As CIOs, despite having access to some of the most sophisticated communication tools available, most of us still do most of our communicating via emails. Not just a few emails, but a whole lot of emails. When we send an email out, there is a very good chance that the person that we sent the email to will reply to it. We may then reply to their reply. They will then probably reply to our reply to their reply. And so on. You can see how this back and forth thing can really start to build up. It turns out that all of this email exchange stuff is actually really bad for CIOs to be doing…

The Problem With Long Emails

I think that all CIOs can agree that resolving complicated issues over email can feel both frustrating and taxing. However, it turns out that cost of email reliance may be more far-reaching than CIOs previously knew. New research now suggests that compared with face-to-face conversation, email not only makes resolving an issue more difficult, but can also worsen a CIO’s performance on subsequent tasks. Not only do we have less motivation, but we also suffer cognitive deficits. Most CIOs hate those long back-and-forth emails. I’m pretty sure that we all have at least one colleague who, if you start to engage them on email, will write literally essays in response. The problem with this is that you have to respond with another essay. And that back-and-forth can really tire you out.

The researchers were interested in measuring the toll this type of email exchange might be taking on CIOs efficiency. The researchers devised four experiments in which hundreds of paired subjects were divided into two groups. In each experiment, the first group was asked to perform a complicated task during a face-to-face encounter. The second group was asked to attempt perform an identical task using email. Perhaps not surprisingly, the pairs who were working face-to-face were more efficient. In the first experiment, negotiating a sales strategy in person took six minutes on average to achieve consensus, while the emailing pairs took over 20 minutes on average.

CIOs understand that email is a great tool for sending information. The challenge comes when you need to arrive at a shared understanding. In situations like this, face-to-face communication works a lot better. The study also showed that the participants who resolved issues over email ended up performing worse on subsequent tasks. When they were asked to spot grammatical errors in a news story about young entrepreneurs, the email communicators who were now working as individuals ended up catching 19% fewer errors than those who had communicated face-to-face. The participants who were emailing communicators also did 49% worse solving a series of logic problems, and 20% worse on a test of their complex reasoning.

Solving The Long Email Problem

The researchers ended up concluding their study with a field test that compiled data from employees in real work situations. They asked more than 200 workers to report their daily levels of text-based communication in an end-of-the morning survey, along with their daily goal progress and work engagement at the end of the day. The results of this study showed that while a big dose of text-based communication had no effect on those working in jobs with low problem-solving demands, it turns out that people working in jobs with high problem-solving demands felt less excited and energetic about their work at the day’s end. The result of this was that they were less likely to report feeling they had made progress.

CIOs understand that email creates a record of a conversation, and often feels easier than trying to schedule a meeting. This can be especially true when people are working remotely or in different time zones. CIOs can feel as though they would rather just type an email and get it off of their desk. CIOs have to realize that they often use email simply out of habit without considering the hidden costs.

What are our alternatives? We can schedule regular meetings so that outstanding issues can be resolved with less effort. And when caught in a nightmare email chain we need to learn to be mindful of the toll it extracts before moving on to the next task. We can take a break, or do something that’s not important, something that’s relatively mindless compared to something that involves a lot of decision making on our part.

What All Of This Means For You

CIOs generally have very little spare time. It seems like our schedules are always full and we struggle to try to get everything that we need to get done, done. When we need to ask someone to do something or when we need information from someone, we will often send an email. However, it turns out that this can be a dangerous path to take. There is a very good chance that our emails may be answered, and then we’ll end up sending another, longer email in response to the response. It turns out that this is exactly what we should not be doing.

Research has been done that shows using email to communicate with people instead of having a face-to-face meeting with them is a mistake. It can reduce our performance on other tasks. Experiments have been conducted that show that face-to-face meetings reach conclusions faster. The studies also showed that when people used email to communicate, their ability to detect problems and think clearly was diminished. CIOs who have demanding jobs are at the most risk of having their abilities diminished by engaging in long emails. CIOs should try to find alternatives to email conversations such as talking with people directly.

A key skill of any CIO is the ability to effectively communicate with other people. We all use email as a primary way to get and send information. We need to understand that email has the ability to diminish our ability to communicate with other people. What we need to do is to take the initiative and try to meet with as many people face-to-face instead of email when we have a chance. Yes, email will always be a part of our lives, but we need to look for alternatives when they are available.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: What is the best way for a CIO to determine if an email has become too long?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As though CIOs didn’t already have enough to deal with, it turns out that the rules are changing on us. Cybersecurity has always been a big deal for our firms; however, the U.S. government is starting to understand just how big of a deal it is. It turns out that if your company suffers a cybersecurity attack, it could have an impact on your company’s ability to stay in business. This could have a dramatic impact on the value of your company. Because of this, the government wants to know more about what is going on at your company in terms of cybersecurity. This means that the CIO has one more job to do.

A Request For More Information On CyberAttacks

CIOs expect that they are going to end up having a closer relationship with their boards based on recent Securities and Exchange Commission proposals seeking to pry more details from companies about cyberattacks and their defense measures. Some CIOs worry that the SEC is going too far. Under recent proposals from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency is asking to know more about how listed companies manage their cyber risk. CIOs would be required to disclose which board directors have cybersecurity expertise, how often the topic of cybersecurity is discussed and what, if any, oversight the board has over its cyber matters. The SEC wants to go further in providing information for investment funds and advisers, requiring boards to approve all cybersecurity policies.

The proposals, which are now open for public comment, indicate the SEC is starting to get tougher as pervasive cyberattacks cost victims billions of dollars a year. These losses are based on estimates from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Not everyone is happy with the SEC’s new proposals. A lobbying group for asset managers has expressed concern over the breadth of the proposed rules. In a letter that they sent to the SEC they said that while companies should have processes in place to escalate cyber issues to boards, directors shouldn’t be expected to manage them directly.

The thinking behind the request to the SEC is that the requirement that boards approve policies and procedures and exercise formal oversight is too prescriptive and crosses into the realm of management. But others say the new rules provide much-needed clarity on expectations from the government watchdogs, as cybersecurity has become a core business risk for companies of all sizes. Many CIOs view this as being a reset, and they think the advantage of this reset is the SEC is being very clear. They’re telling companies what they expect.

A New World For CIOs

CIOs know that in practice CIOs and others with cyber responsibilities must learn how to translate their cybersecurity data into clear risk information that their nontechnical board directors can quickly understand. What this means is that this may force some companies to rethink the CIO role itself. When a CIO lands their first cybersecurity executive position they may lack experience interacting with a corporate board. Just to make things tougher, they may not receive much help. Often CIOs view their first board meeting as being a sink or swim event.

The SEC’s call for senior leaders and directors to understand and disclose more about their company’s cybersecurity posture will require developing a strong relationship between the CIO and the board. It will change how companies develop the next generation of CIOs. This means that they will end up relying less on technical knowledge and more on business-risk experience when they are looking to fill the CIO position. Additionally, companies may end up having to examine the composition of their boards more closely in light of the rules and the heightened cyber threat environment. Many of today’s boards often suffer from a lack of technical knowledge, which can lead to the improper management of risks.

CIOs believe that across boards, globally, there is a lack of understanding as to not just technology, but security in terms of how important it is to an organization, but equally the impact on an organization if there is an IT or a broader security incident. Installing directors with cybersecurity expertise on boards can help the rest of the board grasp these cybersecurity issues. It is important to note that simply having cyber experts on boards isn’t sufficient to meet the SEC’s new demands. What can happen is that the security staff will engage with that member alone, using the director as an interpreter for other board members, who then assume that their more technical peer has the situation in hand. Invariably, what can happen is the balance of the board checks out. What CIOs and other staff will have to do is to find ways to convey the issues they’re facing in language all board members are conversant in. This means talking in terms of business risks, the cost of mitigating them and the resources needed to manage future risks.

What All Of This Means For You

CIOs have to deal with change all the time. There is yet one more change that appears to be coming their way. The U.S. government’s SEC is in the process of changing the rules regarding what a company’s board of directors has to know about the cybersecurity threats that the company is facing. Since the CIO is the person who both has this information and interacts with the board, the CIO is going to be required to be the person who keeps the board of directors up to date.

The SEC is proposing that companies disclose how listed companies manage their cyber risk. These new rules include disclosing which board directors have cybersecurity expertise, how often the topic of cybersecurity is discussed and what, if any, oversight the board has over its cyber matters. The SEC also wants boards to approve all cybersecurity policies. Some CIOs are concerned that the SEC is going too far and that board directors should not have to manage cybersecurity issues directly. Other CIOs believe that the new rules will provide needed insight into how a company is managing its cybersecurity threats. CIOs may have to find ways to translate their cybersecurity threats into language that the board of directors can understand. Having this set of skills may change how companies go looking for their next CIO. CIOs are going to have to learn how to talk about cybersecurity with their boards.

CIOs understand that cybersecurity has become an important issue for every company. What this means is that we are spending more and more of our time finding ways to keep our company secure. Everyone seems to understand the importance of cybersecurity and now the U.S. government wants to make sure that CIOs are keeping their boards aware of everything that is going on. CIOs are going to have to learn how to translate what they are doing in terms of securing the company into conversations that they can have with their boards.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: How often do you think that CIOs should talk with their boards about cybersecurity issues?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As CIOs, despite having access to some of the most sophisticated communication tools available, most of us still do most of our communicating via emails. Not just a few emails, but a whole lot of emails. When we send an email out, there is a very good chance that the person that we sent the email to will reply to it. We may then reply to their reply. They will then probably reply to our reply to their reply. And so on. You can see how this back and forth thing can really start to build up. It turns out that all of this email exchange stuff is actually really bad for CIOs to be doing…

CIOs have a responsibility to create an IT department that can help the company move forward. We need to be able to attract and retain the best workers who will be able to deal with the technology challenges of the future. As we prepare to onboard the latest crop of graduates, we may pause and wonder what we are getting ourselves into. This batch of hires is socially media savvy like no generation before them. Is this going to help them fit into our IT department or is it going to hinder them?

Say Hello To The “Network Generation”

The college students who are graduating this year find themselves graduating into a surprisingly strong work environment, especially compared with their immediate predecessors. CIOs are hiring again, and the labor market is relatively favorable even for job seekers without very much experience. Yet the future is anything but certain. When huge and unanticipated events like the pandemic have become the norm, any outlook could change quickly. However, CIOs are bullish about the long-term prospects for this class of graduates and about the impact these young people will likely have on the workforce. The reason that CIOs feel this ways is because of how much of their lives they have spent involved in digital networks like Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.

This generation of workers is called “Generation Z”. Gen Z’s lifelong immersion in social media is often thought of as a parade of very bad experiences. The narrative has implied that social media has been pressuring them to live up to impossible lifestyle ideals. In the case that they do manage to live up to those ideals, it can turn them into entitled narcissists, hopelessly distracted by superficial and trivial concerns. CIOs want to believe that they are not too emotionally fragile to handle themselves with strength as they move through the worlds of both online and off.

When CIOs ask members of this generation themselves how they think about social media they find that they see things differently. The overwhelming majority of respondents to a survey described social media as a “key tool for connecting and maintaining relationships, being creative, and learning more about the world.” They said that it keeps them “in touch with their friends’ feelings.” Social media connects them with “people who will support them through tough times” and gives them “a place to show their creative side.” It was also viewed as exposing them to “new types of people” and helps them “find different points of view.”

What Makes The Network Generation Different

CIOs need to understand that unlike the Millennials who preceded them, members of Gen Z aren’t just digital natives. Instead, they are “network natives” who get, implicitly and explicitly, the power of connection. Instead of being passive and isolated, they know how to lead lives characterized by participation and community. They realize that social media lets them share their voices directly with the world even as it situates them in vast but tightly woven networks of their peers.

Today the idea that everyone has public professional identities is commonplace. And the people who really understand networks recognize that even with social media’s seeming emphasis on the self, our identities aren’t just our own but are explicitly connected to and shaped by the networks that we build. These days, who you know can be what you know, how you’re known, and who you become. CIOs have to understand that Gen Z gets this with a facility that is hard to approximate for anyone who is old enough to remember when every cellphone came with a push-button keypad, or those who can still recall what a dial-up modem sounds like. New network-driven concepts like crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, the sharing economy, and collaborative workflow apps like Slack and Figma aren’t major paradigm shifts for this generation. Instead, they are just how the world works.

Gen Z also knows, from long hands-on experience, how fast the networked world moves and how competitive it can be. But even as change accelerates, workers continue to crave stability and familiarity. People want traditions and familiar patterns of living that they can count on. CIOs believe that adaptability is the new stability, and that personal and professional networks are the key to adaptability. CIOs believe that if a worker has a diverse team of trusted peers and mentors they regularly share information with and learn from, then they’ve got stability. If they’ve got loyal allies to reach out to when a crisis hits, they’ve got stability. Because Gen Z has already experienced this dynamic and understands it intuitively, CIOs believe that great things are in store for these new workers. They will pioneer new ways to tap the full power of networks and network thinking in the world of work.

What All Of This Means For You

CIOs have to understand who will be joining their workforce going forward. It turns out that the most recent graduates will be member of Generation Z, or the networked generation. These workers will be unlike any workers who came before them. What this means for CIOs is that we have to take the time to understand who these people are and how they will fit into our workplaces.

This year’s graduates have experienced many changes in their lives. They have also grown up using many different online social media platforms. Often people think that how involved this generation has been in social media is a bad thing. However, this is not how they choose to view themselves. Instead, they view social media as being a communication tool that they can use to stay in contact with others. They understand how connections work and they know how to make sure that they are not isolated. They understand all of the new social network concepts like crowdfunding and the shared economy. This generation is ready for the world to change. With their well-established sets of networks, they will be ready when change comes.

CIOs need to be ready to welcome the Gen Z workers into the workplace. We need to understand that these workers will be unlike any that we have had before. They will be ready to deal with our highly connected workplaces and they will be well equipped to deal with all of the change that will undoubtedly come. These workers are exactly the ones that we are going to want to have on our team.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: What unique workplace needs will the Gen Z workers have that CIOs will have to deal with?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As though CIOs didn’t already have enough to deal with, it turns out that the rules are changing on us. Cybersecurity has always been a big deal for our firms; however, the U.S. government is starting to understand just how big of a deal it is. It turns out that if your company suffers a cybersecurity attack, it could have an impact on your company’s ability to stay in business. This could have a dramatic impact on the value of your company. Because of this, the government wants to know more about what is going on at your company in terms of cybersecurity. This means that the CIO has one more job to do.

CIOs have to start to deal with the fact that everything has changed. None of us saw the Covid-19 pandemic crisis coming and when it did, it turned everything upside down. All of the changes that had to be implemented were required so that the business could keep operating even when nobody was allowed to come into work. However, now things have started to go back to normal. However, for CIOs things will never “go back to normal”. How are we supposed to deal with this new world?

The Pandemic Changed Everything

CIOs need to understand that remote work is no longer looking like a blip in the lives of millions of people, but rather a long-term realignment of how those workers and their organizations operate. CIOs are going to have to find ways to help people working from home assert more control over how that transformation is reshaping their lives and careers. The appeal of working remotely was evident in a survey that was recently conducted. More than 80% of people who were new to remote work said they now wanted to keep working remotely at least part time in the future. However, only 15% said they would want to do so five days a week. Workers who were already working remotely at least part of the time when Covid hit were even more enthusiastic about working from home: in the survey 65% said they wanted to keep working remotely full time in the future, and almost all of them wanted to continue at least part-time remote work.

CIOs have to realize that the enthusiasm gap between new and experienced remote workers reflects the obstacles that people have to overcome when they first start working from home, especially if their children are home, too. It’s hard for workers to figure out work-life balance when work and life happen in the same place. It’s also hard to stay focused on that client document, that PowerPoint deck or even that expense report when a worker can see their child getting paint all over the coffee table, hear their spouse conducting their own Zoom call, and smell that delicious batch of cookies their teen is baking in the oven. Everyone knows that it’s frustrating to try to brainstorm with colleagues or write a report together when you’re used to working together face-to-face, with the benefit of body language and a giant whiteboard. And it can be time-consuming to manage your own software glitches and video-call hiccups without the on-site help of the IT department.

As the CIO, we are going to have to talk with our people and discover that for all the enthusiasm they may be feeling about the idea of remote work – including benefits like personal flexibility and freedom from the commute – many people are now starting to experience its frictions. What can seem like tolerable problems when you’re home just for a few weeks or a few months ends up turning out to be significant obstacles to productivity and well-being when you’re looking at a long-run restructuring of your working life.

CIOs Wonder: Where Do We Go From Here

The Plexiglas dividers and floor decals that we’ve used to create our modern offices might not be permanent, but the pandemic will bring lasting change to our offices. That’s why it’s crucial for our workers to stop thinking of remote work as a temporary part of working life, or hoping that its challenges will magically be resolved when the pandemic ends. If workers are going to continue to work from home they have to address the frictions that they are encountering. This means not only addressing the obstacles and irritations that stand in the way of their focus and productivity, but also thinking proactively about what they want their new home-based career to look like.

We need to understand that the answer could be different for different workers. If they miss the creative spark that comes from in-person brainstorming, for instance, maybe it’s time for them to experiment with online whiteboards and mind-mapping tools that let them brainstorm with their colleagues in real time over the internet. If it’s hard to concentrate when they know the kitchen is full of dirty dishes, perhaps they need to make it a habit of calling into their first meeting of the day by phone instead of video, and clean the dishes while they listen in. If they find themselves struggling with depression every afternoon, when the isolation of home-based work sets in, maybe they need to try restructuring their workweek around two-part workdays, and spend the middle of each day going for a walk or visiting with a friend.

From the smallest detail to the biggest strategic choices, the path of each of your worker’s new remote career really is in their hands. Because make no mistake, it will be a new career, even if it’s at the same company or working with the same team that they have been part of for years. When they are working from home, just about everything about their job is new again. This moment, after the pandemic, is a good time for every worker to step back and think about what they want their job to be. It can be a job where they’re held back by the frustrations of video calls and the distraction of children underfoot. Or it can be a job where they’re finally designing the environment, habits and routines that will make remote work productive and delightful for the long haul.

What All Of This Means For You

CIOs have yet another responsibility that they need to tend to. The pandemic changed just about everything for just about everyone. All of sudden everyone who worked for us had an opportunity to work from home. Now that the pandemic is receding, we are faced with a new set of challenges. We are discovering that not all of our workers want to return to the office. For those workers who want to continue to be remote, how will how they do work change?

The opportunity to work from home was a new experience for many people before the pandemic forced everyone to do it. Surveys taken after the pandemic reveal that the majority of workers are interested in continuing to work from home at least a few days each week. CIOs have to understand that wanting to work from home and finding ways to achieve a balanced work life balance can be tricky to do. When workers start to work from home, they can quickly start to discover sources of friction that can cause being productive to become harder to do. Workers are going to have to find ways to deal with these frictions. Each friction will have to be dealt with and each worker may choose to do so in a different way. Working from home is truly a new career for each worker who chooses to do so.

CIOs have to come to grips with the fact that the world that they are living in has changed. As more and more of our workers are electing to work from home either some of the time or all of the time, we need to understand that the transition may not go smoothly for all of them. We need to work with the people who work for us and help them to identify the things that may cause friction for them. Together we need to find ways to eliminate this friction. If we can make this happen, then we’ll have more productive workers and we can all get back to work!

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: What is the best way for a CIO to find out what is causing friction for their workers?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

CIOs have a responsibility to create an IT department that can help the company move forward. We need to be able to attract and retain the best workers who will be able to deal with the technology challenges of the future. As we prepare to onboard the latest crop of graduates, we may pause and wonder what we are getting ourselves into. This batch of hires is socially media savvy like no generation before them. Is this going to help them fit into our IT department or is it going to hinder them?

It seems as though there is more for CIOs to do now than there ever has been before. No matter if it is dealing with trying to decide what applications we should be moving into the cloud, trying to secure the company’s networks, or working out hybrid-work arrangements with our staff, very clearly our plates are quite full. What this means for CIOs is that we now have to become more careful about how we choose to spend our time. We need to very carefully try to prioritize what we spend our time on. Our goal should be to tend to those things that are going to have the greatest benefit for our company. Just exactly what are those things?

What Should CIOs Be Doing?

I think that we are always aware when there are threats of recession. During these times, CIOs are prioritizing technology that drives efficiency, mitigates ongoing supply-chain struggles and contributes quickly to the company’s bottom line. CIOs are monitoring a number of factors, including the financial markets, inflation and supply-chain uncertainties as they continue making their tech investments. During times of economic uncertainty, companies are looking for ways technology can drive growth and create more economic value for the company faster. When IT budgets are under significant scrutiny, companies tend to place more emphasis on finding shorter-term solutions that can drive efficiency and productivity for the company as a whole.

Those types of solutions can run the gamut from simply planning further ahead to the actual use of automation and artificial intelligence to minimize supply-chain bottlenecks that drag on profits. Across the tech sector, from startup founders to public- and private-market investors and corporate executives, a new mentality is starting to emerge in which productivity and profitability play a bigger role. Many companies have been exclusively focused on generating growth. Now there is a focus back on fundamentals like gross margins and positive contribution margins. Technology and services that make the supply chain more efficient are increasingly important.

CIOs Prepare For The Future

For some CIOs, finding ways to manage backlogs involves placing orders well ahead of time. For example, at pharmacy giant Walgreens, delivery times for items such as workstations and PIN pads for stores has in some cases doubled to 16 weeks from eight. The result of this is that it’s putting more pressure on the business to plan farther in advance. For many CIOs, driving efficiency through better management of the supply chain has become a top priority. CIOs understand that more than ever there is potential supply-chain risk, should the economy worsen. What is means is that CIOs have to help their company invest in technology that will help its supply chain cope.

One thing that CIOs are currently trying to do is to achieve better end-to-end supply-chain visibility. In order to make this happen, they are looking for ways to improve the way their company monitors exceptional situations and enhances its ability to redirect or expedite supply more proactively. To achieve this goal, CIOs will work with transportation and warehousing companies. They can also integrate supply-chain data from third-party logistics providers into their systems. Long term, CIOs can have their data-science team help build predictive models that anticipate supply-chain issues and model and evaluate mitigation options.

What All Of This Means For You

When times become tough, a company will look towards its CIO to provide it with assistance. What the company is looking for is someone who can show them how they can become more efficient. This means that a CIO is going to have to start to take a look at all of the data streams that are coming into the company. It will then be their responsibility to process that data and provide the company with guidance as to what their next steps need to be.

CIO need to prioritize technology that helps the company become more efficient. They also need to find ways to make sure that the company’s supply chain operates efficiently. The goal is to find ways to allow technology to drive growth. Productivity and profitability have become the new goals for CIOs to pursue. CIOs may have to help their company place orders earlier to ensure that they’ll have the supplies that they need when the time comes. Making the supply chain visible from end-to-end is important. CIOs may have to work with outside firms to make this happen.

The important point here is that the company is starting to understand just how critical the CIO is. We are being asked to use the tools that we have at our disposal to help the company find ways to run more efficiently and generate more profit. CIOs are becoming responsible for the success of their company.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: How can CIOs get a good view of how the company’s supply chain is operating?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

CIOs have to start to deal with the fact that everything has changed. None of us saw the Covid-19 pandemic crisis coming and when it did, it turned everything upside down. All of the changes that had to be implemented were required so that the business could keep operating even when nobody was allowed to come into work. However, now things have started to go back to normal. However, for CIOs things will never “go back to normal”. How are we supposed to deal with this new world?

As a modern, post-pandemic, CIO we have a lot of new and challenging things that we have to deal with. One of the biggest is determining if we are going to allow our workers to be remote some or all of the time. However, as big of an issue as that may seem, it turns out that there is an issue that is even more important to our workers: just exactly when they come to work. This used to be a simple question: everyone worked the same hours on the same days. Not so much anymore. How should CIOs handle this new issue?

When Should People Come Into Work?

CIOs are starting to learn that their workers, flush with power as employers raise wages and scramble to fill open jobs, are saying that they care even more about flexible schedules than whether or not they go into an office. Ninety-five percent of people recently surveyed want flexible hours, compared with 78% of workers who want location flexibility. The new data based on a survey of more than 10,000 IT workers, offers a snapshot into just how popular hybrid arrangements have become. Now it appears as though virtually all workers prize schedule flexibility above all and the growing concerns that many CIOs have about how to keep promotions and pay fair when some employees are in the office while others are staying at home.

The survey also found that 72% of workers who weren’t happy with their level of flexibility no matter if it was time or location are more likely to seek out a new opportunity in the next year. CIO have to understand that if workers are not getting what they want, they’re open to looking for a new job. Many CIOs have reluctantly embraced long-term hybrid and remote work arrangements after repeatedly postponing their return-to-office dates or discovering that their workers were pushing back on going to the office. That has some CIOs thinking differently about in-person arrangements.

Some CIOs believe that employees should gather only when there is a specific need to do so. The thought is that they should really be organizing around bringing people together for an explicit purpose, whether that’s collaboration, innovation, planning or just socializing. Agreements between team members about when people in the group will work are growing in popularity across many industries. CIOs have to realize that flexible schedules are likely to endure long after the pandemic has faded. Focusing on how many hours people are working may be outdated. CIOs really need to shift from presenteeism and activity tracking to actually understanding the results that workers are driving and the value that they’re creating.

The survey also found that the share of people working in hybrid models, where they split their time between an office and a remote location, increased by 12 percentage points, as more workers have returned part-time to their workplaces. More than two-thirds of those surveyed said a hybrid setup was their preferred way of working going forward. A key point is that many workers have found their productivity surged while working from home and they achieved the work-life balance they had been seeking. This is one reason that so many people see hybrid work as the future. Spending two years into working remote and hybrid, worker’s muscles have now been built. They know how to make this work. People love the flexibility that this gives to them. Additionally, companies love the cost savings.

Adjusting To The New Work Schedule

While many CIOs have decided that the majority of their employees will combine remote work with in-office days, hybrid work does have its downsides. CIOs have growing concerns that hybrid work could increase inequity among rank-and-file employees. This especially applies to women, working mothers and people of color, who, when surveyed, said they were more likely to prefer flexible arrangements. Among CIOs surveyed, 71% said they work in the office at least three days a week; 63% of nonexecutive employees said they go in as often. It’s clear that there is a sharper divide between their preferences. CIOs working remotely were far more likely than nonexecutives to say they want to work at least three days a week in the office, at 75% versus 37% of employees.

What employees want may not be the most effective way for IT organizations to operate. CIOs have to be prepare for the coming battle royale over choice versus coordination that is going to happen in the future. In another survey some initial results align employee sentiment on the importance of flexibility. Seventy-five percent of those surveyed said that they want to choose the days they work from home, as opposed to their employer telling them which days to go in.

CIOs are going to be reluctant to force employees to coordinate. It’s probably not going to go well because on any given day 20% are going to be at home. We need to understand that large meetings are harder to conduct if some people are in office and some are remote. Often people inside companies complain about the lack of energy in the workplace when it is sparsely populated. Forcing a one-size-fits-all solution across a large workforce can seem risky to CIOs at a time many workers are a flight risk. CIOs are probably going to feel like they’re going to have to let their workers choose where they want to work.

What All Of This Means For You

The pandemic changed a lot of things for CIOs. Their workforce was forced out of the office and sent home for a year. Now that that has all faded, the big question is how do workers want to work? Do they want to come back into the office? Do they want to work regular hours? With everyone appearing to be willing to switch jobs at the drop of a hat, CIOs are struggling to come up with answers to these questions that will allow their IT departments to operate smoothly.

CIOs are starting to discover that their workers care more about being allowed to have flexible schedules than they care about being required to go back into the office. If workers don’t get the flexibility that they are looking for, they very well may end up leaving the company. Allowing workers who are part of a team to agree on when everyone will work seems to meet the needs of the workers. Hybrid models where workers work both in the office and at home are growing in popularity. CIOs need to be aware that the hybrid model may not suit certain groups well. There may be disagreements over where workers can work in the future. CIOs have to understand that coordinating many workers and ensuring that enough are in the office can be a real challenge.

CIOs have to understand that their world has changed. Now that their employees have a great deal of say in what kind of work environment they want to work in, CIOs have to take the time to listen to what they want. The world of the future is not going to look anything like the world of the past. CIOs who take the time to find out what their workers are looking for will have the best chance of creating work schedules that best meet everyone’s personal needs. Hear what your workers are saying and then implement a plan to meet their needs.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: How can CIOs make sure that hybrid work environments don’t put any of their workers at a disadvantage?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It seems as though there is more for CIOs to do now than there ever has been before. No matter if it is dealing with trying to decide what applications we should be moving into the cloud, trying to secure the company’s networks, or working out hybrid-work arrangements with our staff, very clearly our plates are quite full. What this means for CIOs is that we now have to become more careful about how we choose to spend our time. We need to very carefully try to prioritize what we spend our time on. Our goal should be to tend to those things that are going to have the greatest benefit for our company. Just exactly what are those things?

Let’s face it: our workplaces have continued to evolve over time. Today’s workplace does not look anything like it used to. We have computer controlled air conditioning and heating, lights turn off when nobody is in the room, and elevators automatically know where we want to go. However, as great as all of this intelligence that has been built into our workplace is, CIOs have to realize that it can also be an attractive target for hackers. How can we keep our modern smart offices safe from the bad guys?

The Challenge Of Working In A Smart Office

So just exactly what is a smart building? A smart building is one that recognizes you and makes your life easier. For example, when you enter a smart building a camera recognize your face and hails an elevator programmed to bring you to your floor. Sensors on the walls measure particles and CO2 levels in meeting rooms and know when to pump in fresh air when levels get too high. The reason that they do this is because higher levels of certain particles mean it is more likely that viruses could be present. In a central control room, big screens show every floor in your multi-story building.

CIOs need to understand that there is a quiet revolution sweeping through commercial buildings across the U.S. Our office towers increasingly resemble multistory computers. These buildings are full of sensors – potentially more than 300 per floor – with elevators and doors connected to the internet, and all overseen by a single piece of software that can be controlled from a laptop or a smartphone. Smart buildings have been delivered with the promise to cut carbon emissions and lead to healthier, happier workplaces. However, it turns out that they also raise privacy and cybersecurity concerns for CIOs. Building owners often lack technological expertise to make their fancy smart buildings secure thus making them vulnerable to attacks from bad guys.

CIOs have to view smart buildings as being the soft underbelly of the company’s infrastructure. Commercial buildings have used some form of software to control mechanical and electrical systems since the 1980s, but for decades the sector saw very little innovation. That all started to change back in the 2010s. The rise of cloud computing and the arrival of internet-connected systems such as smart doors, smart lighting and facial-recognition cameras mean commercial developers now have more gadgets than ever at their disposal to incorporate into their smart buildings.

How To Secure A Smart Building

Many landlords pay very little attention to the digital security at their buildings. Since most systems in a smart building are probably connected to each other, getting access to a single internet-connected door could potentially give criminals control over an entire skyscraper. With this access the bad guys can lock doors and elevators until ransom is paid, or use weak spots to steal massive troves of data. Hackers managed to break into Target Corp.’s systems and were able to steal data on tens of millions of customers. The way that they got in was via an HVAC contractor.

CIOs have to realize that the bad guys only need to find one way in then and whatever is connected to that system will now be on the table. It is hard to gauge how many smart buildings have been successfully targeted, but the federal government is increasingly aware of the dangers. The government has launched a working group with smart-building-tech professionals and producers of control systems to figure out how to protect buildings from attacks.

The threat to CIOs is real. As protections that are being built into mobile phones and databases become stronger, more criminals are going to turn to smart buildings as an easier target. CIOs should expect to see that threat move. CIOs need to work with building designers in order to design building systems in a way that prevent cyberattacks. CIOs can pay “ethical hackers” to try to break into their property’s systems and spot potential vulnerabilities. And in case an attack does succeed, a warning system can be set up to alert the CIO. And in a nod to privacy concerns, sensors and facial-recognition cameras can be programmed to not allow the company to pull data on where a specific employee is at any given time.

What All Of This Means For You

I’m pretty sure that given a choice, we’d all like to work in a smart office. The idea that the building that we work in could recognize us and then take steps to make our life better is appealing to just about everyone. However, as CIOs we also have to be aware that there is a downside to this introduction of new technology. Our smart buildings can serve as an attractive target for hackers. What this means is that we need to understand the nature of the risk and how we can take steps to keep our smart buildings safe.

Smart buildings have the ability to sense when we are in them and they then react to our presence. As buildings become more and more automated, the risk that hackers will attack them also grows. Buildings have always used some form of automation; however, in the past few years the amount of automation built into buildings has significantly increased. All too often landlords don’t pay enough attention to properly securing their buildings. The bad guys can find a way into a smart building, they can cause a great deal of trouble. The government realizes this and has started to study the problem. CIOs need to work with building designers to create secure smart buildings.

CIOs need to start to view their workplaces as being an extension of the company’s networks. We need to take the time to understand how much automation has been built into our buildings so that we can understand the scope of the problem that we are facing. Once we have a good understanding of this, we can start to create solutions that will help to keep our smart buildings secure.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: What is the best way for a CIO to determine if their smart building is secure?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As a modern, post-pandemic, CIO we have a lot of new and challenging things that we have to deal with. One of the biggest is determining if we are going to allow our workers to be remote some or all of the time. However, as big of an issue as that may seem, it turns out that there is an issue that is even more important to our workers: just exactly when they come to work. This used to be a simple question: everyone worked the same hours on the same days. Not so much anymore. How should CIOs handle this new issue?

As the person with the CIO job, it’s also your job to make smart hiring decisions. You want to invite the right set of managers to join your IT department so that you can share the importance of information technology with the rest of the company. However, it turns out that this is not a simple thing to do. It can be all too easy to hire the wrong person if we don’t know how to go about doing this task correctly. CIOs need to find a better way to get the best managers to join their IT departments.

How We Hire Managers Today

So first off, we need to be very clear about the type of person that the CIO might be hiring. We’re not talking about entry-level hires. If a CIO is investing in a person’s raw potential, it’s vitally important to meet them. But when CIOs need to evaluate experienced managers, almost every motive they have for parading these people through the office defies logic. If anything, interviews may increase the odds of making a dumb decision. This may not make sense to you. After all, job interviews are a hallowed rite of passage in business. If nothing else, meeting people face-to-face is the only way to really get to know them.

However, what CIOs need to realize is that it may be even crazier to continue doing what you’ve always done and expecting a better result. According to a recent study, only 18% of the managers companies hire have the ideal combination of skills to succeed. As CIOs devote record amounts of time and money to the hiring process, an entire industry has formed to provide newfangled assessment tools. Companies can measure an applicant’s body language and facial expressions or evaluate them with virtual-reality simulators. The only convention that’s not being widely reconsidered is the sit-down interview.

The basic rules of how a CIO does a job interview were written during the previous era of lifetime employment, when the idea made more sense. CIOs could assume that any new hire might stick around for decades. And back then, achieving “diversity” in management meant employing graduates from both Harvard and Yale. Interviews were essentially litmus tests. Is this candidate one of us? This bias may be less overt, but it still exists. A 2012 study found that CIOs are more likely to hire workers who are “culturally similar” to them. And CIOs that rely heavily on internal referrals often end up hiring lots of new bosses who are indistinguishable from the bosses they already have.

How CIOs Should Hire Managers

Some CIOs are trying to eliminate unconscious bias by dispatching recruiters to new places, relaxing educational requirements for some jobs or even outsourcing the process. But can they really be objective if they insist on meeting every candidate in the flesh? Another problem with interviews is that what we see can be unreliable. In business settings, studies have shown that energetic extroverts and people who seem highly conscientious are more likely to be chosen as leaders. They’re the folks who wow us in job interviews. But other research suggests these traits are less likely to determine whether a leader is effective.

The No. 1 purpose of any interview, of course, is to ask the candidate questions. Sadly, this may be the most useless tactic of all. A guide for interviewing managers on LinkedIn suggests asking them to describe a time they “led by example.” Google recommends asking how they motivate their teams, and how they approach team members who remain unmotivated. The problem with these “anecdotal” questions is that everybody knows they’re coming. Any reasonably smart applicant has already embellished their stories and rehearsed them in the mirror.

So how can CIOs do a better job of hiring the right people? The most promising method I’ve seen for evaluating management hires is based on a model that already exists—the “360-degree” performance review. That’s when a company evaluates existing workers by soliciting candid feedback from many of their colleagues, and even outside clients and customers. Rather than scheduling an interview, I’d propose asking each nominee to submit the names of five people they’ve worked closely with. In turn, each of those people would send the name of one additional current or former colleague who has firsthand knowledge of the nominee’s leadership style. A jury system would take some getting used to. But I’m absolutely convinced that 10 separate accounts from informed observers would be far more useful, and truthful, than one canned performance by the person with the most incentive to lie.

What All Of This Means For You

On top of everything else that the person in the CIO position is responsible for doing, we also have to do a good job of finding and hiring the right people to be managers in the IT department. The challenge that we have in doing a good job of this is that it can be very hard to determine if a person is going to work out with your department just by talking with them and having a number of other people in the department talk with them. There has to be a better way to go about doing this.

CIOs need to understand that the traditional way of interviewing a manager candidate where we allow them to meet many other people, generally does not work. Far too few managers who do get hired have what it takes to do the job well. The way that we interview managers today was set up when the world was a different place. The problem is that when we interview someone, we get unreliable results. When we ask a candidate questions, they already know what we’ll be asking them and they have a polished answer waiting for us. A much better way to determine if a candidate is the right one for you is to get evaluations of them from people who have worked with them. Their feedback will provide a CIO with more information about a candidate then an entire day of asking them questions would.

The quality of the IT department depends on the people who are working in it. It is the responsibility of the CIO to make sure that the best candidates get hired. This has never been an easy process to do correctly. In order to do it successfully, CIOs need a new way to evaluate the people that they are thinking about hiring. A great way to go about doing this is to get in contact with people who have worked with the candidate and, instead of talking with the candidate, get their feedback. This is a novel way to determine someone’s suitability to join your IT department, but it deserves a careful look by CIOs who want to hire the right people.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: How many people do you think that a CIO should try to get feedback from on a candidate?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Let’s face it: our workplaces have continued to evolve over time. Today’s workplace does not look anything like it used to. We have computer controlled air conditioning and heating, lights turn off when nobody is in the room, and elevators automatically know where we want to go. However, as great as all of this intelligence that has been built into our workplace is, CIOs have to realize that it can also be an attractive target for hackers. How can we keep our modern smart offices safe from the bad guys?

Being a CIO today is definitely a real challenge. The world seems to be moving faster than it ever has before and between pandemics and hiring challenges, it seems as though a CIO’s work is never done. However, if there is one thing that a CIO understands, it’s that everything changes. This, of course, means that we have to change. However, we have to make sure that we understand what is coming our way so that we know how to change correctly.

The Challenge Of Change

I think that we can all agree that perhaps there’s no worse time than now to be a fairly average CIO. The reason for this is because right now there is intense pressure on CIOs. For years, your company’s executives have stressed the need for CIOs to move beyond simply managing IT to also leveraging technology to create value for the business. This priority has now become a requirement. New technologies have been at the center of a number of trends. These include everything from mobile-first consumer shopping preferences to the promise of artificial intelligence in critical decision making. They have reshaped the competitive landscape and disrupted business models. For this reason, companies now need to be tech forward: technology needs to drive the business.

Every CIO can agree that this is a pressing need. However, of the organizations that have pursued digitization, 79 percent of them are still in the early stages of their technology transformation. It is understandable that legitimate factors are delaying progress, from the scale of the change to the mind-boggling complexity of legacy systems. Is it possible that one of the biggest issues is that many CIOs have not accepted the degree to which their role needs to expand beyond cost and performance responsibilities in order to transform IT into a core driver of business value?

Before understanding the new responsibilities that CIOs now need to take on, it’s important to understand the nature of tech transformations themselves. In most cases, tech transformations are implemented as a set of disjointed initiatives across a company’s IT landscape. All too often this leads promising developments to stall out or underdeliver for the company. It has been found that a tech transformation must be holistic in order to deliver full business value. As an example, creating powerful customer experiences requires a data architecture to track and make sense of customer behavior. In order to architect modular platforms a CIO needs revamped approaches to hiring in order to get top-flight engineers.

Managing The Transformation

In order to be successful, a CIO has to first come to terms with the scope of the transformation itself. A good way to go about doing this is to think about it along three separate vectors:

• Attempt to reimagine the role of technology in the organization. This vector includes creating the role of technology as a business and innovation partner to design a tech-forward business strategy, integrate tech management across organizational silos, and find ways to deliver excellent user experiences.
• Reinvent how the company delivers technology. IT needs to change how it functions by embracing the agile philosophy; improving IT services with next-generation capabilities such as end-to-end automation, platform as a service, and cloud; building small teams around top engineers; and finding ways to developing flexible tech partnerships.
• Future-proof the company’s foundation. To keep pace with rapid technological advancements, CIOs need to implement a flexible architecture supported by modular platforms, enable company-wide data ubiquity, and protect systems using advanced cybersecurity.

CIOs have to realize that an effective talent strategy requires a culture that supports talent. This means that we need to find ways to build a true engineering community Yes, pay matters, of course, but your top people want to go where they’re valued. CIOs can create this kind of environment by providing engineers with more autonomy by reducing the number of managers that they report to and eliminate often-bureaucratic processes, such as time-consuming reports and multiple rounds of approval. Creating ways for cohorts of similar skill sets to get together can be a powerful way to share best practices and foster a sense of community within the company. The CIO must attend and actively participate.

In the past, IT transformations that have been attempted have often proven expensive, time consuming, and short on value, and this has made some companies leery of undertaking them again. To address this issue and build trust, the best CIOs need to play an active role in educating leaders about technologies and their applications for the business. What we need to do is to make the business implications of each tech decisions clear to all involved. Many of our tech decisions don’t get sufficient business scrutiny beyond cost and high-level strategy discussions. Transformative CIOs will not settle for that kind of interaction, instead articulating how a proposed solution solves the underlying business problem, what alternative approaches exist, and the pros and cons of each. These skills are the tools that enable a CIO’s ability to transform their IT department. And in an increasingly tech-driven business landscape, they position CIOs as a legitimate contender to lead the business as well.

What All Of This Means For You

In the world of CIOs, change is a constant. CIOs have become under more and more pressure from the rest of the company because we are now being expected to use IT to transform the rest of the business. Most companies are early on in this process. It can be all too easy for a technology transformation to occur in way that ends up not benefiting the company. CIOs have to start things out by finding a way to deal with the scope of the transformation that is being planned. CIOs have to make sure that the company’s culture supports the people who work in their department. CIOs have to make sure that the company’s leaders are kept informed about any transformation as it occurs.

CIOs have always been looked at as being leaders within the company. We are the ones who have been responsible for keeping our eyes open for new technologies as they appear and then finding ways for the company to adopt them. However, in today’s modern age the company is now looking to us to lead the entire company forward. This means that we are going to have to work twice as hard and make sure that we know what changes the company has to make and then help the company to make them. If we can show the company the way forward, we can help them to be successful.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: What is the best way for a CIO to keep the rest of the company informed on a technology transformation?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As the person with the CIO job, it’s also your job to make smart hiring decisions. You want to invite the right set of managers to join your IT department so that you can share the importance of information technology with the rest of the company. However, it turns out that this is not a simple thing to do. It can be all too easy to hire the wrong person if we don’t know how to go about doing this task correctly. CIOs need to find a better way to get the best managers to join their IT departments.

One of the biggest issues that CIOs have been facing over the past few years has been the question regarding what to do about worker’s personal technology. The people who work for us have been making major investments in mobile phones, laptops, and tablets. These devices are what they use almost nonstop when they are out of the office. CIOs often require workers to put these devices away and use only company authorized equipment when they are working. However, is this the right thing for us to be doing?

BYOD

Many CIOs still resist the idea of allowing staff to use personal electronic devices at work (Bring Your Own Device – BYOD) or install apps of their own choosing on company devices. However, a recent study suggests those policies may be misguided. A study was performed that set out to look at what happens when employees supplement their employer-issued IT tools with their own consumer technology. The results of the study were that employees reported feeling significantly more empowered and more in control, and they said their work improved, compared with employees who used just the company tools. The study was able to identify a strong correlation between respondents’ feelings of IT empowerment and their perceptions of their own innovativeness.

It’s important for CIOs to understand that this study was a small study – only 160 employees were interviewed. However, the observations are worth noting given that more CIOs are allowing their employees to use their own devices and applications at work – or are at least thinking about doing so – especially in the wake of the pandemic when so many people have worked at home. We need to realize that IT empowerment is real. CIOs can empower people with IT in the workplace.

What The Study Shows

The data was collected four years ago as part of more comprehensive research into the impact that consumer-originated technologies can have on businesses. On average, back then roughly 26% of respondents said they were not allowed to use consumer IT within their organization; 26% said consumer IT was tolerated; 25% said only some consumer IT was allowed; and 22% said they worked in an environment where the use of consumer IT was explicitly permitted. The percentage of people allowed by CIOs to use their own technology in their work today is likely much higher given the number of people who have worked at home during the pandemic.

As CIOs weigh the pros and cons of allowing personal devices and applications at work, they should be mindful of the potential productivity benefits. The study suggested that IT policies that permit workers to access new tools and technologies, whether they are supplied by the company or the employees themselves, could encourage innovative work behaviors and increase their worker’s productivity.

What All Of This Means For You

CIOs have a lot of different decisions that they have to be making. One of the most important is just exactly how they want to go about equipping the company’s workers with the IT technology that they need to accomplish their jobs. Traditionally the company has taken on the responsibility of making sure that each worker has what they need to connect and be successful. However, workers have started to purchase their own products and now they want to bring these devices to work and use them there. Should CIOs permit this?

Traditionally CIOs had been hesitant to permit workers to use their own personal devices to perform work related tasks. However, when the pandemic struck and everyone found themselves at home with no IT department on site to support them, more and more workers started to use their personal devices for everything. A study has been performed that has looked at the impact of allowing workers to use their own personal IT devices. The results of the study have shown that workers want to use their own devices. Additionally, productivity goes up when this is permitted. More data is required to fully study this issue, but clearly workers are trying to tell CIOs that they want to have the flexibility to use their own devices to accomplish work tasks.

Change is something that every CIO has to learn to live with. Our original position where we pushed back when people wanted to use their own devices at work was probably a good idea then for a variety of security and other reasons. However, with the pandemic and other changes, perhaps our original position no longer is the right position to be taking. We need to once again take a close look at what is going to work best for the company’s workers. If we can make workers happier and boost productivity at the same time, then we just might have found a win-win solution to the BYOD question.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: How should the security issue be handled for personal devices that are being used for work tasks?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Being a CIO today is definitely a real challenge. The world seems to be moving faster than it ever has before and between pandemics and hiring challenges, it seems as though a CIO’s work is never done. However, if there is one thing that a CIO understands, it’s that everything changes. This, of course, means that we have to change. However, we have to make sure that we understand what is coming our way so that we know how to change correctly.