Need a CIO? Grow Your Own.
March 2, 2008 | By Joel Dehlin | 14 Comments
In this post over at CIO.COM, Susan Cramm makes the point that the average I.T. professional who feels he is ready to be a CIO isn’t ready at all. She makes a call to CIOs to inform their people that they need to get more “business experience” and to develop “senior level relationships.”
Her charge is noble, necessary and terribly difficult. Many I.T. professionals lack skills critical to being successful in a C-level role. To many I.T. professionals, a vertical career track requires technical depth and specialization. Consequently they spend a disproportionate amount of time developing technical skills and not enough time on skills that would help them get into and navigate within the boardroom.
Skills like:
Communication. My department works on hundreds of simultaneous projects. In addition, we operate hundreds of different products and services continually. It’s critical that we keep our customers and our management aware of what is going on in the shop. I plead and beg our engineers and project/program managers to write very simple, understandable status reports. It is a constant struggle. A member of my office reviews (and in the past has typically re-written) every one of them. We have a hard time talking without jargon and acronyms.
Relationship Management. When I worked in computer games at Microsoft I often had to “check out the competition” and so played an awful lot of games for a couple of years. I remember telling my wife, Lani, about this great new game called Everquest where you could meet new people, develop friendships and have fun together, all in a virtual world. She said, “Gee Joel. It sounds almost as fun as real life.” Hmmm. Sarcasm. The fact is that relationships are easier on line than in real life. If things aren’t going well, you log out or you just “block” the other person. You don’t have to co-exist in a meaningful way–the biggest source of conflict is deciding who gets the +4 magic, +4 intelligence mace you picked up off a monster your party just clobbered. I know I.T. guys who get along socially just fine in on line games and who struggle to go out to lunch periodically with their customers. “I don’t really have anything to talk about with them.” “I’m too busy.”
Business Acumen. Our shop is going through some growing pains this year as one of our focuses is on writing effective business objectives for a project. It’s hard. Engineers think about solving problems very naturally. We don’t always think about cost justification. Why does it make business sense to upgrade your application server? “Well, the cache is filling up and we’re queue’ing requests. That’s why.” Upgrading may make all the sense in the world to a technologist who understands what’s under the hood, but a business person might decide that the business consequences of not upgrading are acceptable in light of the cost of upgrade. This is particularly relevant at the Church where we have to take extra precautions to keep costs low. Many basic business skills like cost-benefit analysis, contract negotiation, and others are not even taught in computer science or information technology programs, and when those skills are taught, they atrophy in I.T. people who are not being required to use them.
In our department, we’re taking steps to help our professionals develop these skills. I’ll talk about those steps in the next post.
James said...
Last year, I had a class with Mark Snyder covering video game design. He mentioned your “competitive reviews,” so I found it quite hilarious to hear you talking about the same thing here!
Great post, BTW. As a technology consultant, I am taking business courses so that I can better do just the types of things you describe.
March 2, 2008 8:21 pm #
Mark Barsocchini said...
Great post. I’ve seen so many “geeks” move into management because they had the most time on the job or “didn’t have anywhere else to go” and most failed terribly. As an up and coming “geek” years ago my manager pulled me aside, took me under his wing and showed me the ropes. Little did I know that he was exposing and prepping me for the vertical move that soon came. The best thing he did was told me to buy a pair of expensive slacks. That way, when someone came along and asked me to crawl under a desk to address something I would tell them, “Are you kidding, in these pants?” and walk away.
I think mentoring is a lost art. Things are so busy, who has time to get someone ready for a vertical move? “Let him ‘em learn the job the way I did!” is so often the attitude and it is terribly difficult for the person involved as well as those who will have to work with them.
If more managers understood the mentor process and its benefits, I believe vertical transitions would be less painful for all involved.
March 3, 2008 7:26 am #
Brian Hall said...
Great post. As an IT professional looking ahead to my career goals, this is very helpful information. I plan on getting an MBA starting this year and hope that the business knowledge and soft skills, coupled with my technical skills, will help me to achieve my goal of working in IT management. Thanks again for the great info!
March 3, 2008 7:34 am #
Kevin said...
I personally sought cross-over degrees to compensate for the deficiencies in a single silo education. I have my undergraduate minor in Computer Science, my major was Business Information Systems, and my Masters degree was in Information Systems Management (Some people know this degree type as a Specialized/Techno MBA).
I have spent the first six years of my career programming and performing smaller roles in project and product management. Last year I was hired as an assistant IT manager and I during that job search I found most managers to be reluctant to hire a non-CS or non-MBA manager. I work incredibly hard to maintain my skill set on both sides of the technology and business worlds and I feel that many don’t value the cross-over skill set.
Do you have any suggestions for someone like me who has that cross-over specialization and is finding it challenging to not get overlooked in the IT management field?
[Joel: I have a hard time seeing why any thoughtful manager would make promotion decisions based on too much diversity of education. To me, a strong C.S. degree with an MBA (or some similarly constructed pedigree) is a dream. Obviously, a good education does not make up for poor performance or a lack of other experience. But if you’re performing well and you’re getting the message that you can’t advance because your education is diverse then something else is going on. Sorry I’m not more help.]
March 3, 2008 9:11 am #
Jared vandeHorst said...
In my opinion, this is the real use of Information Systems programs in business schools. Give the technical background so that you can communicate and interact with technical people, and also develop the business skills and mentality to be able to communicate and interact with upper-level management.
Of course, I may be biased since I’m currently in the Information Systems program at BYU and loving it. I’m hoping to get an internship at the Church this summer, so maybe I can demonstrate the virtues of the program should I get hired.
March 3, 2008 10:21 am #
Davis said...
I was lucky enough to not have a degree when I was promoted to manager. I say lucky because at the time I was deciding which degree to pursue. After stepping into a manager’s role I decided to pursue a degree in Business Management and now I’m pursuing my MBA. My degree program quickly shed light on which areas I was weak in and helped me improve my business skills.
With my degree choice came the questions from everyone around me. Why aren’t you pursuing a CS degree. I think business training should be a requisite for every IT professional. This will help you understand management decisions as well as what your customers are expecting.
March 3, 2008 10:35 am #
Mark Hansen said...
You’re dead on in your analysis and your recommendation of things people in IT need to learn. I’ve also noticed that our programming team here at work tends to put their time and emphasis on things that are “fun” and “challenging” rather than things that might be “useful features” for our customers.
March 3, 2008 11:53 am #
Greg Nelson said...
Thanks Joel for your thoughts and counsel on this matter, it is something I have been working on as a young IT professional. My BA and MA degrees were in the humanities and I didn’t get into programming until I figured out that this something I could do to put food on my table and a roof over my family’s head. After working as an IA for a while and earning a BS in Computer Science, I advanced in my company’s IT department and have been web programming for the last several years. Although I enjoy programming, I cannot picture myself doing this for the next 20-25 years. With my eye on moving to management, I have sought ways to improve the skills that you spoke about and have found that to understand the business is so much more important than I had realized at first. Thanks for giving me some points to focus on, I enjoy reading your blog.
March 3, 2008 10:08 pm #
Steve Starks said...
Joel, I applaud your move to emphasize business and staff skills with your team. I came from an environment in the military where they pushed both specialized skills and leadership/management. It helped members to be more effective in the organization and to see in a bigger picture what the organization was about. I’ve worked to do that with my team members at BYU. Thanks for taking your time on the blog. I enjoy it.
March 4, 2008 8:20 am #
Joshua Feinberg's Blog said...
In the IT consulting world, what many just starting out in the business don’t realize is that business skills and people skills are actually in many ways more important than high-end technical skills. IT consulting is really first and foremost about developing relationships that will lead to long-term revenue. While you definitely need to have and further develop strong technical skills to be a good IT consultant, they are not what are going to sell you as a long-term partner for small businesses. Thanks for the very helpful information about necessary IT consulting skills!
March 5, 2008 9:01 am #
Davis Stovall said...
Joel, what does your organization do to provide mentoring for those IT professionals who are interested in moving up and preparing themselves for greater roles?
[Joel: I’ll be talking about this in a future post.]
March 5, 2008 2:50 pm #
Mario Hipol said...
This was a very enlightening post. Working as a CTO, I found that I needed to change hats frequently depending on who I was meeting with. What was easily explained from a technical perspective was not as easy to explain when asked from a “return on investment” perspective.
Executive:
“I understand that more memory will make our software run faster, but how will it make us more money?”
Technical:
“It will allow us to handle more people faster?”
Executive:
“We just need to handle the ones we have without complaints.”
Technical:
“Right, but as we increase sales, we will need more memory.”
Executive:
“So, we will have to buy more memory every time, I hire a sales person?”
I think that each person in the company has a different perspective on what is going on and what is important. Being able to communicate is definitely what’s important when moving to higher level positions.
March 6, 2008 12:41 pm #
Jorgi said...
A very good post Joel. I see it all around me too. Those of us doing well with people skills in tech roles are often also those who have had experience from other non IT tech roles. Having said that, in the last 20 years I think we can also say that the typical IT department has changed a lot. But there is still room for further change in an ever changing industry.
March 7, 2008 2:01 am #
Wade Burt said...
Outstanding point! As an IT Consultant I have learned that my ability to provide true value has almost as much to do with my ability to understand and relate to the business aspect of IT as it has to do with my understanding of the business technology needs and deployment.
As a specialist in Medical IT, EMR, PM, etc., my value to a client comes from being able to understand the pressures they are under - new initiatives like pay for performance from Medicare and other insurance, combined with the usual financial pressures on medical practices - demand efficiencies at every step of this very manual process.
With a ratio of fulltime staff anywhere from 2 to 5 to each physician, it is important to have a solid grasp of Human Resources issues and ergonomics.
With cash flow paramount to a medical practice (an unfortunate fact in today’s medical practice), it is just as important for IT staff to understand the financial impact of every decision relative to workflow.
As a contract Director of IT for several practices and acting Senior Systems Administrator for a major national healthcare insurance company, my ability to show improvement in processes that effect either cashflow or workflow efficiency drives my value and, ultimately, my ability to justify my salary in these organizations.
In my early days as a tech consultant, I was frustrated with what I saw as a lack of willingness to compensate professional IT staff to the level they deserveed. Now I understand it is a matter of being able to show we understand the complex nature of not just the technology, but of the business itself.
I have an Associates Degree in a technical filed (Avionics), but if I were to get the opportunity, I would lean towards Business Management, ending with an MBA. At 50, and with a 2 and 4 year old at home, I am not sure I will get the chance, but my career is already made.
Finally, I must point out I began learning many of these philosophies when I was called as Stake Technology Specialist and was assigned to deploy MLS in our Stake. Now, as Stake Clerk, I can definitely say had I not accepted the Stake Assistant Clerk calling, I don’t believe I would be where I am now. The Lord provides us each with opportunities - callings are part of our career growth as well. I am grateful for all the knowledge the Lord continues to give me.
Those of us who have “made it” owe it to others to spread the knowledge. If we are ever to fully mature as an “industry”, we need to help people think of us (IT) as they do a doctor, lawyer or CPA. In order to accomplish this, we will need to rise to the challenge. I personally have clients who have never seen me wearing anything but a suit and a tie. Many of my referrals have come from clients who appreciate that attitude. It does pay off.
March 17, 2008 7:30 am #