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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."
No, you missed the point. Improving security is a primary goal of the CIO. But the way he approaches it the sign. The example in TFA has the CIO fear mongering to get a larger budget then he actually needs. Most companies today don't need new firewalls to improve security, they need to rethink the process. Putting security in the hands of software and hardware alone is a path to disaster. The CIO should be able to itemize what he really for security explain the tradeoffs to management, and tell the shortterm and long term effort it will require.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Hey, I think I work for this guy!
[anonymous for job security reasons]
FTA: Young and old flee the CIO's flock. Unusually high levels of staff turnover in the IT department after the new CIO has joined... Ya think? Some departments empty out like rich people leaving the Titanic once you bring in someone new, which is usually a bad sign. A good, sensible leader will often spend the first part of his/her tenure just watching and learning, before making any huge changes (unless they're hatchet men, in which case I'll be the one wearing a dress floating off in the lifeboat)
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Why are programmers non-productive?
Because their time is wasted in meetings.
Why are programmers rebellious?
Because the management interferes too much.
Why are the programmers resigning one by one?
Because they are burnt out.
Having worked for poor management, they no longer value their jobs.
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Likewise, when you recount a CIO's (or anyone else's, for that matter) behaviour to them, they won't recognise it as "bad". So there's little point in writing an article on recognising bad CIOs and then publishing it in an article for CIOs. They'll all either agree or disagree on the points, but none will see their own behaviour described there.
From a company's perspective, the only questions that really matter are whether the CIO being interviewed has a record of delivering programmes of work on target, on budget. That they can successfully turn around a failing (but not turn around a successful) IT department and that they positioned the IT dept. to allow a company to grow efficiently.
It doesn't matter if they name-drop or brown-nose. Anyway a hiring CIO just wouldn't recognise the pattern of behaviour - whether they, themselves, are good or bad.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
A lot of these behaviors seem like they should be red flags for any candidate for any position, no?
In practice, because shareholder elections are a farce, most boards are compromised by being populated by other executives, typically leading companies in the same or similar industry as the executives they are supposed to oversee. This frees executives from shareholder control, essentially giving them reign over other people's assets. Lavish stock grants entrench executives by giving them share ownership which in turn increases their control over the board.
Freed from oversight, executive goals diverge from shareholder goals. The limits to this divergence are mostly appearance based. You can't appear to be diverging from shareholder goals too much. Image is everything. To achieve this, executives typically vet those they hire based on loyalty. Many employees, while they profess to understand this, do not. So I repeat. To achieve the goal of appearing to promote shareholder values, executives hire first and foremost on the candidate's ability to be loyal to the hiring executive. This results in the typical knuckle dragging tribal culture found leading today's corporations.
Saying that solving this problem is hard, is a major understatement because you are talking about making America's ruling class accountable. Solutions like co-determination do exist, however, but would require the right political climate to implement.
Politicus
I formerly worked at ATMI, and they employed the dumbest CIO they could find. He has no IT training or knowledge, claiming his managerial accounting background will allow him to do the job. The CEO is a guy that surrounds himself with yes-men, and Kevin Laing is his personal puppy of a CIO.
Kevin hired an infrastructure director, who was trying to gown up in our clean room and couldn't find any left handed rubber gloves. It's no wonder the companies stock has been flatlining for the past 5 years.
Those poor bastards still working there will never get an annual bonus, because the CIO blows the budget horribly every year. The Help Desk manager has run off all the competant staff with full blessing of the CIO, I just don't see any upside to this guy at all. If the CEO and CIO were fired tomorrow, I'd guess there would be a jump in the stock just because they would be gone.
Key attributes of Kevin LaingKevin
Irrational Diversions
In other words, security is a process. Security is not strictly a hardware and software solution.
So, how can we prevent these hoodlums from ruining our lives and get them either not hired to begin with or canned when we see their complete incompetence?
You can't. Once someone reaches "C" level, they have something akin to diplomatic immunity. Even if they screw the shareholders out of billions of dollars and run the company into the ground, the only thing that might happen is they get fired, get a huge golden parachute, and some other company will immediately scoop them up for even more salary and stock.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
> Profiting by fraud/scam is evil and amoral,
Eh? How can something be both evil AND amoral?
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
We don't need a list of what they do! We need a list of who they are! So we can check it when job hunting. Now that would be helpful.
Personally, I would rather be led by a CIO with a Liberal Arts degree than one with a MBA, but that's just me.
:wq
As for the article... it suggests CIOs who change company too often might be bad. That's not an indicator of anything. That's not even a good heuristic.
I disagree. It's at the very least an indicator of changing companies frequently.
In some positions, you can live with turnover. Others really benefit from continuity. In my mind, that includes a lot of technical and accounting positions, the C*O level included. In those positions, the more history you know, the more effective you are.
Especially with software development and IT infrastructure, there are a lot of ways to get the job done, and each person has their strengths. Change key people too often, and you'll pay a lot to switch approaches over and over, without seeing any real payoff.