CIOs need to know how to attract (and keep) the best IT talent
Image Credit

Who is responsible for making sure that your IT department has enough IT workers do everything that is expected of it? Lots of CIOs would like to think that given the importance of information technology, this task is something that the Human Resources (HR) department needs to take care of. However, the truth is that at the end of the day the CIO plays a big role in making sure that you don’t have too many open positions at any given point in time…

How To Get The IT Talent That You Need

I’ll agree that your HR department will always be the ones who extend the actual job offer to a candidate and worry about what it takes to get them on board. However, as the person with the CIO job, it’s going to be your responsibility to create an IT department that the best candidates will want to join.

So what’s it going to take in order to create an IT bug light that will attract the best and the brightest in the world of IT? The good news is that the answer to this question is already known. CIOs need to spend their time creating an IT department that has a great culture and offers IT employees the benefits that they are looking for.

The benefits that will attract great IT workers include a good base pay (of course!), flexible work arrangements, and access to the types of IT technologies that appeal IT professionals. Things like vacation time and recognition for the work that they’ve done are there, but they are further down the list of things that IT workers want.

How To Become The Place That IT People Want To Work

Just what do today’s best IT workers really want from an IT department? One thing that the younger IT workers especially want is to work someplace where they feel that their work will have a positive, tangible impact on the business.

As CIO one thing that you can do is to create programs that ensure that once IT workers decide to join your IT department, they feel as though you value them. One way to go about doing this is to implement an 18-month development program that rotate them through different roles within the IT department. This is a unique opportunity that will let them experience all that an IT department has to offer them.

CIOs need to keep in mind that it’s the little things that really add up when an IT professional is evaluating where they want to work Things like offering a flexible workplace and a collaborative work environment can make your IT department look more attractive than other options.

What All Of This Means For You

A CIO is only as effective as his or her IT department will allow him to be. What this means for you is that you can’t leave who gets hired to your HR department. As the person in the CIO position, you are going to have to make sure that you’ve built the IT department that the best and the brightest IT workers all want to join.

In order to make this happen, you are going to have to take the time to build an IT culture that will be inviting for job candidates. You’ll also have to implement programs that allows all of your new hires to understand how the IT department works and how their contributions will impact the overall business.

Staffing an IT department is very much like trying to sell a house. You want the “curb appeal” of your IT department to be good enough to attract the very best talent. This can be done, but it’s going to take a commitment from you. Now go sell your IT department CIO…!

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

Question For You: If you set up an IT department new-hire rotation program, what should you do with new hires when they are done with the program?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Nobody ever promised you that the CIO job was going to be fun, right? I can’t make what is a hard job any easier, but I just might be able to help out with that fun thing. CIOs everywhere are discovering that there is a new movement sweeping through IT that is going to change how we do everything. This change has a name: it’s called gameification.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: "rotation program", "tangible impact", "work culture", collaborative, environment, flexibility, hiring, recruiting, talent

BYOD just might be a trap that has been set to snare a CIO
Image Credit

Have you heard about the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) craze that is sweeping companies worldwide? Employees have invested so much money along with time and effort into customizing their smartphones, tablets, etc. that they want to bring them to work and use them to do work. This is opening the door to a whole new world of problems for the person who has the CIO job…

What’s So Wrong With BYOD?

If we spend just a moment and think back to our High School history lessons, we’ll remember that the city of Troy fell because the bad guys brought a wooden horse that was (unknown to them) filled with good guys into their city. BYOD is sorta like that horse: your IT employees might be bringing viruses and worse into your company’s IT department contained within their personal laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

Studies show that roughly 35% of mid to large size firms are allowing their employees to use their own devices while at work. This number jumps up to 50% when you consider smaller firms with less than 500 employees in total.

The motivation for allowing BYOD is very strong. The company stands to save a lot of money by not having to provide each employee with their own laptop and / or smartphone. As an added benefit, there is no learning curve when it comes to using the devices that the employees provide themselves – they already know how to use them and so the downtime associated with coming up to speed on a new device has been eliminated.

What’s A CIO To Do?

Darn that coin – there’s always two sides to everything! Since it looks like there are some compelling reasons why the company may want to take advantage of the benefits that BYOD will provide them with, what’s a CIO to do?

The first step is to make sure that everyone has implemented at least the very basic of security measures on their personal devices. When it comes to cell phones, this means turning on password locks.

The next level of security that you’ll need to implement will be to install applications that will allow you to remotely wipe a phone or a laptop if it gets stolen. This will remove both company information and personal information so you’re going to have to be very clear with your employees: if they want to retain their personal files and photos, then they are going to have to get religion when it comes to backing up their devices that they are using at work.

As a CIO you are also going to have to wrestle with the trickiest of problems. What are you going to do about the situation where an employee who has sensitive company information on their personal devices decides to leave the firm and go work for one of your competitors? All of a sudden that cloud thing is starting to look a lot more attractive…

What Does All Of This Mean For You?

Since you are in the CIO position, you need to realize that there is no way to prevent the members of your IT department from bringing their personal electronics to work with them. However, it’s what they are going to do with these shiny toys that a CIO needs to step in and lay down some ground rules. The importance of information technology is just too great to the company to allow bad things to happen because of BYOD.

The possibility of employees personal devices introducing a virus into the workplace is a real problem. Also, when an employee leaves the firm, the CIO needs to make sure that they aren’t taking sensitive company information with them.

All of these issues can be dealt with. The cost savings to the company of having employees provide their own IT systems is very large. However, all such benefits do come with strings attached. CIOs need to be very careful that BYOD does not turn into more of a problem than it’s worth…

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

Question For You: Do you think that there should be any limits put on what types of personal devices can be used for work?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Who is responsible for making sure that your IT department has enough IT workers do everything that is expected of it? Lots of CIOs would like to think that given the importance of information technology, this task is something that the Human Resources (HR) department needs to take care of. However, the truth is that at the end of the day the CIO plays a big role in making sure that you don’t have too many open positions at any given point in time…

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BYOD, device management, gadgets, laptops, password locks, security issues, security risks, sensitive information, smartphones, tablets

CIOs need to know how to find social media secrets

Image Credit

Darn that social media stuff! Just when you thought that the job of being a CIO couldn’t get any tougher, along comes this whole new way for the world to communicate. The arrival of social media has just boosted the importance of information technology. What makes things even tougher is that the rest of the company is waiting for you to tell them what the rules for using social media at work is…

Let’s Have A Policy Party

Hopefully by now you realize that as part of your CIO job you need to be responsible for creating a social media policy for your company. This policy needs to provide direction to everyone in the company to let them know what is and what is not permitted when they use social media on the job.

Just creating a policy is not enough. You are going to have to go one step further. You need to make sure that everyone knows that the company has a policy and just what is contained in that policy. This means that you need to get the word out and you need to collect some indication from each employee that shows that they’ve read the policy.

What 5 Rules Need To Be A Part Of Your Social Media Policy?

Now that you know that you need a social media policy, here comes the really big question. What needs to go into this policy? Depending on the industry that your company is a part of, you may already have a number of regulations about what your employees can and cannot say publically (healthcare and financial firms know all about this). However, here are 5 rules that need to be a part of every CIO’s social media policy:

1. Record Keeping: Hopefully this is a no-brainer. Every interaction with a social media site needs to be recorded just in case there is an issue down the road.

2. Suitability: Your employees are going to have to be very careful when it comes to making recommendations via social media. The rules say that they can’t make any recommendations via social media that they wouldn’t make using the more traditional forms of communication.

3. What Needs To Be Approved?: The answer to this question is the key to your firm’s social media participation. The right answer is that any static social media material such as profiles needs to be approved. However, the day-to-day dynamic interaction does not need to be approved.

4. Supervision: There always needs to be a lifeguard on duty. All of your company’s social media interactions need to be supervised. The goal of this supervision should not be to crush creativity, but rather to make sure that the posters stay within the company’s social media guidelines.

5. Be Aware Of 3rd Party Posts: It turns out that you are not responsible for any 3rd party posts that show up on your corporate sites that permit such postings. However, you do need to be aware of what is being placed there just in case you find yourself being asked how something came to be on your site.

What All Of This Means For You

The CIO position is challenging enough without having to worry about the brave new world of social media. However, social media has arrived and that means that the rest of the company needs you to step up and tell them what the new rules are.

The correct thing to do is to create a company-wide policy that will let every employee know what the rules are when it comes to interacting with the outside world via social media. This social media policy needs to include rules that describe such things as record keeping, suitability, approvals, supervision, and how you want to handle 3rd party posts.

CIOs need to understand that social media does not appear to be going away – it’s here to stay. This means that the CIO is on the front lines of helping his or her company prepare to make the most of this new tool while preventing it from harming itself. This isn’t going to be easy, but get the right social media policy in place and you’ll be ahead of the curve…

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

Question For You: What do you think would be the best way to make sure that every employee has read and understands the company’s social media policy?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Have you heard about the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) craze that is sweeping companies worldwide? Employees have invested so much money along with time and effort into customizing their smartphones, tablets, etc. that they want to bring them to work and use them to do work. This is opening the door to a whole new world of problems for the person who has the CIO job…

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: "3rd party posts", "record keeping", approvals, policy, regulations, responsibilities, social media, suitability, supervision

Inner peace is what all CIOs are really looking for

So CIO, what is your life like these days? Are you dealing with long hours at work, demanding peers and customers? An IT department who doesn’t want to talk to you let alone do what you need them to do? Unfortunately all of these things seem to be part of the modern definition of information technology. I guess the concept of finding inner peace must seem pretty far away most days. Over at Google, their IT workers are experiencing everything that you are experiencing – and more of it. How do they deal with the lack of peace in their lives?

Search Inside Yourself – Why It Matters At Google

As pretty as Google appears from the outside, and as nice as all of the perks that the employees get sound to those of us who don’t work there, the day-to-day reality of working for Google is actually much harsher than at many other firms. Google, the corporation, is driven to compete with the rest of the IT sector. The people that they hire are by their very nature driven to be the best. The combination can burn a CIO out in short order.

You’ve got to give credit to Google, they know that they have a problem. They’ve created an internal training course, Search Inside Yourself (SIY), that has turned into one of their most popular courses.

SIY is all about how IT workers, including CIOs, can keep it together when working in high stress environments. Who among us wouldn’t like to know how to accomplish that? In this class, the students don’t learn any “hard skills” such a time management. Instead, they learn “soft skills” such as motivation and how to get along with others. Laugh all you want, but at the end of the day these are the skills that a CIO really needs if we are to be successful over the long run.

How To Search Inside Yourself

If this concept of learning how to find your inner peace appeals to you, then the big question is how to do it? The Google SIY class is broken into three main parts: attention training, self-knowledge and self-mastery, and the creation of useful mental habits. One of the key skills that get taught is the ability to listen while being less reactive – don’t be planning what you are going to be saying next, really take the time to listen to what a person is saying.

Another key skill that is taught in the class is what is called S.B.N.R.R. This stands for Stop, Breath, Notice, Reflect, and Respond. It sure seems rather simple; however, I for one can easily list a number of cases where I didn’t do this – I just quickly responded to something that I thought was happening and I turned out to be completely wrong.

If I haven’t been able to convince you that this class holds a great deal of benefit for over-stressed Google IT staff, then this last piece of information just might do the trick. One if its key messages is to teach its students to practice what is called “mindful emailing”.

We all send many, many emails every day. What the course teaches its students is that they need to focus on the person who is going to be receiving the email, not the email itself. If you take the time to understand the impact that your email may have on the person who is going to be receiving it, then you’ll do a better job of sending email. Likewise, if you prepare yourself to receive emails from others, then email won’t make you upset or angry so often.

What All Of This Means For You

As wonderful as the 21st Century is to live in, CIOs also have to learn to live with a great deal of stress simply because of the importance of information technology. This stress can eat away at us until we are no longer able to find the inner peace that all of us so desperately crave.

Over at Google they have come to understand that their IT workers are dealing with the same stress that the rest of us are facing. They’ve created a course called Search Inside Yourself (SIY) that teaches their employees how to find their inner peace.

The steps that they take to do this include teaching them to become better listeners, understand what motivates them, and deal with the emails that they receive with less fear and anger. Ultimately, it teaches Google employees how to reduce the natural friction that always occurs whenever you have people working together.

What can the rest of us learn from all of this? If the fantastic Google and its best-of-the-best employees are dealing with the same stresses that you and I have to deal with, then maybe we’re not all that different. Instead of banging our heads against the wall, you and I need to learn a lesson from Google and understand that perhaps we need to seek outside support in order to once again find our inner peace. Take a yoga course, go rock climbing, take an email course. Do whatever it takes to help you search inside yourself…!

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

Question For You: What steps could you take today to make yourself less fearful or angry when it comes to dealing with email?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

p>Darn that social media stuff! Just when you thought that the job of being a CIO couldn’t get any tougher, along comes this whole new way for the world to communicate. The arrival of social media has just boosted the importance of information technology. What makes things even tougher is that the rest of the company is waiting for you to tell them what the rules for using social media at work is…

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: attention training, class, culture, email, Google, mental habits, mindfulness, motivation, search inside yourself, self-knowledge, self-mastery, training

A CIO can have a big impact on how customers view your company
Image Credit

In your company, whose job is it to make sure that your customers are happy? Sales? Marketing? The CEOs? It turns out that all of these people have a role to play, but in the end it is the CIO who may end up having the biggest impact on just exactly how the customer ends up feeling about your company.

Say Hello To The Mobile Era

Remember back in the old days? Back then the only time that your company had to worry about making its customers happy was when they were in the store or when you were sending them something through the mail. Now fast forward to today: because of the importance of information technology, if the store is online, then the doors never close. Your customer can be dropping in at any time and you always have to make sure that they have a good time.

This was bad enough when your customer could sit at home and log into your store’s web site. However, things have gotten even worse now — with the arrival of smartphones your customer can use a mobile device to access your company’s store from anywhere at any time. Looks like the CIO is now going to be standing in the spotlight when it comes to finding ways to make sure that the customer always has a good experience when interacting with the company.

4 Ways To Create A Company That Is Focused On Your Customer

If we can agree that in the 21st Century the CIO position plays a major role in shaping how a customer sees the company, this now leads to the simple question: how? As with all such life questions, there is not just one thing that you need to be doing, but rather a whole range of activities that you need to be taking care of. Here’s the list:

• K.I.S.S.: Keep It Simple Stupid. The complexity of most IT departments can be mind blowing. In fact, if a CIO isn’t careful the IT department can end up spending most of its time trying to keep the various parts of the network talking to each other. Take the time to simplify how the network operates and you’ll free up time for the IT department to spend more time worrying about the customer experience.

• Make A Friend: Your company’s customers want to buy its products through the channel that makes the most sense for them. The IT department needs to make sure that products and services that are available on one channel are available on all channels. Have the IT department staff take the time to develop a relationship with your customers based on the company’s ability to fulfill their buying needs.

• Reduce Risk: No matter what industry your company is part of, there are undoubtedly rules and regulations that restrict what your company can do with all of the customer data that is has been collecting. The CIO needs to make sure that the IT department secures this data from potential data breeches and attacks. Do a good job of this, and your company will never have to tell your customers “we’re sorry”.

• Use Your Customer Data Well: Just because the business has a lot of data about the company’s services and the customers that use it, doesn’t mean that you are using this data wisely. It’s the CIO’s job to help the IT department to find ways to put all of this data to work in ways that will make the customer’s buying and usage of the company’s products that much easier.

What All Of This Means For You

In every company, how the customer feels about the company has to be one of the most important factors in determining the company’s long term success. The CIO plays a critical role in how each customer views the company.

As the mobile era arrives, the CIO has four approaches that he or she can take to improve how the customer views the company. These approaches include reducing complexity, engaging the customer, managing risk, and properly using data.

The good news is that none of these four actions is impossible to do. The bad news is that all four need to be done at the same time. As CIO, ensuring the customers have a positive view of your company is another part of your CIO job. Now go make it happen!

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

Question For You: In order to simplify the CIOs life, do you think that you should ban employees from bringing their own mobile devices into the workplace?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So CIO, what is your life like these days? Are you dealing with long hours at work, demanding peers and customers? An IT department who doesn’t want to talk to you let alone do what you need them to do? Unfortunately all of these things seem to be part of the modern definition of information technology. I guess the concept of finding inner peace must seem pretty far away most days. Over at Google, their IT workers are experiencing everything that you are experiencing – and more of it. How do they deal with the lack of peace in their lives?

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: "mobile data", "personal mobile devices", complexity, data, email, engage, heterogeneous, instant messaging, mobile devices, risk

Hadoop is a database that solves the problem of how to handle big data

Image Credit

Hey CIO, just in case you’ve been living with your head underneath a rock, the world appears to have gone “big data” crazy lately. The importance of information technology is now being measured by how you are planning dealing with “big data”. Your customers, your IT department, and probably your competition have all started to talk about the problem of big data and just exactly what can be done about it. No matter what challenges your IT department is currently facing, it sure seems understanding what the problem is and how it can be solved has become a part of the CIO job.

What’s Wrong With How We Handle Data Today?

Before we go running off trying to solve a problem, let’s first make sure that we really have a problem that needs to be solved. If you and I were going to create a database today, how would we go about doing it?

Let’s say that we wanted to create a database to hold name and address information. The simplest way to think about a database is to picture a table. This table has both rows and columns. In our name and address database, we’ll create a new row to hold your address information and we’ll start out by creating a new column to hold your name. We’ll then create 5 more columns and use each one to store one component of your home address: street, apartment number, city, state, and zip code (assuming that you live in the United States).

That’s it! Now we have a very small database: it contains one record (yours) and that record holds 6 pieces of data: your name and your address. Now if we went one step further and added the names and addresses of everyone who lives in your town to this database it would grow from one record to now contain thousands of records, perhaps even millions of records depending on where you live.

Now imagine that you owned a flower shop in your town. One day you discover that you have too many roses. You’d like to send a postal letter to everyone who lives in the area around your store and remind them that a great way to say “I love you” is by giving someone roses. You don’t want to send this email to everyone in town because if they live too far away they won’t make the drive to your store and you’d just be wasting the money to send them the letter.

You can now go to our new database and ask it a question: please provide me with a list of all of the names and addresses for people whose address has the same area code as my store (this means that they live nearby). Once the database provides you with this list, you can go address all of your letters and sell your roses.

Say Hello To The Hadoop Distributed File System

The type of database system that we just described has worked very well for the past 40 years. However, in the past 15 years problems have started to show up because of big data. A little company called Google was one of the first to run into this problem. Back in 2002, Google wanted to index the world wide web every day – talk about a lot data!

Let’s think about a challenging problem. How about if we wanted to create a database that contained all of the data that was collected as a part of the last U.S. census. There are roughly 360M people living in the United States. If each answered 100 census questions, than that is a database with 360M rows and 100 columns – one big database!

Even if we were able to fit it onto a storage system that our little database engine from the last example could use, it would take a week or more to generate an answer to a question that we asked it. Don’t even think about having multiple people use it at the same time.

A better way to handle big data was needed. A researcher named Doug Cutting stumbled across a couple of papers that Google had published that talked about how they had solved the problem of indexing an ever growing word wide web in a reasonable amount of time. Doug realized that with some work, he might be able to use these ideas to create a database that could handle very large data sets. With this idea, the Hadoop database system was born.

When it comes to big data, the first problem that has to be solved is how to store all of that data. No matter how you slice it, it’s going to take a lot of hard drives. The Hadoop distributed file system tackles the problem in the following way.

The fundamental unit that makes up a Hadoop computer consists of a “node”. A node is a cheap processor, some memory, and one or more disk drives (generally hundreds of disk drives). Put a bunch of nodes together and you’ve got a “rack”. Put a bunch of racks together and now you’ve got a “cluster”.

First the data is broken up into 512k “storage units”. Next these storage units are grouped together into 64k “file units”. The file units are then stored on disks associated with a cluster. Since any disk in the cluster might fail at any time, multiple copies of each file unit (generally 3 copies) are stored on different disk drives at the same time. Although you are going to need to have a lot of disk drives, you have now solved your storage problem for your big data.

Did Somebody Say MapReduce?

Having all of that data stored will do you no good if you can’t ask the Hadoop database questions and get answers quickly. That’s where the Hadoop MapReduce function comes in.

This function is responsible for taking your question, splitting it up and sending it to all of the clusters. There an answer is created for the cluster. MapReduce then collects all of the answers and reduces these answers down into a single answer which is then returned to you.

What this means is that the problem of searching a very large database has been transformed from a single big problem into a set of distributed smaller problems. Since each of the file units are exactly the same size, the operation will take the same amount of time in each cluster and you’ll have your answer very quickly.

What All Of This Means For You

Whew! That’s a lot of database talk – what does someone in the CIO position care about all of this? No matter if your company can make use of a Hadoop database or if your IT department is the only one who is going to need to use a Hadoop database in order to process all of the data that is being collected and stored, Hadoop is eventually going to be part of your life.

You might not be programming your IT department’s Hadoop database, but you will be interacting with the IT teams who are. You need to understand how the system works so that you’ll be able to interpret what your database support team is telling you.

Take the time to do some studying and find out what situations the Hadoop database is well suited for. Work with your IT department to make sure that they design a solution that is going to support the company’s needs for both today as well as for tomorrow.

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

Question For You: Do you think that you should build your own Hadoop computer or use someone else’s in the cloud?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In your company, whose job is it to make sure that your customers are happy? Sales? Marketing? The CEOs? It turns out that all of these people have a role to play, but in the end it is the CIO who may end up having the biggest impact on just exactly how the customer ends up feeling about your company.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: "big data", "data set", "Hadoop distributed file system", database, Hadoop, MapReduce, query, SQL

CIOs need to take action before all of their best employees leave
Image Credit

Let’s say that you’ve built up a great team of IT professionals to run your IT department. They must all be happy and are planning on sticking around for a long time, right? The answer to this question is “no” and there are some very good reasons why your best workers maybe preparing to tell you “goodbye”…

How Do You Know That You Have A Problem?

We all know that despite the importance of information technology, the success of an IT department rests on its employees. Part of the CIO job is to solve problems – this includes IT staffing problems. However, you can’t solve a problem that you don’t know about. Dr. Monika Hamori and her team have done the research to find out what’s going on here for us.

When they were doing their study, they spoke with 1,200 young up-and-coming employees – the ones who are most likely to leave. The average age of this group was 30. The disturbing part for CIOs is that the 75% of them have sent out resumes and been on job interviews at least once during their first year of employment with you!

Where things start to get really ugly is when the researchers took a look at how long these highly valuable employees remained with your firm. It turns out that they will be leaving your company, on the average, after being with you for 28 months.

In the past, employees who were moving up the corporate ladder could be convinced to stay with their current employer because it was an accepted fact that your career would be better if you did. However, that no longer appears to be the case. The researchers found out that the salary of the employees who switched firms actually increased faster than those who didn’t.

Why Are Your Best Workers Going To Leave?

With a little luck I’ve been able to convince you that you’ve got a problem. Now since you have the CIO position, you’ve got to figure out what’s going wrong and how you are going to go about solving this problem.

The researchers took the time to ask the employees that were leaving why they had made this decision. What they found out is that a lot of the problem had to do with dissatisfaction with employee development efforts. This was a significant contributor to the employee exodus.

The good news here is that a lot of what companies are doing is working. The young managers who were leaving reported that they were generally happy with the on-the-job training that they were receiving. They also reported that they felt that they were getting the high visibility job assignments that they wanted. Finally, as they moved up the corporate ladder, they felt as though they were being given more and more responsibility. However, this was all not enough to keep them on board.

The big question that the researchers wanted to find an answer to was why were these employees leaving? It turns out that the one thing that they feel as though they are missing is formal development. This type of development takes on a number of different forms: training, mentoring, and coaching.

What a CIO needs to realize is that many firms are hesitant to provide the very training that this group of employees is seeking. The reason that this type of employee development is not often provided is because it can be quite expensive and the company fears that once the employees have received it, they will leave and go to work for another company.

This is where you need to step in as CIO. Yes, there is a risk that you’ll provide your best employees with high quality development training and they’ll still end up leaving. This is too bad, but it was going to happen anyway. What’s important is that by providing your employees with formal development in the form of formal training classes and hands-on mentoring and coaching you will be able to convince them to stay. These are the employees who will someday be leading the company and by convincing them to not leave, you’ll be positioning the company for future success.

What All Of This Means For You

In a perfect world all that a CIO would have to worry about would be how to use IT to make the company more successful. Unfortunately we don’t live in a perfect world and so you are going to have to deal with real-world issues like why your best workers are planning on leaving.

Studies have shown that younger workers are in the process of trying to find a better job. This means that they are sending out resumes and interviewing. The reason for this is because they don’t feel that their current job is providing them with enough training, mentoring, and coaching.

The good news is that what’s causing your best workers to leave can be addressed. You need to start to make more of an investment in them in order to offer them formal skills training. Yes, some will still leave; however, you’ll be able to retain more and you’ll end up with a better IT department.

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

Question For You: At what point in a employee’s career should you start to invest in their training?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Hey CIO, just in case you’ve been living with your head underneath a rock, the world appears to have gone “big data” crazy lately. The importance of information technology is now being measured by how you are planning dealing with “big data”. Your customers, your IT department, and probably your competition have all started to talk about the problem of big data and just exactly what can be done about it. No matter what challenges your IT department is currently facing, it sure seems understanding what the problem is and how it can be solved has become a part of the CIO job.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2013. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: coaching, employee-development, high achievers, interviews, mentoring, networking, professionals, resumes, training

The power of social media comes when you do it correctly

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram — these social media tools seem to be occupying the news every day. If anyone had any doubts about the importance of information technology, the arrival of social media has changed that. If you want to hold on to your CIO job for a very short time, feel free to ignore them and tell people that you think that they’ll eventually go away – because they won’t. Instead, do the right thing and figure out how your company can get the most out of today’s social media tools without screwing things up.

What CIOs Must Not Do With Social Media

If you take a look online these days, you’ll come across a lot of people who have a lot of suggestions for what CIOs should be doing in order to jump on to the social media bandwagon. However, what you are not going to find is anyone telling you what you need to be careful to not do.

Social media can provide your company with a fantastic way to listen to what its customers are saying. Not only that, but through social media your company can very quickly respond to your customers. The Internet is filled with stories about customers who complained about some company service issue via Twitter only to receive immediate attention from the company that ended up resolving their issue.

However, this is where the true danger of social media lies. Most companies are much more used to controlling how their company is portrayed in the media than social media allows (that’s why it’s called “social”). What this means for you as a CIO is that you need to push back when the people who are running your company ask you for tools and processes that will allow them to control the conversation.

Additionally, not everything that gets posted online about your company is always going to be flattering. What this means is that it can be very tempting to censor the conversations. Don’t do it. Once this type of behavior is detected by the masses, and it will be, your company’s online reputation will be shot.

3 Things That Are Driving Your Company To Use Social Media

Not every company is all that excited about using social media. However, your company needs to jump in or otherwise they risk running into problems down the road.

The first reason that your company needs to embrace social media is because the public’s perception of businesses right now is at an all-time low. Look around you and you’ll see movements like “occupy Wall Street” that are clear indications of just how fed up your customers are. By using social media to allow your customers to become involved in your company’s decision making process, you will be taking steps to reverse this current situation.

Next, regulations are changing everywhere. More and more both at the state and the federal level government agencies are requiring companies to be more open about how the business is being run and how decisions are being made. This push for more transparency can be met by having the company become more involved in social media.

Finally, the arrival of social media has dramatically changed the new product creation process for every company. No longer are products created in a back room and then rolled out to your customers. Via social media, your customers now want to play a role in defining what your company creates next – oh, and what price you put on it also!

What All Of This Means For You

CIO’s need to take action – social media has arrived and it’s not going to be going away anytime soon. The most important thing that you need to be aware of when you are in the CIO position is that you can’t control social media – it’s bigger than you are.

What you do need to understand is why your company is going to be forced to find ways to incorporate social media into the way that that the business is run. Trust of business in general is at an all-time low and social media is one of the few tools that your company has that can help to repair this problem. Next, new regulations are requiring companies to be more open with their customers. Finally, social media has redefined how products are both being made and priced.

The good news is that we are still at the start of all of this social media stuff. However, the market and the tools are rapidly evolving. This means that as CIO you need to move quickly and make sure that your company’s voice can be heard in the social media revolution.

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

Question For You: Do you think that one single group should control your company’s entire social media presence?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Let’s say that you’ve built up a great team of IT professionals to run your IT department. They must all be happy and are planning on sticking around for a long time, right? The answer to this question is “no” and there are some very good reasons why your best workers maybe preparing to tell you “goodbye”…

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: brands, censor, conversation, Facebook, Instagram, pitfalls, PR, regulatory environment, reputation, social media, Twitter

Just collecting data isn’t enough, now you need to know what to do with it
Image Credit

As CIO, a big part of your job is to help your company realize the importance of information technology and, based on this, help them to both collect and store data. Once you have it, you need to scrub it, maintain it, and protect it. However, has anyone every told you how to do the most important thing with it – use it?

Welcome To The World Of Business Analytics

We’re all probably aware of the global meltdown that affected almost every business starting back in 2008. However, what we may not realize is that every business out there should have seen what was coming long before it hit. Your company collected enough data that all of the warning flags were already in your database before bad things started happening to the company.

Just looking at the data that you’ve collected is not going to be enough for you to uncover what is going on. Instead, that data is going to have to be processed by business analytics tools so that you can uncover what the data is really trying to tell you.

The smart folks over at the technology research firm Gartner have helped us out here by defining just exactly what analytics is. They say that it’s embedded in technology (this makes it different from all of that offline analysis that we all do using tools like Excel). They say that analytics is forward-looking instead of backward-looking and that its data is drawn from increasingly diverse sources of information that is unstructured, not the plain old databases that we are so used to using.

If this isn’t enough to get you excited, then perhaps this will. Gartner has identified business analytics as being one of their top 10 strategic technologies for the next few years. It is believed that for every dollar that a company invests in developing its analytics capabilities, they’ll see a $10.66 return on that investment.

What Is A CIO Supposed To Do With All Of That Data?

You can have the best collection of data and you can have the best Business Intelligence (BI) tools, but it’s not going to do a lot of good for you if you don’t use what you have. Likewise, if your company is just collecting a lot of data and they have not deployed any analytics tools then they are missing out on an important opportunity.

The smart people at the research firm IDC have done a study on just how much data companies are collecting. What they have found is that the data that is being collected and stored by each company is currently doubling every two years.

This data is coming from a number of different sources and as part of your CIO job you need to be able to implement a solution that will allow you to handle all of them. Among the types of data sources that your company’s analytics solution needs to be able to process includes the Internet, blogs, tweets, “likes”, and even video and audio. Just to make things a bit more challenging, much of this new data is unstructured so you’ll have to hunt for the pieces that matter the most to you.

The key takeaway from all of this talk of adding an analytics solution to your company’s set of IT tools is that you must not start with the data. Instead, you need to ask yourself what the company really should be doing and what it needs to know in order to do this. Once this is known, then you can uncover the data that you’ll need and apply the analytics to get the answers that you are looking for.

What All Of This Means For You

In the past few years, CIOs have helped their companies to become very good at collecting, storing, and securing data. However, just having the data is no longer enough – CIOs have to be able to show their companies how to make use of the data that they have.

Analytics is defined as being embedded technology that allows the company to be forward looking. In order to do this, unstructured data from a wide variety of sources such as the Internet and social media sites has to be collected and processed.
The key is for you to use the CIO position to understand what types of questions the company is trying to answer and then apply both the correct data and the correct analytics tools in order to uncover those answers.

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

Question For You: Do you think that there should be a special part of the IT department that is dedicated to analytics?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram — these social media tools seem to be occupying the news every day. If anyone had any doubts about the importance of information technology, the arrival of social media has changed that. If you want to hold on to your CIO job for a very short time, feel free to ignore them and tell people that you think that they’ll eventually go away – because they won’t. Instead, do the right thing and figure out how your company can get the most out of today’s social media tools without screwing things up.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: analytics, BI, BI tools, business intelligence, data, Excel, rate of return, social media, unstructured data

If only CIOs could harness the power of Facebook in the workplace…
Image Credit

I’ve got a quick question for you: what’s the most popular site on the web? If you said “Facebook”, then I think that you’d be correct. Almost without exception, each and every person at your company may be visiting this site at least once each day to tell their friends what they’ve been up to. If only there was some way to capture the excitement and power of Facebook and find a way to apply it to the work that your company’s employees do every day. Oh wait, there is!

What’s The Big Deal About Social Networking?

Just how popular is that Facebook thing? They have as of last count 800M active users! Clearly we humans have a need to connect and share status information that Facebook has very cleverly filled for us. It turns out that the same need exists where we work.

Pretty much since businesses were first created, the folks who run the place, including CIOs, have been looking for ways to harness the importance of information technology in order to get their employees to share more information with each other. The thinking goes that the more that you know about what others are doing, the better you’ll be able to do your job.

Traditionally, we’ve been using email to try to accomplish this. However, as we all know that doesn’t work out all that well. We get behind in our email and we can’t seem to get caught up while things keep changing faster than email would ever allow us to keep up with.

It has been a part of the CIO job to be on top of this need for a number of years now. I’m not sure what the first solution was, but I’d be willing to bet that it had something to do with bulletin boards and thumbtacks. In recent years, CIOs and their IT departments have tried a number of different solutions including Wikis and blogs. These solutions have met with mixed success – they really require someone to be dedicated to working on them in order for them to have any real value.

Facebook has changed all of this. Now your company’s workers have been taught by Facebook how to keep their status updated all the time. They know how to set up their own profile, how to form groups, and how they can “follow” other people’s status updates.

Best Practices For Social Networking At Work

Why not sign everyone in the office up for Facebook and then be done with it? Well, ok, for a whole bunch of reasons including personal privacy and keeping control over your company’s proprietary information that would not be the right thing to do.

I’ve got some good news for you: there are commercial Facebook alternatives. These include solutions from Yammer Inc., Tibco Software Inc., and Salesforce.com Inc.

As with all software tools, you can’t just install the software and hope that this will solve every communication problem that your company has been having. Instead, you are going to have to give your company’s employees a bit of a nudge in the right direction in order to make this a success.

One of the key “lessons learned” that is coming back from firms that have already implemented their own in-house social networking solution is to make sure to leverage the power of groups. An individual user of a social networking solution only has so much value; however, if you make that person a part of one or more groups then suddenly they become a key part of the company’s success.

Groups can be automatically set up and people can be assigned by the IT department – teams, departments, branches, divisions, business units, etc. However, you are also going to want to put the power to both create groups and to join groups into the hands of your end users. They’ll naturally form their own groups in order to tackle problems and stay on top of situations that develop.

Another key success factor has to do with who uses the company’s social networking service. The answer has to include the company’s senior management. As the workers start to become aware that the people who are running the company are both using and monitoring the new workplace social networking system, they’ll get the message that this is the way that business is going to be done going forward. They’ll start to use it more and that’s when things will really take off!

What All Of This Means For You

In order for your company to compete in the modern global economy, you are going to need to have every employee contributing to your success. In order to make this happen, you’ll need to find a way to allow all of your employees to communicate with each other seamlessly.

Facebook has shown CIOs the way: it’s all about social networking. Since using Facebook at work is not an option, commercial alternatives are available. Once implemented, CIOs need to make sure that they leverage the power of groups and that they make sure that the company’s senior managers use the new social networking tool.

We are just at the start of a new way to exchange information within the company. Not all of the rules are in place yet, you need to use your CIO position to be out in front and leading the charge. Now get out there and make sure that everyone “likes” everyone else!

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

Question For You: Do you think that you should allow your workplace social networking tool to interface to Facebook?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As CIO, a big part of your job is to help your company realize the importance of information technology and, based on this, help them to both collect and store data. Once you have it, you need to scrub it, maintain it, and protect it. However, has anyone every told you how to do the most important thing with it – use it?

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chatter, Facebook, profiles, Salesforce.com, social networking, teams, Tibco Software, Yammer