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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."
Pointy hair
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.
It may be tagged humour, but I see too many signs pointing at our CIO... -.-
Is it for sure that we can't shoot them?
home
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
then a sublist....
Behaviors observers should note when the CIO has settled in his new habitat.
and then there is a sublist within that second main list (in case you werent confused yet):
MORE SIGNS OF BAD CIOS
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
Blake Edwards said it best when receiving his oscar for life-long achievement: "I want to thank my enemies too. I couldn't've done it without the enemies...."
I reported to a bad CIO for years. First off, the mind of a politician isn't much different from that of a corporate-climber. I found the same mind in my experiences with attornies. It's enough to make anyone appreciate the misanthrope Jonathan Swift. At the core of all these folks is a basic deceptiveness invented, grown and maintained with one single goal: power.
I've read Ringer and I've read Lewis. Ringer says, "Look out for number One." Lewis rebutes (although he wrote this before Ringer by decades), "a life devoid of virtue is simple a life looking out for number one.... and void of its purpose...." Or something to that effect.
I could write a novel containing my thoughts and experiences on the bad CIO, but in short I believe being absent any real talent, being totally goal-oriented and power-hungry, they practice basic machievelian manipulations and mob psychology to intimidate people into staying in line.
In my experience, any true and honest person that happened into an officer position at a corporation is quickly devoured by the meat-eaters.
If you want a life and job filled with honest work, non-game-playing individuals and good sleep at night, then read the signs and minds of those around you, build yourself, bend the questionable intentions of those around you into tools that form who you are, and, as Shakespeare put it, "to thine ownself be true." Eventually, you'll find that job and slowly realize "yes, I'm here. I can just do a fulfilling job and get paid."
Trust me, it happens....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
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
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
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
The cult of personality CIO is probably the most destructive and wasteful of all of them. They're particularly dangerous in government. The last big contract I worked had one. He brought in "his" people to manage projects. Some of them were, in my opinion, charity cases. A couple had qualifications that included boarding their horses at the same riding academy. They had unproductive jobs and were bossy and abrasive on top of that. I watched them waste millions of dollars, produce nothing tangible or productive, then get promoted. The talented people took other jobs and left.
It's very demoralizing when you're trying to do the right thing for the customer and be cost effective, then see someone ride in with his toadies, blow millions on something that never had a chance of working in the first place, then get moved up the chain. Makes you question if there's a margin in being practical and productive. I always thought that if you made good business decisions in IT, the customer would eventually come back to the value proposition. But it doesn't always work that way and I'm starting to question whether that's naive.
I certainly have several first-hand experiences where the incompetent, impractical and wasteful have flourished.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
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
I think a big problem in most organizations is insufficient bottom-up feedback. A CIO may be a great kiss-up to the CEO, but may otherwise be a crappy manager. If a formal process was put in place such that underlings ranked their supervisors, then the bad ones would either have to shape up or ship out.
One interesting approach is a list of about 15 traits, and employees pick the top 3 that the manager needs to improve on. This avoids a "blunt" ranking that many organizations dislike, but at least gives the top layer feedback on the biggest problems.
Table-ized A.I.