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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.'"
If you are called a 'CIO' then you are pretty much guaranteed to be an idiot. WTF is an 'Information Officer' anyway, and how can you be the chief one if there are no others? What is wrong with being head of the IT department? It doesn't sound as swanky, which is surely a good thing, reminding you that IT is there to serve the rest of the business.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
That's what happens when the article is in CIO magazine. They tend to start making assumptions about what you know about CIOs.
Chief Information Officer
CEO: Chief Executive Officer
CFO: Chief Financial Officer
CxO terms are pretty common for the top level in larger corporations.
CTO: Chief Technology Officer
COO: Chief Operating Officer
All equal to:
CYO: Cover Your Own _____
My blog
s/think.KNOW/gi;
There, fixed it for you.
If we only THOUGHT the CIO was clueless, that would be a different story. too many businesses are like septic tanks - the really big chunks (the floaters) rise to the top.
So remember, children, high visibility isn't necessarily a good thing. It might mean you're just full of shit.
Coder: "How tall are you?"
CIO: "6.1"
Coder: "Gee, they're piling shit higher nowadays."
First he says don't be a dinosaur, then he starts talking about tapping Ethernet cables.
The last time I tapped an Ethernet cable, my buddy was throwing 9-track tapes at the dinosaurs to keep them away!
Anonymous Cowards get no respect.
Also, point 4 in the article is going to be interpreted by any CIOs who do care as "be sure to stay current with all the hot buzzwords". Developers will see through most attempts at this instantly.
The problem is, in many companies, the role of the CIO is pretty nebulous.
It gets further confusing when you have both a CIO and a CTO. When you don't, the CIO has to fill both roles, which are often at odds.
The way I see it...
The CTO is responsible for understanding, predicting, and planning technology.
The CIO is responsible for ensuring that the technology in use by and acquired for the company is in the best interests of the company (and its shareholders, if applicable).
CIOs are typically from a financial background, as at the end of the day their primary responsibility is to the business units that fund the technology. It isn't about the latest, flashiest, or even best gadgets - it's about meeting the needs of the business units while spending the least amount of money to do so. Unfortunately, this often leaves us (the geeks) on the short end of the stick. And perhaps worse, with the financial focus of the average CIO, they often fail to understand where a reasonable investment in technology can save them money over time. Since the typical CIO is only in their position for a few years, they don't have a lot of time for investments to pay off. Cut costs today, and let the next guy fix the mess they've made.
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
s/think.KNOW/gi;
Substitution replacement not terminated at line 1.
Not much of a fix.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
C3P0
20: GOTO 10
COO: Chief Operating Officer (usually a doctor)
CTO: Chair Throwing Officer (usually a Ballmer)
EIO: Chief Farming Officer (usually Old McDonald)
Chief Insult Officer, that's me.
"Go snort a moose, you snorkel-bleaching thimble monger!"
That's why I get paid the big bucks.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Top three signs:
1 - CIO reads magazine articles equating "Ruby on Rails" and "multicore programming" in the same sentence,
then proceeds to plan new projects with a vision towards "massively distributed MVC, ROR, multicore Web 2.0 social applications",
(code word for slow ruby websites that seem developed by drunken monkeys).
2 - Follows advice regarding "Your ability to talk tech will go a long way to earning the respect of application development professionals."
Usually developers have close to zero tolerance for the inane utterances ("talking tech") of managerial staff,
or as it is call in technical terms, "bullsh!t".
3 - Reads articles that use dehumanizing terms to refer to technical staff ("resources"),
then proceeds to use them to form akward "complimentary" sentences:
"Bob, you are by far my most leveraged, hyper-synergic resource".
- Bonus: CIO fires the company's most experienced engineers, hires an all-Kazakhstani team,
which after six months of working without a formal design produces hundreds of slideshows
that are demoed to customers on MacOSX, extra points if shown on spanking new MacBook Airs.
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.