http://www.cio.com/article/510115/8_More_PowerPoint_Train_Wrecks?source=CIONLE_nlt_leader_2009-12-10
Certainly we have all been guilty of boring people with PowerPoint.
Personally, my favorite is when people simply read the slides verbatim.
During another presentation, this person hung on one slide for a very long time that had a graphic image on it so complex I started to ignore the presenter in order to focus on what my imagination could make out of that graphic.A friend of mine was a habitual mouse “click-tease” – During and application demonstration he would start talking about the next feature while the mouse cursor hovered over the link that actually showed the feature. Talking and talking away while the cursor, now a click-here finger on the screen, hovered nervously. I believe at one presentation the entire group ended up watching the mouse, thinking to themselves, “Click it. Click the blood mouse!” Funny. He has since gotten much better at not doing that.
I recently read an article about the CIO at Proctor & Gamble who created an IT allocation model for all employees at his firm that stated, “Employees each get an IT budget to spend on any equipment they want, rather than relying on company equipment that might cost P&G more to buy and manage.”
On one hand it is easy to think that this would not apply to an architecture or engineering firm as the computer that runs design software needs to be robust in just about every way. It’s easy to imagine a hodge-podge of different workstations and laptops flooding in, all awaiting the latest version of Autodesk software, and the IT team losing their minds in their attempts to sustain a productive environment. Or the employee who buys an iPhone with their allotment and complains their workstation is too slow to run Revit.
On the other hand, isn’t this just an extension of the growing trend to give up corporate-managed hardware; like subsidizing cell-phones instead of managing and maintaining them? Might this also assist in reducing hardware sprawl; where cell phones, air cards, printers, and twin monitors appear in numbers greater than ever?
(Re: printers, read: http://www.cio.com/article/12580/Why_CIOs_Should_Care_About_Rising_Printing_Paper_Costs)
In thinking about an easy definition of what makes a manager versus a leader, I came across this from an article in HBR. Here are the definitions, simply put:
A MANAGER works towards the continuous improvement of the status quo.
A LEADER acts as a force of change that compels a group to innovate and depart from routine.
Does this definition cover every base? Probably not - I mean, it doesn’t speak to skills in employee retention, growth, and succesion. But, it is hard to find a company that doen’t believe in innovation as a necessary element in survival. With these definitions, asking a manager to innovate could be very problematic.
Perhaps one of the most important things a CIO could change within IT is its ability to communicate. Now, I’m making an assumption here – That being just about every IT department is wanting in its communication skills. Another assumption is that this lack reaches both inward and outward; the IT person that doesn’t communicate to the company is the same person that will not communicate to another IT person.
Why does this lack of communication exist? Is it that IT people are typically ‘geeks’ whose social communication is as lacking as their professional? Or, are IT people ‘hoarders’ – People that find a niche and protect it at all costs. Is there insecurity at work here? Perhaps some IT people have cultivated a ‘god’ complex. (“Why should I tall you, you wouldn’t understand it anyway”) Are some IT people adverse to change and resist communication because that leads to decisions and decisions lead to change? I’m not sure.
A while back I asked the four senior people in IT to document what they have worked on for the week within an IT-accessed only Wiki using bullet points but explaining the complicated things. This worked ok for a while but I had to continue to ask them to catch up on the weeks they missed. I also asked them to forgo the obvious, redundant entries. (We know support folks provided ‘user support’ that week) Did a print server get rebuilt, a NAS get swapped out, was there an issue with a billable project that needed a special fix, did something change within the network – These were the things I was looking for.
The positive was that just about every support person read the entries every week (and said they did directly to me – Something I relayed to the senior staff) because, for the first time, it kept them in the loop. The negative was that during my vacation, all senior staff stopped making their weekly entries – By the time I got back, there hadn’t been an entry made in weeks.
To be continued…
http://davidmaister.com/articles/4/95/
Good article with many fine points. I suggest reading the entire article to get the points that apply for you, but here are the ones that I took out of it.
• Strategy is deciding whose business you are going to turn away
• Any business that tried to deliver all four virtues of quality, cost, variety, and speed would be doomed to failure
• If you never say “no,” you will just be one more undifferentiated firm
• Strategy is not about understanding something—or planning to get around to it—it’s about having the courage to make it happen
• Courage is one of the scarcest commodities there is. That’s why it’s a significant source (perhaps the major or even sole source) of competitive advantage
• You need to say ‘no’ to save your energy for the opportunities that are worth pursuing
• When deciding between saying “no” to achieve the strategy of a distinct market position and making money to meet budget numbers, a company who does the former and pulls off the strategy will eventually make more money
• Financial reporting systems almost inevitably fail to make a distinction between strategy and volume (strategic versus counter-strategic revenue)
• CEOs and managing partners should ask their people the question directly: “What could I do that would convince you that I was serious about sticking to our strategy and enforcing the standards that flow from it?”
• The most dramatic evidence that things have changed is when new people are put in key positions of influence. “The only way to change people is to change people!”
http://advice.cio.com/thomas_wailgum/erp_lessons_from_rich_people_who_stink_at_golf
Not sure this is the article one would send to their company leadership in response to a similar situation, but then again, one might. Seems the role of CIO is to ensure due dilligance. To have a mental image (and have written it down) of what the finish line for a project looks like and the plan to get their.
Love the quote: “Technology cannot solve problems – It can only make them faster.”
The role of CIO as a change agent cannot be underestimated. It means spending a great deal of time in front of people. Talking with them to understand what their needs are, how they feel about a technology, how to get them to change, and how to strike compromises. At a conference, the President of Stantac said that about the time he has talked about a change for the hundredth time is about the time the organization starts to change – No sooner that one hundred meetings, requests, speeches, etc. A CIO should be out in front and on the shop floor as an agent of change, not holed up in an office. As well a communicator as is a technologist. Oh, and remember what the Godfather said, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
Thought of a new word today while my wife was at a conference and I ended up surfing the ITunes store for a particular song.
Itunejugate (pronounced: eye-Tune-Je-Gate)
the act of purchasing a song from ITunes that you already have in your library
One of the characteristics of an effective CIO is the ability to be a member of all teams within the company. For my firm, the Survey team and the Water team work together but are separate, unique, entities. So when Survey acquired a laser scanner and later the Water group leader asked me for advice on how to “wow” a potential client during a project interview, I was able to convince a surveyor that we should laser scan a similar project facility and create a digital fly-through for the Water project interview.
We leave tomorrow to do the scanning and although I do not know much about laser scanning, my role is to walk this digital fly-through to completion, hand it off to the Water team, and share it with all the other teams in the company so they know what can be done.
Recognizing opportunities to help win work, seeing them through to completion, and educating the company about it.
Heard a story about a friend’s IT Manager who, one day in early April, sent an email to his company (all 200 employees) stating that because of a new agreement with ATT, there was going to be 100 iPhones available to anyone who filled out an online Intranet form.
The form had questions like, “why do you think you should get an iPhone?”
85 people filled out the questionnaire - The submitted entries were captured in a database, and the “thank you” page shouted out, “April Fools!”
Classic.
I guess it upset some people, but the data was fascinating. The reasons people wanted an iPhone covered a lot of ground, but most felt it would improve productivity and communications. Is this merely a perception? Does the ability to receive and send email while driving or at lunch really make the company more profitable than the cost of the smart phone and supporting hardware and software to keep it running? Our network manager refuses to have a smart phone. Instead, he rolls around with a regular-old clamshell cell phone and, quite honestly, does his job just fine without one; the emergencies are voice calls and the other stuff is responded to when he has access to his laptop before, during, and after work.
It’s funny – Personally, there are many ways for me to get email, including, my laptop within any office, my laptop with the air card, my laptop with VPN from broadband, my Blackberry, and Outlook Web Access from any web-enabled browser. If an emergency should always be a voice call, that’s five different ways for me to get non-emergency emails…