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…
Flying back from the bi-annual AEC/IT Leaders Roundtable meeting, a colleague and I were speaking about the challenges we face at work. In fact, this was an extension to a conversation held by five of us after dinner in the hotel bar. Mostly revolving around war stories and commiserating on those things that are always annoying but will never go away. Such things include challenging company owners, users who make the same mistakes yet refuse to be trained, and the ever-popular ‘ignored until blamed’ theory that holds that an IT department is ignored when things are fine and held responsible, and blamed, when things are not fine.
I asked my colleague what he thought about creating a personal list of those things that are challenging, or annoying, at work. Things that, if fixed, would make for a happier job and, perhaps, an improved work-life balance. Some of my quick examples revolved around a challenging employee as well as the occasion opposing request from my boss (the CFO) and the company CEO. For my colleague, the first thing that came to his mind was he didn’t like where he had to sit within his office.
After some consideration, his counter to the List was that the thing that most annoyed him, he had no control over. So, we agreed that a List might be good to have as long as it had a column that said whether that challenge could be changed or not. We also agreed that the List required prioritization. After identifying which item (that you can change) is the most important, to start working on changing it.
We have been playing around with VM Ware for a while. In fact, we now have two monster servers (Twin socket four-core 64-bit with 32 gig RAM) running High Availability within a virtual cluster. This virtual stack has come in handy – We’ve created ‘oh crap’ virtual copies of the Intranet, HR system, and our Advantage Accounting System. We have also used it when we needed another server right away for our Business Objects software. Mostly, however, it is used for testing and backup – Until now.
A few weeks ago, the server that connects to our storage area network device to serve just about every file for our intranet, extranet, accounting system, and payroll froze up big time. We had to drive to the collocation, hold in the power button, and force it to restart. It did get back to life, but we considered that a warning shot for worse to come.
Last night we swapped that server for a virtual one. Not a horribly difficult process, but not a cakewalk either. Although we were ready for a drop in performance, the testing we did showed a significant improvement.
This is a big step for us – A tier-one production server is now in a virtual environment.