Reasons a CIO Fails #1

Today is the first of a five day series of posts that I am writing on reasons CIO’s fail.?I have in my career worked for some really good and some really bad CIO’s. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the bad ones were bad people.?They were just not equipped to do the job that was put in front of them. So, as I prepare to break this down let’s get to the first one.

“Talking In Geek?-?The conversation around the boardroom table is rarely technology specific.?The CIO job is to communicate concepts, vision and strategy.?When it veers into alphabet soup of acronyms, the audience is lost.” -Nathaniel Morris

CIO’s that have come up through the ranks of IT are the most likely to suffer from this one. This is not a bad thing for a CIO but they have to know when they should speak to technology and when they should speak business strategy and leave the technospeak out of the conversation.?Most CEO’s and board members are industry not technology professionals. In the boardroom they don’t want to hear about the latest network, storage, or server technology available. They want to know how can we automate things to become more efficient and cost effective. ?

The closest you will get to a technology conversation will be asked, “What is the plan to get us to the cloud?” This is a strategy play. When presenting this don’t go into the bits and bytes of how you will be using Terraform to deploy infrastructure as code. They don’t care. They want to know the answer to how is moving to the cloud going to be good for us? How much is the initial investment going to be? What is the timeframe? When asked these questions be concise with you business answers.

• How is this going to be good for us? We’re going to reduce our on premise presence by X and this will reduce our need to spend $X.
• What is the initial cost? We will need an initial investment of $X
• What is the timeframe? We will have the first phase of X% in the cloud by xx/xx/xxxx.

This was the one thing that a professor in graduate school always reminded us while I was getting my MBA. When you get down to it all IT staff need to learn how to speak the language of business.

Please come back each day this week as I break down the other four. I want to thank Nathaniel Morris for permission to use some content from his original post which gave me the idea to break them down. I would also like to thank Dawn C Simmons a long time friend for the graphic used in the articles I am posting.