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CIOs Dismissed As Techies Without Business Savvy By CEOs
Qedward writes in with a link about the gap between the tech side of business and the bean counters. "CIOs are being dismissed by CEOs as too techie and not aligned with business activities. According to recent Gartner survey of 220 CEOs across the world, business leaders expect spending on IT to rise, but without a corresponding rise in the importance of the role of the CIO within the organization. CIOs appear to be failing in the eyes of CEOs in terms of alignment with the rest of the business. The research showed the stereotype of the head of IT being too preoccupied with technical issues to be effective business leaders persists. He said they were perceived as unable to bring a breadth of business perspective to the table."
That's okay. Most CEO's should generally be dismissed as people with no leadership abilities, intelligence, morals, scruples or logic.
Hence, "businessmen" as opposed to "Human."
Consistency is only a virtue if you're not a screw-up.
CIO's are dismissed as suits without tech savvy by engineering.
Go figure.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
This didn't sound like fire-fighting? Though I'll agree, someone that's always busy fighting fires needs to focus more on fire prevention.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I've often gotten the impression that IT is perceived by management as Janitorial services, or Corporate Archives, or the company cafeteria by companies that are not directly selling IT services themselves, as well as government agencies in general. They are a cost center, but not a revenue center. They are not customer facing, so they are just another physical plant cost. Like keeping the lights on, the water flowing, and the elevators running.
In some companies this is in fact the proper place for IT services. If all a company's use of computer technology is merely to process letters and reports, fill out time sheets, and read email you really don't need to attributed a great deal of status or power to the IT staff.
But who uses computers that way any more? Only really small business. Restaurants, plumbers, small stores, small law firms, etc.
IT departments have a problem of perception, because the better they do their job (without being total dickheads about it) the less they get noticed, and the more they become perceived as mere Archivists or telephone repairmen. Its almost like management needs an emergency or outage every 4 years to remind them just how much of their business relies on their IT.
That being said, unless your IT is customer facing (internet services or sales, etc) the perception that CIOs do not bring new business is reasonably valid. They may help you keep the business you have, but just about nothing IT can do will sell one more unit of product, or add one new customer. IT that is not customer facing is in fact still a support service. Support services tend not to make business decisions or grow the company.
So maybe pushing CIOs into the front office and the boardroom was not always warranted. And maybe in a lot of companies they still don't belong there. And maybe CIOs should not be hired from technical backgrounds.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
So many CEOs don't like CIOs? And resort to namecalling? They reveal themselves ...
Such CEOs are very arrogant and resentful of any nay-sayers. Even when the objections are based on physics or established computing capabilities.
The problem is such CEOs have gotten to where they are by pushing people around, and believe physics can be similarly pushed. Sorry, but it won't even notice.
CIOs are in charge of a giant cost center. That a section of the business where money goes to die. The CEO's POV is that anyone who can't make a profit for the company is lacking in business sense. This, of course, misses the point entirely. However, when you take into account who the inevitable audience is (the board and the shareholders) for every single thought, word and deed of every single CEO, the comments make perfect sense. No CEO worth his $10 million salary would ever say that anyone who loses company money has business sense.
In the end a good CEO knows you don't hire a CIO based on their business sense or even their technical know-how. You Hire them based on their ability to successfully deliver on technology promises. That's more a project-leader thing and not something CEOs are known to do very well. Its the same with CFOs. You hire them based on their ability to know exactly where the money went, is going, and will go. Again, not a trait CEOs are famous for.
CEOs don't care about "cutting corners dangerously", causing potential problems in some nebulous "future", they only care about this quarters stock price. By the time problems develop from their shortsightedness, it will be Someone Else's Problem.
In college, all of the IT degrees were part of the School of Business rather than the School of Technology - and all of the professors preached that while tech is cool, it's useless if it doesn't help the business. So far in my professional career, I've found that to always be the case.
To the typical CEO of today, the Sales VPs make money while IT costs money.
CEO: All the CIOs keep saying we should waste money upgrading from IE 6 and our crappy Windows 2000 servers. All IT does is cost money money and I can't raise the share price by staying ahead of the competition when I can just let my infrastructure fall apart and lead by saving money and not innovating. Waaa CIOS suck
CEO: What?! What do you mean my IPAD can't display that IE 6 app properly? I pay for the state of the art outsourced development team. bla bla
Typical BS from CEOs who got promoted up for being good cost accountants with only an eye for increasing efficiency and cutting cost while not saying the forest from the trees.
20 years ago CEOs were former engineers and product developers. They understood investments and did not focus on just costs. WHenever I hear failing to be alianged with the needs of the business. I just picture someone being cheap and thinking all IT is good for is help desk and word and excel. Not anything else like database, ERP, or anything else that adds value. Its just a cost and nothing else.
http://saveie6.com/
"CIOs are being dismissed by CEOs as too techie and not aligned with business activities."
"CIOs are being dismissed by CEOs for constantly pointing out technical hurdles and reasons why the idea they read in a magazine on the plane won't work. They are party poopers. Plus, they don't play golf."
There, fixed it.
CEOs don't care about "cutting corners dangerously", causing potential problems in some nebulous "future", they only care about this quarters stock price. By the time problems develop from their shortsightedness, it will be Someone Else's Problem... because they will have long ago jumped out the window on a golden parachute and now be running for president while claiming they "created jobs" as a Bain Capital Corporate Raider.
How world works:
CIO: In order to support [business_plan], we need the following infrastructure: [list of modern hardware]
CEO: But think of the bottom line! Make it work with what we've got now.
CIO: It won't work with what we have now. What we have now is insufficiently powerful, further it's out of warranty and we run increased risk of catastrophic hardware failures the longer we fail to replace it with up to date infrastructure that can handle the current bandwidth, storage and processing requirements.
CEO: But maintenance costs money. Just make it work with what we have. My management for dummies courses at MBA Mill University said all we have to do is tell people what to do and make sure they know their job is on the line and they'll find a way, so tell your people their jobs are on the line unless they make it work with what we already have. Do more with less. Leverage that diversity and synergize to create a new paradigm by thinking outside the box so we can make a sea change to increase company wellness. At the end of the day the new alignment will have the rank and file thanking you for all the empowerment and mean more organic growth for the company.
CIO: Fine. Go back to playing with your etch-a-sketch.
The problem is that IT people always think that nobody but an IT person can possibly manage an IT department, and MBAs can't possibly understand the needs.
No, actually, the problem comes from MBAs thinking they don't need all the skills you mentioned. And then, won't someone think of the poor, poor executives when they start playing over par as they struggle to understand why the minimum wage delivery drivers don't like the new "smile or we fire you" morale-boosting initiative; why the AR clerks raise an eyebrow when you explain to them how even though we lose money consistently from the same set of deadbeat customers, we need to keep those same deadbeats happy so just let it slide again this month; why the nurses keep talking about stupid shit like "patients dying" when forced to work 18-hour shifts.
Yes, the truck driver (or the highly skilled engineer, for that matter) doesn't necessarily understand the world of business. But the business side most definitely does need to understand the operational details of what their company does.
The problem is that IT people always think that nobody but an IT person can possibly manage an IT department, and MBAs can't possibly understand the needs.
Uhhhhh.....
That's true.
It is not arrogance either. According to your logic i dont require an understanding of accounting, finances, etc to manage the accounting department. I can just jump in and fake it till i make it.
That's disrespectful of IT and trivializes their field. If you are not in IT you most likely dont have the breadth of knowledge required to manage the department well.
I could relate anecdotes for hours about shortsighted managers and executives where "not aligned with businesses interests" translates to "i am butthurt because you pointed out technical flaws or the unrealistic cost and time projections of my ideas".
A CIO and CEO can act like mature adults and bring both their skillsets together to find a solution that is both technically feasible and aligned with business interests.
Or we can continue with the stereotypes and attacks and accomplish less. I wonder why there are so many problems.........
CEO's think Larry at Jiffy Lube is just a qualified to work on cars as Scott the trained mechanic. Scott is just too focused on getting the car run right and stay running. Larry knows how to sell $10 air filters for $25!!
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
>Are Shipping Operations Managers hired from the driver pool or the mechanic pool?
Are CFOs hired from tellers or account clerks?
Are hospital administrators selected from the best nursing staff or even the interns?
Once upon a time they were. Back in those days you could actually WORK your way to the top of a firm. Loyalty and effort were rewarded.
Nowadays, if you didn't choose to study MBA kiss any hope of ever earning an executive salary goodbye... and that is a big part of why business is in the fuckup it's in.
Why be loyal in an age of "headcount reduction" ? Why work hard for a company if your continued employment from one month to the next is mostly a lottery thing.
In fact... you're better off NOT working too hard. If you work the least, you'll be out of there - but if you're the best you also get fired because you're the most expensive.
Once a company goes public - quality of work loses all value to those who really run it (people who own shares - and their goal is to sell them for a profit THIS quarter). So what happens ? Nobody cares if the business is bankrupt in a year. What matters is maxing out the profits right now - and you do that by firing all the talent (and selling all the useful assets).
About the same time companies started calling people "resources" they started treating them with the same respect they give other resources... like staplers, so of course the people responded by treating the companies with that same (lack of) respect... voila - economic collapse.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
This is just a rehashing of the classic arrogance of the executive class -- that "managing" is the skill they specialize in, and there's no need to have any specialized knowledge of the area you manage.
The justification for this perspective often boils down to some combination of:
* I'm a decision-maker/course-setter. I hire area experts to explain complex details to me in simplified terms and then I make decisions and set future directions based upon this information. Structuring the management decisions is what's really important.
* I'm well educated and intelligent. I can figure most of this stuff out on my own. So-called "experts" in this field aren't as smart as they think they are (and I actually am) and dramatically overstate the complexity of their fields and the amount of information needed to make decisions.
While these two positions are somewhat contradictory, I've seen plenty of executives who hold both positions simultaneously. The former is actually somewhat reasonable and is more or less how most large organizations have to function.
The problem is that arrogance creeps in, and executives tend to cherry-pick -- when their area experts don't tell them what they want to hear, they fall back to their belief that they are the smartest guy in the room and make poorly informed decisions based on their own "understanding" of the topics at hand.
The real problem is the MBA degree, which i've been saying for 30 years is destroying the US. They're the ones with "long-term thinking" == "next quarter".
In terms specifically of IT, I recently realized that the major problem was the complete idiocy, started AFAIK in the 80's, of declaring each part of the company "profit" or "cost" centers. Everywhere I've worked, if they had that, they kept trying to make IT a "profit" center... meaning charging other divisions for the work, leading to:
a) other divisions buying their own equipment and software
b) other divisions creating half-baked software to get around paying IT to do it, which is why you find
mind-bogglingly big spreadsheets instead of databases, and
c) cut spending by IT on hardware, software, and, I mean, why would you want to spend all that money on
experienced people, we can hire two or three folks right out of college who are "fresh", or maybe outsource
it to Asia or eastern Europe for a quarter the price.....
mark "then there's HR...."
How world works:
CIO: In order to support [business_plan], we need the following infrastructure: [list of modern hardware]
CEO: But think of the bottom line! Make it work with what we've got now.
CIO: It won't work with what we have now. What we have now is insufficiently powerful, further it's out of warranty and we run increased risk of catastrophic hardware failures the longer we fail to replace it with up to date infrastructure that can handle the current bandwidth, storage and processing requirements.
CEO: But maintenance costs money. Just make it work with what we have.
In my experience, the response of the CEO to anything even remotely technical is "All I heard was 'Blah blah blah I'm a big egghead nerd.' I don't understand a word you said and I really don't care. Listen, Poindexter, you just make it work with what we've got and stop spending all our money on Ward of Whirlcraft, or whatever it is you guys do all day."
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
You know, if you have a CIO with business sense and tech sense, why do you need the CEO?
That's like saying that you have a sales person who knows some Perl, so why do you need software engineers?
It worries me that this was flagged as insightful.