The Chief Information Officer (CIO) Skills

University of ZagrebFaculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER)

Damir Kalpićdamir.kalpic@fer.hr

Motivation (1)

• Our graduates are among “best & brightest”?

• Relatively few managers, bosses...

• An Internet dispute between our engineering

students (“Fachidioten”) and students of

economy (“ignorant & bluffing”)

• Technical competence– Hard to achieve

– Indispensable

Motivation (2)

• Other competences– Social skills

– Understanding of economy & business

– Knowledge of essential legal regulations & practices

– Empathy & sympathy (for the user)

– Communication skills

– Holistic approach

• Willingness to bother with issues other than technical!• High payoff to relatively little effort?• Personal experience & Respected literature

The (new?)role of CIOPresentation in 2009From: Marianne Broadbent and Ellen S. KitzisThe New CIO LeaderGartner Inc. & Harvard Business Review Press, 2004– Technology:

– cut the costs, – improve efficiency through:

• integration, • automatisation, • standardisation.

– Agility:– Management of speed, scope, costs and risks of change.– Balance of change requirements with change capabilities.

– Information:– Business insight and understanding to act under changed circumstances.

– Innovation:– Presenting on the market new ideas using comparative advantage and capabilities and

developing new ones.

The (new?)role of CIO

• 10 priorities (Gartner):1. Understanding the essence of environment2. Produce a vision how can IT contribute to success3. Formulate and explain the expectations of IT-based company4. Devise an understandable and appropriate IT management5. Merge the business and IT strategy6. Build a new IT organisation, to be elastic and more focused7. Develop and maintain a high performance for IS8. Manage the new company and IT risks9. Lead, not only manage10. Transfer the information about your IS using business language

The (new?)role of CIO

Desirable competences:• Understanding the business organisation, policy and culture within the

company,• Commercial behaviour,• Understanding and analysis of competition,• Leading, in-sourcing and building of trust,• Strategic thinking,• Leading, delegation, development,• Team building,• Influence and persuasion,• Out of 25 competencies, CIO must exercise 24 of them, to more or less extent. The

only one not applicable for CIO is Design and development of applications.• It cannot harm of s/he had been doing it, but should not continue with it as CIO.

Soft skills (1)

1. Leadership• Not necessarily the best expert in technology• Exceed business expectation• Make IT a source of progress• Realise it with your staff

2. Difference between thinking and leading• Think analytically• Act collaboratively

3. Admit to be human• Listen• Demonstrate your vulnerability• Humour• Care• Maintain relations• Stay tough

Soft skills (2)

4. Build relationships• Greatest opponent to become ally• Informal relations not directly connected to hierarchy• Two major groups of users within organisation:

– Wish to improve the IS– Always complain about IT

• Identify informal leaders and influential individuals & build relations with them– They can help or prevent change

• Good horizontal links to peer CXOs– More and better information earlier

• Relationships outside the organisation– Trust– Respect– Understanding of the other’s situation– Maintain relationships

Soft skills (3)5. Social contacts and communication

• Do not kill passion and interest in people, use it!• Observe the audience reaction and act accordingly• Avoid impressively sounding empty phrases

6. Create enthusiasm• You cannot lead if others will not follow• Create “our” vision• Motivation• Action

7. Build people firsthand• Develop the next generation of leaders• Key stakeholders• Peers• Business partners• (even) the Board of directors• Technological literacy & confidence• Supplier of talents across the organisation

Gartner – Key Findings

• In many successful organizations, CIOs are extending their role and responsibilities to become strategic partners of the business.

• These CIOs incorporate architectural thinking and processes in their role definition.

• Successful CIOs become catalysts of change in their organizations and take an active role in the C-suite, collaboratively co-creating the business strategy.

Gartner – Recommendations for CIOs

• Collaborate with C-level colleagues and other business stakeholders to actively define, influence and clarify the enterprise's vision and strategy.

• Use architectural processes to explore the enterprisewide future consequences and implications of the enterprise's vision and strategy to provide context and direction for the development of implementation and development strategies.

• Engage with business stakeholders to explore future states and their implications.

• Leverage the current-state architecture as an overview of the business landscape to evaluate the IT portfolio from a business capability point of view, including its relevance, sustainability, distribution across capabilities, and capability gaps and overlaps.

• Leverage IT's transformational potential to translate the enterprise's strategy into effective business change.

Gartner - Architectural Thinking Thinking about effective enterprise change • Holistic: It looks at the enterprise as a whole rather than

at its individual components and studies the patterns and relationships that define its dynamics and structures.

• Environment-aware: It analyzes systems and the implications of strategic choices in the wider context of the environment that the enterprise and its systems operate in.

• Future-oriented: Its starting point is an envisaged future state of a system.

• Progressive: It describes how to move a system from its current state toward a desired future state.

IT should know “better than the user”

In "Managing IT to Support Rapid Growth: An Interview With the CIO of NetApp" (published in McKinsey Quarterly, June 2008), NetApp CIO Marina Levinson discusses the changing attitude of leading CIOs: •"Within IT, a big challenge is getting people out of the 'order taker' mode. We shouldn't be saying to our business partners, 'Tell us what to do.' We should instead be saying, 'Tell us what your business challenges are, and don't worry how we're going to get there. Let's work together, and we'll come back to you with a proposal for how we can change both the business process and the systems supporting it to get you to where you're trying to go.”

Literature

Graham Waller, George Hallenbeck and Karen Rubenstrunk:The CIO Edge – Leadership Skills You Need to Drive ResultsGartner Inc. & Harvard Business Review Press, 2010

Evidence from statistically significant analysis of120,000 executives, 1.4 million database records.

Bard Papegaaij: The CIO as Architect: Leading CIOs Use EA (enterprise architectual) Thinking to Drive Transformation and Enable Business Success, Gartner Research, 23 March 2010, ID Number: G00174591

Own experience (1)Vedran, Mornar, Krešimir Fertalj and Damir Kalpić:Introduction of SAP ERP System into a Heterogeneous Academic Community, The Third Global Conference on Power Control and Optimization - Innovation in Optimum Technology, Gold Coast , Australia, 2010. 1-8-Locally successful, full deployment questionable-Successful at FER

-High motivation-To become SAP consultants for higher education-To prove the value of own department-To correct the distribution of budget between departments and between faculties-To correct the legislation in higher education

-Rest of the University-Low motivation

- Why to bother with complex SAP?- Why to show your IT incompetence?- Why to loose privileges?- Try to prove that deployment is not possible/ not legal/ not adequate / etc.- Some truth in criticism- “Political correctness” prevents from saying the other half of the truth to obstructionists:

-Thank you for your very useful remarks-Thank you for your warnings regarding the contract-Thank you for having noticed some missing details- Thank you, thank you, …, also for trying to ruin the project!

Faced with users’ unwillingness, the implementer gladly abuses the occasion!

Own experience (2)

Damir, Kalpić and Krešimir Fertalj:Development of a new information system for Croatian forestry, ISOne World 2007 - Engaging Academia and Enterprise Agendas,Las Vegas : The Information Institute, 2007. 23_1-23_9

- Protracted, questionable success- An attempt to re-educate the semi-qualified IT staff in a state

owned organisation- To save their jobs and exploit their knowledge in forestry business

processes- The Strategy accepted in 2005- Every next step prolonged due to public procurement- Delivered a development platform for .NET and C#- Education completed for the platform- Another firm got the development & coaching task due to lower

price!- Expected outcome: failure!

Own experience (3)Stjepan Pavlek and Damir Kalpić:Observability of Information in Databases - New Spins in Data Warehousing for Credit Risk Management, ICSOFT 2008, Third International Conference on Software and Data Technologies, Porto : INSTICC, 2008. 361-368

-Successful-Good example of a successful spin-off company-Former students engaged as a Group on contract at the Faculty, working for a major bank-Decided to save the value gained through activities on the market-Fair distribution of ownership among the Group members and the former employer-Establishing of a spin-off company and ceding the contract with the Bank to it-Rare opportunity for a new firm to have immediately a major contract!-Preserved (a significant amount of) enthusiasm, creativity and dedication

Own experience (4)

Damir Kalpić, Vedran Mornar, Mario Kovač, Krešimir Fertalj and Mladen Kos:An insight into efforts to establish computerization and e-services for public health in Croatia, Proceedings of the 2005 Networking and Electronic Commerce Research Conference (NAEC2005), Dallas : Southern Methodist University, 2005. 75-91

- Successful but protracted-Ministry of health lacks a proper CIO-Too much ignorance regarding IT-Not enough motivation for success-Personal motives sometimes prevailing over the common ones-Political games

-Not to admit that the opposition did anything well-Intrinsic problems with public procurement and related budget spending

-Money cannot be transferred to the following year-If not spent, returned to budget and further financing cut-How to act as developer?-How to act as supervisor?

Own experience (5)Vedran Mornar, Krešimir Fertalj, Damir, Kalpić and Slavko Krajcar:Credit Card System for Subsidized Nourishment of University Students, Annals of cases on information technology. 4 (2002), Idea Group Publishing, Hershey, PA, USA; 468-486- Successful–Developed without project nor specification–Based on wrong specification of requirement

•There are two categories of students (actually, more than 24)•All the restaurants have a professional Internet connection (none has professional Internet, some had no telephone line)•It is enough to connect to a central server (what if the line is broken while thousand students wait to be served?)

• (Extremely) competent project leader and developers• Cheap platform (MS SQL + Access)• For years in exploitation for thousands of students daily• Not a single day being down

Own experience (6)

Damir Kalpić, Mirta Baranović, Vedran Mornar and Slavko Krajcar:Development of an Integral University Management System, International Conference on System Engineering, Communications and Information Technologies, ICSECIT 2001 Proceedings, Punta Arenas, 2001.

-Predominantly successful-Inappropriate motivation for faculties to deploy it-Serious lack of financing for the perfective maintenance

-Changes like Bologna and legislation

-Blackmailing the developers-Your software is an eventual failure!

Own experience (7)

Damir Kalpić, Krešimir, Fertalj and Vedran Mornar:Analysis of Reasons for Failure of a Major Information System Project, BITWorld 2001 Conference Proceedings, Cairo : The American University in Cairo, 2001. 1-8

- Analysis of someone else’s failure- Competent company- Competent project leader- Competent developers- How come the failure?– Success was (nearly) in no one’s interest!

Own experience (8)Damir Kalpić, Vedran, Mornar and Mirta Baranović:Case Study Based On A Multi-Period Multi-Criteria Production Planning Model, European

journal of operational research. 87(3) (1995) ; 658-669

- Very successful, but not continued- Paradigm for success

-Everyone highly motivated (existence in question)-Strong support from the top management-Efficient CIO

-Not primarily from IT (chemical engineer)-Highly experienced with the company processes-Well connected to stakeholders and peers-Trusted the competent outsourcers-Understanding and supporting the reengineering-Authority for the staff

- After existence had been saved-looking to buy something best in the world-instead of own efforts

Own experience (8)

Damir Kalpić:Automated Coding of Census Data, Journal of Official Statistics, Sweden. 10 (1994) , 4; 449-463

- Very successful in 1991 but not repeated-The best marks achieved

-Automatic coding of texts in highly flective Croatian language-The next time (in 2001)

-Cheaper Canadian software acquired (Public procurement!)-The coding performed manually

Own experience (9)Damir Kalpić, Mirta Baranović and Krešimir Fertalj:How to Organise a University Based R&D and Teaching Group in Computing? A Case Study, World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, Proceedings, International Institute of Informatics and Systemics, Caracas, 1997. 174-181

- Very successful, but for a limited period of time / size of the Group

-Business group established (in addition to teaching)-Additional employments due to projects-Teaching load distributed to all equally-A fixed amount of virtual money distributed monthly according to individual percentage-Secret balloting of peers regarding the percentage-Actual percentage + history (moving averages)-Highly motivating for a few years-Dismissed

-Too large and too heterogeneous the Group had become-Tendency towards undeserved uniformity of percentages

Conclusion• SE is not only engineering!• Multidisciplinary hard job:

– Understand the target system (“better” than the insiders?)

– Empathy for the user– Communications skills– Motivation for all the stakeholders– Recognise and tame the obstruction– Negotiate well the contract– Be a hardworking professional in IT– …