Month: July 2013

A CIO’s Hierarchy of Needs

3 Comments

Early on in my role as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of AIIM, I read a Harvard Business Review Article by Ray Wang. In it, he outlined the Four Personas of the Next-Generation CIO. I felt a certain resonance with the article.

After having been a CIO for about 18 months now, I’ve decided that Ray only got it about half right. He beautifully covered the roles but he neglected the relationship between the roles.

The Four Roles

While you should read Ray’s article yourself, I thought I would list the four roles here for convenience.

  1. Chief “Infrastructure” Officers focus on cost reduction, and account for 65% to 70% of the overall IT budget. Most of this CIO persona’s projects prioritize keeping the lights on and managing legacy environments…
  2. Chief “Integration” Officers connect internal and external ecosystems. With 5% to 10% of the overall budget, this CEO persona must bring together a hodge-podge of business processes, data, systems, and connection points with legacy systems and newer cloud-based approaches…
  3. Chief “Intelligence” Officers empower the business with actionable insights. Representing between 10% and 15% of the overall budget, this CIO persona must improve business-user access to information. A key theme includes placing the right data to the right person at the right time on the right interface…
  4. Chief “Innovation” Officers identify disruptive technologies for pilot projects. Investing 5% to 10% of the overall budget, this CIO persona must drive innovation on a shoestring. Typically from business backgrounds, these leaders move fast, fail fast, and move on…

The article goes into more detail but it misses on the dependencies between the “roles”. In fact, I’d argue that you can’t focus on some roles until the others are mastered, or at least under control.

The Hierarchy of CIO Needs

These roles are really priorities for the CIO. Just like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, they build upon each other and you cannot readily execute each subsequent level if the previous one isn’t sound. This isn’t to say that work won’t be done on multiple levels at any given time. It is just to say that each level must be predictable and under control before you can turn your focus to the next level.

Continue reading →

Review: Every Leadership Book

3 Comments

Over my life, I’ve been through a lot of training outside the traditional classroom. Starting in Scouting and then transitioning into my professional life, I’ve been exposed to a lot of different Leadership principles. When mixed in with my professional experience, I think I have a firm understanding of what it takes to be a Leader.

I have read a few books on Leadership in my day. I’ve been impressed with none of them. When I saw this Dilbert strip, it all made sense to me.

Dilbert explains all leadership books to his pointy-haired boxx

No system works for every organization. No system works for a single organization all of the time. The Leadership style that creates a startup may not work when that startup is a market leader. The Leadership style for a software product company may not work well for an Association.

Continue reading →

Ready to Prove Yourself at AIIM 2014?

AIIM13 KeynoteThe call for speakers is out for AIIM 2014. As an employee, I can only speak as either a backup or as a keynote, though John Mancini seems to have that job locked-up.

You, on the other hand, can speak. In fact, you should speak. Your experiences and war stories are the kind of things that make the AIIM Conference useful for everyone.

Why should you speak?

  1. It is a chance to share your pain. Think of it as group therapy.
  2. Presentations are only 20 minutes long. Anyone can find enough useful information to fill that time.
  3. You can validate your ideas and experience among some of the leading minds in the Information Management profession.
  4. It is a chance to tell your favorite “war story”. (Those are the best presentations)
  5. Your boss is unlikely to say you can’t go if you are a speaker.
  6. You can tell people I am wrong without me being able to interrupt you.
  7. Looking smart in front of potential future colleagues is always a good thing.
  8. Why do lists always have to have 10 items? This is hard.
  9. Gaining the respect and admiration of your industry peers goes a long way.
  10. Who doesn’t want to spend a week in Orlando?

So start thinking about all the nuggets of wisdom you want to share and submit your idea today.

Review: The Introvert’s Guide to Success

4 Comments

The Introvert's Guide to Success in Business and Leadership

Years ago, I started following Lisa Petrilli on Twitter as I had found some of her blog posts interesting. She had written several blog posts on how Introverts can leverage their skills to be valuable leaders.

I loved the posts because I am an Introvert. If you don’t believe me, then you’ve never seen me hibernate after a large conference or noticed how I am always easier to find in the first few days of a conference than the end of the event. Being moderately “successful”, the posts usually helped to explain why what I was doing was the right thing or gave me tips on how I could do something better. When The Introvert’s Guide to Success came out, I quickly bought it. Then like many work-related books that I buy, it took me a while to read.

Glad I did.

Serial Readings

As I read the book, I was reminded of many Science Fiction classics. Not in tone or topic, but in style. Many early works were actually a compilation of a series of short stories published in one of the magazines of the day. As such, every few “episodes”, a basic tenet of the imagined universe was restated. This makes a lot of sense in a series that is read over a year or more, but not as much sense in a novel.

Continue reading →