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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."
Alert: CEOs also don't like CFOs who tell them they are losing money.
Notice: CEOs don't like COOs who inform them that cancelling the pension fund is illegal.
Warning: CEOs don't like CIOs who spend money on "infrastructure" instead of "apps".
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
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.
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 being dismissed by CEOs as too techie and not aligned with business activities."
One of the main purposes of CIOs and CTOs to represent the technology side of the business at the executive level. I work for a client that has no CIO or CTO and middle management is supposed to step up for the technology-side, but their not at the same level as the CEO and they're afraid to tell the executives the truth. CTOs and CIOs report to the board so that they have an equal standing with other executives.
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.
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 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...."