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9 Reasons Why Developers Think the CIO Is Clueless
Esther Schindler writes "Finally, a Forrester analyst who understands the attitudes of software developers. Mike Gualtieri identifies nine behaviors managers need to steer clear of or risk being labeled 'clueless' — from control freak tendencies to being a vendor puppet. My favorite, however, is point #8: 'the CIO collaborates to death,' in which Gualtieri opines, 'And, if you never watched Star Trek then you shouldn't even be a CIO.'"
The former CIO of one of America's 'Big Three' car companies, who shall remain nameless, but I'll say that the name of the company is a four-letter word ;) -- was an IBM vendor puppet. Of course, he came from IBM, and after he left, he went back to work for IBM....hmmm.....
Needless to say, his policies live on. The only approved vendor at the four-letter American automobile manufacturer is ... IBM.
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I've reported directly to a couple of CIO's in a couple of different organizations. In both instances they were petty, clueless people. On the other hand, I've had customers whose CIO's were not so bad and seemed to have a good grasp. I don't think there is a one size fits all answer to this one, but it's true that quite a few of the CIO's I've interacted with have been what I would kindly call clueless idiots.
Then again, they were smart enough to somehow get that high paying gig, so go figure. Many times though it's not what you know, it's who you know.
You don't think that his Star Trek comment is funny?! There's a sort-of accompanying article about managing developers, based on what developers say motivates them. Not all the opinions agree, obviously. (I wrote that one.)
"Vendors are a problem. Relentlessly annoying. Going to have to come up with a system to keep them from bothering me all day."
Do what they did at a previous job of mine appoint a "Procurement Advisor".
Basically, when the secretary announce that "Bill from Wonderful widgets is here", Our Boss would say "Tell him the Procurement Advisor is on his way up." Then check to see who's available, and send him. (We were all briefed on the procedure, but good BSers were prime pickings for Procurement Advisor.)
PA of the day would then meet with Bill in an available office/conference room/whatever and listen, nod, and accept freebies.
Then when Bill tries to close the deal, say "I'm just the Procurement Advisor, I'm not authorized to make this decision, but I will pass my recommendations up the chain. Thank you for your time."
Some weasel.. er, vendors caught on after awhile and tried to circumvent the system. They were politely, but firmly told "I'm afraid you'll have to talk to our Procurement Advisor, this is his job."
The U.S. really needs an English to Wisdom dictionary.
That most companies don't produce anything is an indication of the fact that the US is dominated by services companies.
Companies that offer services don't produce anything except the services they provide. There's no "product."
This is certainly dominant in the IT industry. There's really no production at all. I mean, Software companies (sometimes) produce software, but IT companies (IT meaning everything besides programming) just produce working systems (or not. But they try.)
Then there's payroll companies, banks, repair shops, postal carriers, transportation companies, etc etc etc.
Many companies that actually manufacture things, do so in poor countries (for obvious reasons) but leave management and infrastructure in the US or other wealthy countries.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
When he took over when he was an Army Colonel, he cracked down on various items. When he retired from the Army, a slot was made for him to remain there. Below are the list of various items he did:
On the dress code aspect, when he took over as colonel, he made an example out of a couple of Sys Admins when they showed to a meeting in blue jeans and sandals. He had them fired on the spot and escorted of the premises and off the base. A friend who worked there prior to when he showed up mentioned the place was fun to work at. When he did nights and weekends, they didn't care if you showed up dressed for comfort. When the colonel showed up that changed ! He also took away the traditional Hawaiian Shirt Friday as well. He also cracked down on people who left early on Friday, another "tradition" in the DoD contracting world.
When the colonel took over, he didn't consider the culture of the place at the time plus the culture of Colorado which is considered very casual like in dress. One thing not mentioned until now, his additional degrees are from East Coast schools like U. of Virginia. With formal rules being more important than getting the job done, the dynamic changed for the worst. I really don't to go back to that facility as long as he is there. I still keep in contact with some people who still work there. One day, there was a water problem where all the bathrooms were shutdown but people were told they could NOT leave for home early and to keep working. The basement of the building has been converted to "cube farms" from basically storage. One thing not included was more bathrooms. Even for the men you have to wait 5 or 10 minutes for a toilet stall to open up. A lot of times there are several people waiting for each stall. Complaints have so far been ignored.
$90k sounds good to you, as a CIO?!? Come to Western Australia (Australian Dollar btw is basically 1:1 with USD) - broom pushers on mine sites get paid more than that here.
And I literally mean people who push brooms.
For goodness sakes, I have a friend who's job it is to mark a dot on the ground every few metres (where to put the explosives) and he gets $120,000 a year.
Go to uni and get a degree, they said....
I had it communicated to me succinctly as "keeping your inner geek on a leash" - able to keep it in check when with the suits, but able to unleash it when required.
That's the whole thing, though.
People are making more than that for unskilled work on the mines, here. Skilled people (managers, tech's etc) are making $200,000 +
The downside is you have to work on a minesite in the middle of nowhere, so I guess it evens out a little...
Well, the problem is that those positions even got to be called "officer" in the first place. All of them.
"Officer" used to mean, you know, army or navy. Even using it for the police is as recent as the end of the 19'th century, though it could be argued as a continuation from the times when the city guards acted as both police and garrison. Even the use for someone who holds an office of the state, was originally reserved for judges, but, anyway, the key words were: of the state. You know, someone acting in an official government job.
So at the very least I have to wonder about the original shallow souls who thought they need an even funkier title.
Now I won't blame the ones who just get such a stupid title thrust upon them; after all, they're the victims there. But I have to wonder about the original ones who just had to invent some new titles for themselves.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
From my experience, when someone seems clueless or illogical, it's just that they're not saying which problem they're really trying to solve.
E.g., if I were to come and say that my team needs a pony, and it would be great for team morale, and double as company car too, you might think, "WTF? Is he that retarded? Who rides a pony through town to a meeting with the customers?" The issue is that I'm not solving the problem I'm claiming to. The real problem might be that my daughter wants a pony, and I figure, maybe the company can pay for it. But of course, now I can't go to a management meeting and say, "I want the company to buy my daughter a pony." So now I'll work backwards from the solution I wish ("the company should buy a pony that I can use") to an acceptable problem it would solve (e.g., "we need environmentally friendly transportation!") And maybe I already have a second phase of that plan in mind, but I'm not telling it to you yet, either.
The same applies to a lot of seemingly retarded managers. It may be just that they're not solving the problem you think, or that their job title says they should solve.
E.g., if he comes up with a vision towards "massively distributed MVC, ROR, multicore Web 2.0 social applications", maybe really he's just trying to play bullshit bingo with the CEO or the investors. You're not the one he's trying to impress, the guy signing his paycheck is.
Or maybe he's got a second phase in mind too, like that next he'll need more hardware for that, and he's already bribed by some vendor. Or that he already knows which graphics company he wants to outsource some of that to and what bribe he'll get.
Literally, I've seen one project where their visionary wanted to have at least 1MB graphics in an applet, and that was back in the dialup and ISDN days, just because his best buddy had a graphics design company, and he wanted to outsource those graphics to that. Corruption by any other name, but there you go.
Or maybe he just wants more budget and a bigger team under him, because that raises his perceived status and importance.
Or maybe he just wants to be able to keep the current team, in the face of some retarded budget allocation which would otherwise have him fire everyone now because there are no projects in the pipeline for July, only to re-hire them in August when the next projects kick in. So he's creating some grand task as some make-work solution.
Or maybe he's just strategically gaming the budget rules in advance. In a lot of places they have retarded processes like that if you didn't use all your budget this year, you get a budget cut next year. So people end up turning the heating on in March, because the winter was mild and otherwise they'd get no heating budget next year, when maybe the winter will be worse. Same here. You don't really know what you'll have to do next year, so you essentially have to burn some money in advance to be sure you'll get a budget for it next year. A case of "massively distributed MVC, ROR, multicore Web 2.0 social applications" is something so overachieving and nebulous that it can burn any amount of money you want it to burn.
Etc.
Firing everyone competent and hiring the cheapest burger flippers, well, again I've seen it done for strategic reasons.
E.g., because with the same budget you can have more people under you, which raises your own status. And some places also have rules for what your job title and/or salary can be, based on the number of people under you. Ok, it wasn't at CEO level, but I do know someone who raised from a minor team leader to mid-level manager just by having his team inflate like a blowfish. He kept hiring incompetents and still needing more... and got rewarded for it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Wow, I really like this post. You hit the nail on the head: The CIO is absolutey not clueless, he has some other objective in mind that he keeps secret. My CIO just got voted "CIO of the year" and we all went "WTF!?" because he seems so clueless. Thinkning about it (and having your post help) he just knows how to be a "good CIO". It's a game I don't think I want to play (nor am I good at it), but the pay is good. I think I'll stay with what I enjoy, in the trenches.
Who?
I have to second that motion. This article was of abysmal quality, but then again Forrester.... Pffff... I had a girlfriend once that worked for Forrester's branch office in Amsterdam and I have never met so many incompetent bags of wind in the same space ever before. They did employ hot women though. One of them wore a cat-suit for Halloween that was quite.... Inspirational.
Anyway, I have never seen anything emanating from the likes of Forrester or Gartner that actually had any bearing on Life, The Universe and The Rest insofar they weren't taken on by C*O's and made into self-fulfilling prophecies.
Bloody idiots.
"I always thought it was Career Is Over ..."
I'm reminded of the last company I worked for, where the Kiss of Death was the QA Manager on a project. Ostensibly a real, *mandated* position of Govt. construction projects, it turned into a holding position for the incompetent, malcontents, and out of favor. The phrase "we're slotting you into the QA manager's slot on the XYZ job" is universally interpreted to mean "You have until the project ends to find a new job, or convince someone in another division to take you".
I got copied on the letter to the Navy giving formal notice of the change in management moving me to QAM and the VP's bootlicker to PM. I handed in my notice the next day - I had been given a heads-up long before. I even signed my own pink slip.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
A few years back, an article in one of my computer magazines (Dr. Dobbs or PC probably, but I forget, now) pointed out that the benefit of raising the head of IT to CIO is that the board now has a patsy to take the fall when they screw up, whereas some manager wouldn't satisfy Wall Street, the FBI, Elliot Spitzer's or Rudy Giuliani's task force from the US Attorney's Office, or whatever other group wants someone to blame. Otherwise, it was a dead end, and the occupant "died" fairly soon after, moving on to "a new, exciting opportunity" with some small or startup firm or retiring to "spend more time with my family" or whatever other lame cover-up.