Hunting Bad CIOs In Their Natural Environment

onehitwonder writes "Bad CIOs are a blight on the IT profession, the organizations that employ them and the IT staff who toil under them (usually cleaning up their messes). Yet bad CIOs manage to migrate largely undetected — like the mythic Big Foot — from company to company. In the process, these bad CIOs lay waste to businesses and information systems, destroy staff morale, pillage budgets and imperil shareholder value. To help rid the world of this scourge, CIO.com has compiled a list of behaviors common among bad CIOs that recruiters, hiring managers and IT staff can use to identify them during the recruiting process."

Comments

Thats website is a f*cking mess

[Anonymous Coward]

look at the state of it ! click next ten times to read another 100 words with 30+ adverts per page ! in fact most of the content on that site is advertising of one sort or another they should look at their own management ethos before criticising others "hey lets set up site that has more adverts on it than a domain squatters" here's the print version because as a CIO i wouldnt waste my time reading a site like that http://www.cio.com/article/print/186800

Article in a nutshell

[bennini]

Another one of those top-10 articles broken up into 7 web pages with 3 paragraphs each and flooded with useless advertisements & buzzwords like SOA on demand, Oracle Fusion Middleware and "Storage Utopias"...heres the summary:

1. They migrate quickly from habitat to habitat.
2. Selective amnesia
3. Excessive preening
4. A pugilistic stance
5. Sketchy evolution.
6. Dropping names.
7. Bad references.

then a sublist....
Behaviors observers should note when the CIO has settled in his new habitat.

1. They eat their young.
2. Young and old flee the CIO's flock.
3. They use the same hunting and gathering strategies regardless of their environment.
4. Brown-nosing.
5. Excessive hibernation.
6. Intimidation
7. They play favorites with vendors.
8. They act like a wolf in sheep's clothing.
9. They show their teeth and their claws.
10. hey don't finish what they start.

and then there is a sublist within that second main list (in case you werent confused yet):
MORE SIGNS OF BAD CIOS

1. They overpromise and underdeliver.
2. They can't sum up their IT strategy into an elevator speech, nor can they articulate the company's vision.
3. They don't take ownership of critical issues, nor do they demonstrate accountability for problems, but they're quick to take credit for successes.
4. They can't motivate their staff and don't pay attention to building teams inside the IT group. They can't attract and retain IT staff.
5. Instead of working on projects that make meaningful contributions to the company's bottom line, they focus either on projects that will look good on their résumés or on sucking up to executives by giving them Blackberrys and new laptops with wireless Internet connections.
6. They overemphasize project management to the point where 90 percent of the timeline for projects is given over to planning and only 10 percent to implementation.
7. They view project management as a waste of time.
8. They can't prioritize projects.
9. They give staff responsibility for projects but no authority, direction or support. When the individual and the project fail, they publicly berate the individual.
10. They espouse a different management practice every month.

Just a Bad Manager; Move Along . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

These are not characteristics of a bad CIO, but characteristics of a bad manager. TFA reads like headunter-scum puffery. It would point at any incompetent boss.

"Nothing to see here folks. Move along." -- Leslie Nielsen in Naked Gun

He?

[Crafty Spiker]

The absolutely worst IT executive I ever had the displeasure to work for was a woman. Arrogant, rude and completely unqualified. It turns out that she had quite a horrid reputation in her prior jobs. Made a complete mess of things and then moved along to another (local) company where she proceeded to make the same mess. I will give her points for consistency. This all appears to be simply a matter of empty suits finding one of their own for critical executive positions. To my regret I was out the day that IT became a political space and not a technical one.

Re:A point of disagreement with TFA

[eudaemon]

You hit that right on the head. If you look at the most recent scandals in Finance
Societe Generale's 4.9 Billion Euro loss was attributable to someone who allegedly still
had access to middle-office systems after moving to the front office, along with
the skills to BS senior managers over his positions. Failure in process.
They failed to remove access and they failed to follow up on sketchy stories.

Same with the recent extortion attempts at two different banks in Lichtenstein;
former bank employees pulled data and then extorted or attempted to extort
bank customers. This time failure of process that has nothing to do with technology -
you just employed people that ultimately could not be trusted. Their access was
required as part of their job -- what firewall can protect against that?
(Answer: none, firewalls can only allow or deny access,they don't make
context based decisions on intent, i.e. no firewall says "gee normally this guy
pulls 10 customer records, but today he pulled 1,000! What's up?)

Re:Here's a summary...

[n6kuy]

Here in the USA at least, it's only possible to check good references.
Nobody dares give bad references anymore, for fear of being sued.

Re:A point of disagreement with TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Most companies today don't need new firewalls to improve security, they need to rethink the process.

sorry but replacing that Linksys router with a WatchGuard Firebox is a good idea. MOST companies and Schools have a Joke for their infrastructure. And upgrades ARE needed.

What about bad CEOs?

[PPH]

An outfit I worked for a few years ago had a good CIO and IT department, when measured against other companies IT departments. But we were (and I stress were) a great engineering and manufacturing company. IT was, in times past, only a tool used in that busiiess process.

At some point, the folks on mahogany row became bedazzled with the culture of information and forgot exactly what it was that we were supposed to be doing. In corporate speak, they neglected their core competencies. The IT department did a great job in standardizing processes and tools and upgrading systems where cost/benefits warranted it. But this was all measured with metrics viewed from the information systems side of the house, not the production side.

Pretty soon, we had cheap and efficient IT systems. But the engineering and production systems suffered where their requirements didn't meet the IT template. Processes that had been developed to give our company an edge over our competition were dropped in favor of using industry standard tools.

I'm certain that our CIO will receive the respect and admiration that he deserves along his career path. He did what he promised, within schedule, budget and with quality. But our profit margins and market share suffered as we became a commodity.

Unless your business is the IT business (Google, Microsoft, etc.) they are just tools folks. Far too many CEOs and BoDs were dazzled by the shinney server racks.

Interesting note: About a decade ago, when we were looking for better ideas and processes, our managers traveled to Japan to see how companies like Toyota and others achieved their efficiencies and profits. Along with lots of good process ideas, they brought back an interesting observation. The Japanese hadn't really bought into big enterprise-wide IT systems. Some of their best processes used clip-boards and paper.

Re:A point of disagreement with TFA

[Fulcrum of Evil]

i.e. no firewall says "gee normally this guy pulls 10 customer records, but today he pulled 1,000! What's up?

Yeah, that's a tripwire activity - if you log record access, you can identify common usage patterns and alert when the numbers get out of whack - if 10 is normal, set alerts at 20 and 40. It's still a human process after that; computers are good at filtering, though.