You know your way around the data centre. Your staff respect you and it?s largely safe to walk among the users without fear of assault. By industry standards, you run a tight ship. However, a couple of things are niggling you, writes Ade McCormack:
?You rarely get involved in strategic business decisions.
?The chief executive still calls you first when their laptop is broken.
Where does this leave your career?
The reason you are not included in strategic business decision-making is for much the same reason the catering manager is not invited to board meetings. You are both seen as operationally important, but not strategically significant.
Despite the wisdom you will have accrued as to how technologies can and do change business models for the better, you cannot get the senior management team?s attention.
In fact, the last time you tried, the chief finance officer looked at you as if you were a supermarket check-out assistant offering lifestyle and wealth management advice. You are seen as first-line support ? a view reinforced by the fact that more IT elements can now be bought in packaged form, which means the amount of software development has dropped considerably. The creative aspects of IT are disappearing and what remains are the handle-turning procedural elements of IT management.
The ?cloud? ? aka the internet ? is taking this to the extreme, enabling users, in effect, to hire a virtualised IT function via the web. So it would appear that the writing is on the wall for IT managers.
This is not totally true, however. Some aspects of your in-house portfolio of IT services do not lend themselves to a cloud-based model. Cloud vendors might focus on services that deliver the greatest financial return and so will avoid niche, complex or legacy systems ? these will remain your responsibility.
But overall, the bad news is that end-user IT departments are dying. The good news is, of course, that IT departments are dying. Because it?s not about technology management any more. Users don?t want technology per se, they want what technology can give them, ie information, knowledge and even wisdom.
While it might be a few years before I can convince the market to talk about the IT industry morphing to the IKW (Information, Knowledge, Wisdom) industry, I believe this is what is happening. The interesting end of the digital services world is becoming the provision of technologies that help people make better decisions through better business intelligence (sweat the database) and effective collaborative tools (sweat the staff).
Smart IT managers with genuine CIO aspirations are thus advised to take the following steps:
?Decouple yourself from technology. By all means let people know you are digitally alert, but suppress tech jargon when talking to the users.
?Express all request and reporting in terms of the organisation?s strategic imperatives.
?Embrace the cloud. The sooner you outsource technology management the sooner you can focus on value-adding information and collaboration services.
?Pay great attention to your brand. Read up on brand management.
?Build credibility with the users by taking a sabbatical on the user side. A stint in sales or finance will equip you with the skills needed not just to be on the senior management team, but one day to lead it.
?You know you are intelligent. In fact you know you can reason someone to death if necessary. But possibly your intelligence is more IQ than emotional intelligence. Consider whether you need to work on your softer side.
?If you are going to become a senior player in the organisation, you need to ensure that you have the political skills to remain a senior player. Forming alliances with the powerful starts with knowing who the powerful are and what they see of value in you.
?Treat your IT function as if you were a customer. This again positions you as a consumer of IT services rather than a provider. Your focus is on innovative ways to lever information to achieve strategic objectives.
?Look for land grab opportunities that extend your influence. You could become chief energy officer, chief property officer, and chief business process officer, to name a few.
Mindlessly applying for CIO roles would be akin to following your fellow lemmings off a cliff. Be aware that organisations need their CIOs to be leaders. As someone moving up through the ranks you can steer your personal development in a manner that meets the need of employers today and tomorrow. In a post industrial digital economy, we need information leaders rather than IT managers.
Ade McCormack is a writer, speaker and adviser on digital leadership (www.itdemystified.com).
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