Solving the CIO Trilemma
I have written from time to time on the human side of being a CIO and considered the value of the title of the senior IT worker in a company, and have decided to make a summary; some things don’t change.
I have come to the conclusion that a CIO needs to be able to make people, money and technology work effectively, and I am also of the view that individuals that can do all three are exceedingly scarce. Sadly I have no science nor survey data to back up the proposed skills conflicts but I do have many years of observation.
As IT complexity has grown, senior management has required more skills and the management portfolio has moved from the CFO to a peer director level appointment, initially, in the UK, IT or IS directors, but latterly, our US colleagues desire for alphabetic symmetry has led to them being called a CIO. This transition [of skills] has been healthy as the fetishising of measurable positive ROI is diminished.
This might be seen as controversial, but in my article “Influences on Economics” or on Medium, I wrote,
... my thinking about this started in the early 1990’s, Dan Remenyi at Henley Management School helped crystallise in my mind the idea that Information was the 4th Factor of Production, that industrial age economics was insufficient as it was unable to explain why companies that invested in negative or zero profit IT projects, as measured by ROI, outperformed those that didn’t, and that an industrial age balance sheet was incapable of evaluating an information system asset.
I still believe this to be true.
On the question of people management, I would also refer readers to my articles on theory x/theory y, or you can check out other’s commentaries on it, or read the white paper, where amongst much wisdom on treating people well and trusting them; in my blog article, “The dark side of HR???”, I conclude that,
[one] pearl of wisdom is to understand that people managers should be good at it. This may seem obvious, but most managers are chosen for their core skills and organisational planning, not for their people management skills.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on 11 July 2023.