing with the importance of information technology, is this the time for the person in the CIO position to turn to robots to keep track of how their new managers are doing?
CIOs Discover That Dumb Technology Can’t Always Be Upgraded
As CIO we are always trying to move our companies forward because we understand the importance of information technology.
What this means sometimes is that when our company has a piece of equipment that has become outdated or perhaps no one knows how to use or maintain, we’ll often try to apply a wrapper technique to it. We’ll try to marry modern technology to older equipment in order to extend its life and avoid replacement costs.
However, as some CIOs are starting to discover, this is not always a good idea.
CIOs Start To Deal With Trying To Secure Their Supply Chains
When a CIO starts to think about what they need to do to secure their company, most often they tend to look around themselves.
They look at the company’s data centers, the desktop systems that people use, the laptops that people take home, etc. All of the company’s IT assets that relate to the importance of information technology can be seen and, with a little luck, secured. However, it turns out that there is one area that too many CIOs have been overlooking: their supply chain. What this means is that all of the computers and systems that a company’s suppliers use to connect to the company have to be as secure as the company’s systems are.
However, can a CIO ever be sure that their supply chain is secure
How Can CIOs Prevent The Creation Of A Post Pandemic Two-Tier Workplace?
In the post pandemic world CIOs are facing a major challenge: where should everyone work?
There are those people who have been just waiting for permission to return to the office because they like the environment and the interaction with all of the different people. However, on the other hand there are the people who actually prefer to work from home and who might leave the company if they were forced to come back into the office. CIOs are going to end up with a hybrid work environment with some workers in the office and some remote.
How is this going to work out for everyone?
Why Are More CIOs Keeping Their Data At Home Instead Of In The Cloud?
You would think that being a CIO these days would be a pretty easy job.
All you really have to do is to find ways to move more and more of your company’s IT assets into the cloud and everyone will think that you are doing a great job! However, it turns out that a number of people with the CIO job who understand the importance of information technology are starting to have second thoughts about doing exactly that. It turns out that there are a number of issues such as cost and security that make what seemed like a simple decision a lot harder.
CIOs need to take a careful look at their current situation and make the right decisions.
How CIOs Can Use Social Media To Further Their Career
CIOs need to understand that in order to be successful in communicating the importance of information technology, they need to work with others.
The people that they need to work with may not work for their company, and in fact they may not be in the same country as the CIO. We need to have the ability to reach out and connect with others who understand what we are trying to do and can provide us with the contacts and resources that we need. The big question for the person with the CIO job is how to get in touch with these people?
It turns out that the answer might be right before us: social media.
How Should CIOs Handle A Hybrid Office?
As all CIOs now realize: the world has changed.
The Covid-19 pandemic changed everything for everyone. After having spent a year working from home, most companies have now once again opened their offices. However, not all of their workers have come back and in fact many of their workers don’t want to come back. This means that the office environment that we once knew where everyone clustered in a shared environment has now gone away forever. Say hello to the “hybrid environment”.
How can CIOs make this new work environment work for everyone?
CIOs Know That The Biggest Threats Come From Inside
As the person with the CIO job, one of the things that takes up a lot of your time is trying to keep the company’s valuable data and knowledge safe because you understand the importance of information technology.
You try lots of different ways to make this happen: you install firewalls, you require everyone to change their passwords every 90 days, and you make sure that everyone has been trained about the dangers of phishing. However, in the end, it just might turn out that your greatest threat doesn’t come from the outside.
Rather, the people who work for your company might be the ones that you have to guard against.
Five Rules That CIOs Have Learned About Working From Home
CIOs need to understand that things have changed.
The workplace has undergone a once-in-a-lifetime change and now the number of workers who are working from home has skyrocketed. What the person with the CIO job needs to understand is that many of those workers aren’t going back anytime soon. A survey of corporate leaders found that in the future, 82% plan to allow remote working at least some of the time; 47% said they intend to allow full-time remote work going forward. A recent survey of managers yielded the same result: 82% said they will have more flexible work-from-home policies after the pandemic. CIOs need to quickly learn lessons about the varied necessities of remote work, from appropriate tools to new styles of management.
Here are five rules that every CIO needs to adopt.
CIOs Prepare To Work With Virtual Assistants
There is no question that CIOs need help.
There is just too much to do during a day as we deal with the `importance of information technology and there are too many people asking for a piece of the CIOs time. We all need someone to step into our lives and lend us a helping hand. I have some good news for you. That person may be preparing to start to help you out. However, you may not recognize them when they show up.
It turns out that what every CIOs needs may be a virtual assistant.
CIOs Move Slowly To Implement Artificial Intelligence
I think that we can all agree that artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful IT tool that can allow companies to use the importance of information technology to get their IT systems to do more.
CIOs have been studying the technology and attempting to understand how it can be applied to their firms. The implementation of AI at firms has been progressing fairly slowly at smaller firms simply because the complexity of implementing it is still out of their reach.
Due to the importance of what AI can do for a company, CIOs need to find ways that AI can be used to help the firm move forward.
Chinese CIOs Find Ways To Put Robots To Work
All CIOs understand that if they are going to help their companies become more successful, then they are going to have to find ways to introduce new technology into how the company performs its processes.
It turns out that in China CIOs are under a great deal of pressure to successfully accomplish this task in order to help their firms and their country achieve national goals.
How are Chinese CIOs going to pull their companies forward using the latest technology?
Can CIOs Lower Costs By Hiring More Robots?
Let’s face it – companies are under more pressure than ever to do more and provide their customers with a better shopping experience.
There are only so many ways that this kind of increased level of service can be provided and hiring more workers, while one solution, often turns out to be too expensive for most companies. This means that they have to go looking for a better solution.
This is when the CIO is provided with an opportunity use their understanding of the importance of information technology to step in and determine if there are specific jobs within the company that perhaps could be performed by robots in order to help the company boost customer satisfaction while lowering labor costs.
CIOs Start To Prepare Their Websites For Use By Older Customers
One of the responsibilities of the person with the CIO job is to make sure that the face that the company presents to the outside world is one that everyone can interact with.
More and more these days, it’s the company’s online presence that is how current and potential customers first come into contact with a company. What this means is that it has become a CIOs responsibility to make sure that the company’s websites can be used by everyone.
This includes older visitors who have their own unique set of usability issues.
CIOs Want To Know Where To Go From Here With AI
Every CIO knows about the key role that artificial intelligence (AI) plays in the importance of information technology and the fantastic things that it is going to be able to do in the future.
Already our homes are being flooded with devices that can listen to what we want them to do and perform a variety of actions to meet our every need. However, in the workplace it’s starting to look like AI may have hit a wall – a limit in what it can do for us.
How are CIOs going to find a way to realize the true potential of AI?
CIOs Need To Start To Watch Out For Ad Scammers
CIOs need to watch over where the people who work at their company go to when they are using the internet at work.
I’m pretty sure that we are all up on blocking the gambling, porn, and other inappropriate sites. However, it turns out that there is a new problem that we have to be aware of. The online ads that your workers willingly click on are more likely to make them a scam victim than the robocalls flooding their work phones with urgent messages. A new study found that scammers are far more likely to succeed in engaging and stealing money from potential targets by using websites and social media than through the phone calls and emails they have long used.
What’s the person with the CIO job to do?
CIOs Get Involved In Efforts To Prevent Airplanes From Being Hacked
As though airline CIOs didn’t have enough to worry about dealing with the importance of information technology, some people in the CIO job are now having to worry about IT systems that spend their time flying from city to city.
CIOs for the major airlines have become aware that their company’s most expensive assets, their airplanes, may be vulnerable to hacking attacks. As airplanes have become more and more modern, the number of IT systems that they contain has been increasing. The result of this is that each airplane is almost as complex as a flying data center and it has as many vulnerabilities.
This means that CIOs need to take steps to find ways to protect them.
Agile vs. Waterfall: Which Should A CIO Choose?
As a CIO I suspect that you are well aware that there are a number of different ways that your IT teams can go about developing software (and doing a lot of other things).
There is the classic method that has been used for over 40 years called “waterfall”. Then there’s the new upstart in town that everyone seems to be flocking to called “agile”. All of these options can place a CIO in a difficult place.
Which way is the best way for our teams to create products?
How Can CIOs Make Their Talent Pipeline More Diverse?
Every person with the CIO job wants to have an IT department that is quick and nimble.
We want our staff to be able to anticipate what is coming and make sure that the company is ready when it arrives. CIOs also realize that in order to be able to do this, they need to make sure that their IT department is diverse.
However, even though much has been said about the importance of having a diverse and inclusive IT workforce, when it comes to promoting ethnically and racially diverse people to senior leadership positions, CIOs continue to struggle.
What CIOs Need To Know About Self-Driving Cars And AI
As the person with the CIO job we are responsible for staying on top of all of the cool new technologies that are rapidly developing because of the importance of information technology.
Although our firm may not use all of these technologies, they will be influenced by them and so we have become aware of what the new technologies can be used to accomplish. Two of the hottest new technologies that are currently being developed are artificial intelligence (AI) and self-driving cars.
These technologies are linked together and how they evolve will have a big impact on the IT field going forward.
Should CIOs Track Employee Happiness?
As the person with the CIO job, one of your many tasks is to find ways to make sure that the people that your company has hired choose to stick around.
This can be a difficult thing to do: all of the computers in the world can’t tell you what your company’s employees are thinking at any given moment in time. CIOs need to find ways to use technology to determine if the company’s employees are happy or not.
Is this something that we can do without violating everyone’s privacy?
CIOs Need To Prepare For The Arrival Of Face Scan Technology
As CIOs who understand the importance of information technology, we know that we always have to be ready to deal with the next wave of technology.
The challenge that we have is trying to stay on top of things so that we’ll be able to see new things before they overwhelm us. One brand new technology that only now is starting to become a part of everyday life is face scanning technology.
Although this new technology may affect all the people who have the CIO job eventually, CIOs who work for sports ventures are going to be seeing it first.
How Should CIOs Deal With Companies Who Don’t Do E-Commerce?
Over the past few years there has been a revolution been going on in retail.
An industry that used to be based on people coming to their bricks and mortar stores has been shifting more and more to doing business online as the e-commerce market has exploded and retailers have come to understand the importance of information technology. The arrival of the Covid-19 virus and the resulting of shutting of most retail stores caused the move to e-commerce to start to move even faster. However, not all CIOs are currently involved in this process.
In fact, over at T.J. Maxx they are taking a different path.
Health Provider CIOs Have To Deal With Ransomware
Nobody ever said that being the person in the CIO position is an easy job for anyone to have.
However, lately it sure seems as though it is becoming even more difficult. The bad guys have decided that instead of breaking in and stealing our data, they now are breaking in and configuring our systems in a way that we can no longer use them. They’ll undo what they’ve done, but only if we agree to pay a ransom.
What are CIOs to do now?
Why CIOs Need More Diversity In Their IT Departments
Perhaps more than any other executive in the company, CIOs have long known that having a diverse workforce is a good thing.
Now research is starting to back them up. Diverse and inclusive cultures are providing companies with a competitive edge over their peers.
This is the result of research analysts ranking of corporate sectors based on how diverse and inclusive they are.
CIOs Ponder If They Should Ever Return To The Office
The person with the CIO job realizes that someday the Covid-19 pandemic will release its grip on our lives and we will return to the workplace.
The question is: Will there be an office to go back to when this is all over? The changes the business world is considering offer a radical rethinking of a place that is central to corporate life. There will likely be fewer offices in the center of big cities, more hybrid schedules that allow workers to stay home part of the week and more elbow room as companies free up space for social distancing. Smaller satellite offices could also pop up in less-expensive locations as the workforce becomes less centralized.
What do all of these changes mean for a CIO?
CIOs Deal With The Problem Of How People Create Passwords
If you take a look at the long list of things that a modern CIO is responsible for, securing the company’s network is right there at the top.
What this actually means is many different things. The importance of information technology requires that firewalls have to be deployed, encryption schemes have to be put in place, and end user training that has to be delivered. However, it turns out that this is all an uphill battle for CIOs. We are struggling with our end users. It turns out that they do a really bad job of coming up with passwords to secure their company network assets.
What’s going on here and just exactly how hard could this be to do correctly?
CIOs Start To Realize That They Have A Colorblind Problem
As the CIO, you have the responsibility to make sure that the company’s technology is made available to everyone.
This can be fairly easy to do when you are considering the needs of your workers. However, things can start to get a bit trickier when you have to take into account all of the firm’s customers and the people that you do business with.
This issue can come to light when you realize that the company’s website may not be usable by people who are colorblind.
How CIOs Can Build Human Networks
Although we like to think of the CIO job as being a technology job where we spend our time trying to communicate the importance of information technology, there is a lot of human contact required.
With the arrival of the Covid-19 virus this part of the job, which was never easy, has all of sudden become that much harder to do.
In this new era of social distancing, how can CIOs build the human networks that they need?
CIOs See A Need For Data In Their Factories
CIOs who are responsible for their company’s factories are starting to understand that they will be spending far more on data management and analytics tools in the aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak, and will be using those tools for deeper insight into operations, sales and supply chain disruptions.
The reason that they will be doing this is because they understand the importance of information technology and they want to be able to enhance their ability to remotely monitor plant equipment, which engineers had limited access to during the pandemic. All of this is going to require a lot of changes.
What will CIOs have to do?
How Serious Is The Lack Of Machine Learning Talent?
The person with the CIO job understands that the future belongs to artificial intelligence (AI).
Just about every part of the business is starting to be infused with AI based software that is designed to help humans make better decisions by wading through the reams of data that threatens to overwhelm most businesses.
As much as the person with the CIO job understands that the importance of information technology requires that mastering AI is critical to helping the company to get to where it wants to go, they are starting to discover that hiring people with AI talent is becoming harder and harder to do.
What Impact Will 5G Have On Work From Home?
If you’ve been watching TV or reading a newspaper (online) lately, you’ve probably started to see all of the 5G wireless network ads that the major service providers have been running.
It sure looks like when 5G arrives, the world is going to change. However, one of the big questions that CIOs need to find the answer to is just exactly how is it going to change.
More specifically, what will the impact be on workers who want to work from home?
Shopping Mall CIOs Try Out Facial Recognition Software
So if you were the CIO for a shopping mall, what would you want to know?
You’d want to know that all of your servers and networking gear was secure. You’d want to know what the next “big thing” in technology is going to be. You’d also want to know just exactly who your customers at your mall were. This last question might be the hardest question of all to answer. Anyone can go to a mall, visit one or more stores and then go home and the mall CIO would never know.
Well, that’s all about change and it’s going to change because mall CIOs are starting to deploy facial recognition software to keep track of you and me.
How CIOs Can Reduce Bias When They Are Hiring
With a little luck, we’ve all gotten the message by now: having a more diverse IT department makes for a better IT department.
However, despite the fact that most companies have spent a lot of money trying to teach everyone about the power of diversity, we still don’t seem to have done a very good job of making our departments diverse. It turns out that one of the big problems that the person with the CIO job is dealing with is that the people doing the interviewing are bringing their bias to the interview table. We all like people who are like us.
What can be done about this?
How IT and Business Can Work Together To Benefit The Customer
CIOs need to ask themselves why should the business and IT collaborate?
Perhaps a better question is why wouldn’t they collaborate? We need to understand that business units like sales, marketing, and operations have direct interactions with customers that are enabled or empowered by technology — technology that’s typically managed and deployed by IT. CIOs have to ensure that these front-line experiences are optimized for customers. To make this happen business and IT teams must work together closely. We all know that better customer experiences lead to better business outcomes.
Over half of all CIOs are spending time learning about how better serving customer needs and using the importance of information technology can create new revenue generation opportunities.
How IT and Business Can Work Together To Benefit The Customer
CIOs need to ask themselves why should the business and IT collaborate?
Perhaps a better question is why wouldn’t they collaborate? We need to understand that business units like sales, marketing, and operations have direct interactions with customers that are enabled or empowered by technology — technology that’s typically managed and deployed by IT. CIOs have to ensure that these front-line experiences are optimized for customers. To make this happen business and IT teams must work together closely. We all know that better customer experiences lead to better business outcomes.
Over half of all CIOs are spending time learning about how better serving customer needs and using the importance of information technology can create new revenue generation opportunities.
Why Do CIOs Fail When It Comes To Innovation?
As the CIO of your company, you have been given the job of leading innovation at the firm so that it can realize the importance of information technology.
However, it can be all too easy to fail at this task. I think that we all understand that innovation is an important driver of growth, and many CIOs aspire to build capabilities that can deliver sustained innovation. However they have a steep hill to climb: A quarter of CIOs who participated in a recent study say that their innovation capabilities are nonexistent. Of the CIOs who responded, only 11 percent assessed their current innovation capabilities as excellent or leading.
Why are we doing such a bad job at innovation?
Questions You Need To Ask About Your Next CIO Job
As CIOs we will eventually go looking for our next CIO job.
When we do this, we need to be prepared to answer plenty of questions on various technology, business and personal topics. However, before any employment meeting ends, it’s always a good idea for you to toss a few probing questions back to the interviewer. Keep in mind that as the potential employer seeks to ensure that you’ll be able to perform professionally and productively, you’ll be risking nothing less than your reputation and future career path on commitments made during this interview.
What types of questions should we be asking during our CIO job interview?
How CIOs Can Position The IT Department For Success
As the person with the CIO job, it’s your responsibility to make sure that the IT department is successful. In order to do that, you need to be able to lead the department in the right direction in order to realize the importance of information technology.
What this means is that you have to plan, organize and launch new strategies and initiatives. Changes in business trends, security issues and increasing government oversight of many IT activities, combined with a seemingly never-ending series of disruptive technologies, make it essential to be thinking about tactics and goals all the time.
How should a CIO go about doing this?
CIOs Struggle With The New Challenge Of Citizen Developers
As though CIOs didn’t already have enough to worry about with the importance of information technology, it now turns out that within their own company there may be a shadow IT department at work.
What has happened is that there is a growing demand for software and this has given rise to pseudo-programmers who, though not professional developers, build applications that help their business lines. These so-called “citizen developers” (cit-devs) build apps because the IT department is not willing to build the software they require when they require it. Clearly this is an issue for a CIO.
What are we supposed to do about this new army of developers who don’t work for us?
CIOs Have To Prepare For The Hybrid Work Environment
Every CIO understands that the pandemic was a major disruption to their business and the importance of information technology.
Their workplaces went from being filled with people to being deserted. Now that vaccines have become available, those workers are starting to trickle back in. However, the workplace as we used to know it may never exist again. Instead, it’s going to be transformed into a new environment. Not all of our workers are coming back and not all of the ones who are coming back will be there all the time.
How is a CIO going to secure this new hybrid work environment?
Just Exactly What Should A CIO Do During Their First 100 Days?
Being a CIO is an exciting job.
Starting a new CIO job can be both exciting and just a little bit daunting. When the person with the CIO job gets ready to start a new job, they need to make sure that they are going in with a clear plan. Hitting the ground running can be key to establishing themselves at a new firm and laying out a path to success so that the company can realize the importance of information technology.
What you are going to need is an 8-part plan for the first 100 days.
How Are CIOs Failing Their Business Users?
Right now every CIO seems to be talking about the customer experience (CX).
What CIOs have been told is that if you don’t get customer experience right, you may leave yourself vulnerable to competitors who do. However, CIOs who focus only or mostly on customers are forgetting something just as important: the employee experience (EX) . The basic formula is: You can’t have customers that are happier than your employees no matter how well you understand the importance of information technology.
Here’s how CIOs can fall short of providing employee-facing technology that helps rather than hurts productivity, morale and the bottom line.
How A CIO Can Make An Inherited IT Department Better
As CIOs, some jobs are tougher than others.
One of the most demanding is when you find yourself taking on a troubled IT department. This isn’t a job for the faint of heart. Your job will be to repair damage and put things back in order so that the company can realize the importance of information technology. This will require a great deal of time and effort on your part. The good news is that if you succeed, you’ll be lauded as a hero.
The bad news is that if you fail, your washout could haunt your CIO career for years to come.
How Should CIOs Implement Robotic Process Automation?
Guess what? A brand new technology is on the horizon and as the company’s CIO, you are going to be the person who is going to have to implement it.
This new technology is called robotic process automation (RPA) and it allows average business users to configure software “robots” to automate what are called “swivel chair” repetitive tasks and maximize the importance of information technology. A company’s motivation for launching an RPA campaign is to put themselves on a much faster automation track while reaping the benefits of increased productivity and lower operational costs.
What do CIOs need to know in order to introduce this new technology into their company?
What Do CIOs Have To Know About Business Intelligence?
Modern CIOs need to understand that Business Intelligence (BI) leverages software and services to transform data into actionable insights that inform an company’s strategic and tactical business decisions. These BI tools access and analyze data sets and present analytical findings in reports, summaries, dashboards, graphs, charts and maps designed to provide users with detailed intelligence about the state of the business.
In IT the term business intelligence often also refers to a range of tools that provide quick, easy-to-digest access to insights about an organization’s current state, based on available data.
The challenge that CIOs are facing is how best to make use of these new tools?