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

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.