Posts Tagged Career planning
What a CIO does
Posted by Frank Mortimer in CIO Jobs and Careers on January 29, 2010
The chief information officer (CIO) is a job title for the board-level head of information technology within an organization. The CIO typically reports to the chief operations officer or the chief executive officer.
The Chief information officer (CIO) is one of the most unique of all corporate positions. Like all jobs, the CIO role is defined by a set of requirements and expectations specified by the management of the corporation. The problem is that CIOs can do exactly what they are asked—and still fail.
The position of a CIO is a paradox. How can a CIO be a visionary implementer of new technology and, at the same time, an operational manager whose systems never fail? How can a CIO find ways to simplify the current infrastructure and save money while adding capability and capacity to that same infrastructure? Can a CIO be a supportive business partner while driving information technology (IT) standards?
A good summary of requirements of CIO’s by K. Anderson (2007) does shed some light on this role:
Requirement 1: Manager of people
The CIO is responsible for the overall management of the IT organization. This organization is a mixture of technical, business, and service individuals who may be full-time, part-time, contracted, or outsourced. Many of those individuals are highly technical, not necessarily customer-friendly, and cling to pieces of technology and projects like over-protective parents. Many times, technology and project review meetings begin as intellectual exercises and end as civil wars between two distinct factions.
The CIO needs to ensure that the right people are in the right jobs, create a management team that brings order but doesn’t limit creativity, and recruit/retain top IT talent. The CIO needs to clearly articulate:
- The purpose of IT within the enterprise
- The roles and responsibilities of each member of the management team
- The interaction between IT staff members and customers
The CIO is a leader, recruiter, disciplinarian, negotiator, communicator, and mentor.
“CIOs can do exactly what they are asked— and still fail.”
Requirement 2: Manager of Infrastructure
The CIO is responsible for the management of the current IT infrastructure. While most of this infrastructure is probably the result of a previous administration’s decisions, its overall availability is critical to the success of the corporation. Documenting and understanding the current infrastructure, as well as understanding how the corporation uses it, are baseline requirements that are extended by the addition of service and support commitments.
Requirements also include a plan for obsolescence of old technology, capacity management for normal growth, and creation of a disaster-recovery plan based on corporate needs. A CIO must look for opportunities to reduce cost and simplify current infrastructure. In addition, a CIO must be a forward-thinker and be aware of any radical impacts on that infrastructure including growth, downsizing, acquisitions, or divestitures.
CIOs that provide a reliable, flexible, and cost-effective infrastructure tend to go unnoticed. Completing projects on time and within budget is expected. Responding to customer needs in a timely manner is considered business as usual. These functions, once thought strategic, now constitute entry-level requirements for any CIO.
Requirement 3: Financial Planner
Investments in IT not only improve operational performance, but also shape a corporation’s communications and interactions with employees and external partners. As a corporation continues to invest in technology, the financial planning skills of its CIO become essential to the success of its IT department. Because IT budgets are large and complex, a CIO must have the ability to manage the department as a stand-alone business. They must understand when to make strategic purchases, when to implement those purchases, and how to depreciate those assets over time. Moreover, a CIO must manage all hardware and applications as a portfolio of investments, each of which must show a significant return or be subject to obsolescence.
Requirement 4: Business Expert
CIOs need to not only establish rapport with the various departments, but also know their company’s business and industry as well as (or better than) their executive peers do. CIOs must understand their business partners’ domain and objectives as well as be able to effectively articulate how IT can help. CIOs with business savvy and technical confidence can influence business strategy and identify ways in which technology can give their corporation a competitive edge in the marketplace. That involves more than just aligning IT with the business; it involves bridging the great divide between technology and business.
Requirement 5: International Expert
CIOs are now being asked to bridge cultural gaps between countries and societies. Global differences between technology and business perspectives are complicated by significant cultural diversity. This results in an intricate mix of requirements and expectations. Many CIOs have been managing global organizations for years and have attained a good understanding of how the global market works. Relationships created through offshoring and near-shoring development efforts and support functions can be a benefit to other business relationships. For any global initiative, understanding how other cultures work, how to communicate between time zones, and how to stay aware of the complexities of collaboration can mean the difference between failure and success.
Requirement 6: Customer-Facing Executive
CIOs who have traditionally been internally focused are now finding themselves working directly with external customers, vendors, and suppliers. Not only are they involved in overall corporate business strategy, they are being asked to communicate that strategy in the public marketplace. Frequently, CIOs are quoted in the press and serve as guest speakers at conferences. In the past, CIOs fielded questions about technology implementation; today, they are being asked to justify their corporation’s existence in the modern marketplace.
Requirement 7: Leader
As manager of the IT department, the CIO has direct authority to make changes regarding priorities and resource staffing. This authority allows the CIO to set clear performance expectations and processes for addressing poor performance. This authority is essential to building a competent IT organization—but does not extend to other departments.
As business leaders, CIOs must be skilled communicators who have the ability to foster strong business partnerships. Without direct authority over other departments, CIOs must understand the art of negotiation, persuasion, and influence. An effective leader understands that human relationships supersede reporting structures.
Conclusion
The roles and responsibilities of the CIO constitute one of the most unique corporate positions. No competing role demands such a broad range of capabilities and yet provides so little in terms of defining requirements. So let’s ask the question again: What does the CIO do? The answer is: A CIO is a manager of people, a manager of infrastructure, a financial planner, a business partner, a business expert, an international expert, a customer-facing executive, and a corporate leader.
From the Field:
Marriott International CIO Carl Wilson on why it’s up to today’s IT leaders to teach future CIOs tomorrow’s skills (August 2007):
In the eighties successful CIOs were mostly seen as strong technologists. Many of the leading technologies of the time—MS-DOS, Apple’s Apple’s Macintosh, IBM PCs, Windows and analog cellular phones—were designed to enable individual productivity. Reflecting the standalone nature of those technologies, companies created predominantly siloed IT functions that reported to finance or to a unique line of business, with limited cross-functional interaction. Our business peers thought of us as data processing or information systems managers and not chief information officers. IT, not the business, “owned” the technology, and we were solely responsible for making it work.
The Cross-Enterprise Era
And then, a little over a decade ago, the IT profession began to come of age with the rise of technologies such as the Web, Java programming and wired and wireless local-area networks. These tools made it economically feasible to enable business processes across functions and speed up decision making. CIOs started to look horizontally across functions and became involved in all aspects of the business. Business leaders began to see technology’s potential to integrate business processes, and they began to seriously assume their role as the ultimate owners of that technology. CIOs gained meaningful seats at the table; we were at last positioned to automate processes horizontally and achieve the real value of IT.
My experience at Mariott International mirrors these changes. I joined Marriott 10 years ago as its first CIO and an officer of the company. Our technology then was predominantly back-office. With the advent of CRM, IT moved out to the hotel front desk, enabling guest recognition. Then IT moved into the guest room with high-speed Internet access. Now with our Web reservation systems, technology is in our guests’ homes and offices. Marriott.com brings in more than $4 billion in annual revenue—that’s IT driving top-line growth. When our Chairman and CEO Bill Marriott launched his public blog Marriott on the Move earlier this year, I knew that Marriott had reached a new milestone in the power and reach of technology. His blog has had more than 175,000 hits since its launch in January of this year. The expectation that we will take care of the back-office technology has never gone away, but now we also have accountability for this broader scope of IT.
What a COO does and how to hire one
Posted by Frank Mortimer in COO jobs and careers on January 26, 2010
When the CEO is too busy to manage the production quotas and other operational factors of an organization, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) steps in to fulfill that responsibility. Often known as one of the top executives or the senior vice president in the corporate hierarchy, the COO reigns over the day-to-day activities of an organization, reporting back to the Board of Directors on a regular basis. So the focus of the COO is on operations management, which means he or she is responsible for the development, design, operation, and improvement of the systems that create and deliver the firm’s products/services.
The basic tasks of a COO:
- Marshal limited resources as set out by the CEO and the board of directors to the most productive uses with the aim of creating maximum value for the company’s stakeholders.
- Lead by developing and cascading the organizations strategy/mission statement to the lower ranking staff, and implementing appropriate rewards/recognition and coaching/corrective practices to align personnel with company goals.
- Plan by prioritizing customer, employee and organizational requirements
- Maintaining and monitoring staffing, levels, Knowledge-Skills-Attributes (KSA), expectations and motivation to fulfill organizational requirements
- Drive performance measures for the measurement of an operation’s performance and consideration of efficiency versus effectiveness, often in the form of dashboards convenient for review of high level key indicators.
The role of a COO differs case by case
The COO job description and reporting structure should correspond to the needs of the organization. Discussing what the organization hopes to do in the coming years, what kind of leadership will be necessary to fulfill those goals, and what role the COO is expected to play in relation to members of the existing senior team will determine a vision for the COO position.
The link with the CEO role is essential. It could come down to:
Questions a company should be able to answer before hiring a COO
Questions about the Candidates
Entrepreneur: In some companies, the COO is a figure of power–a coach, a counselor, a master of process engineering, a CEO-in-training. Yet just as often, the COO gets almost no respect; he (or she) is a glorified paper-pusher, someone willing to handle odd jobs that the important executives prefer to avoid. Batman and Robin may be a Dynamic Duo, but it’s a sure bet that Robin sometimes wonders about the resume value of being a perpetual sidekick.
In fact, a good many management experts believe the COO’s real job is to babysit a dysfunctional CEO. “Ninety percent of the COOs I run into,” says one of our subscribers, “are put in place by boards who realize their charismatic, walk-on-water, given-to-flashes-of- brilliance CEO really doesn’t have the skills to run a business.”
This may be a cynical view, but the fact remains that company founders almost never feel that a COO is an essential part of their core management team. And as a latecomer, the COO typically has to carve out a job by taking tasks and authority away from the CEO and from other top executives. Not surprisingly, the COO’s job often ends up as a political battleground.
Still, there are COOs who have quietly helped build great companies, who have become the CEO’s closest confidant and a caring, trusted leader for the rank-and-file.
Sources: Bridgestar, Entrepreneur
Your next career move: How not to ruin it
Posted by Frank Mortimer in CV writing, Finding A Headhunter, Interviews on January 24, 2010
A report published in Harvard Business Review suggests that even high-ranking executives make elementary mistakes when searching for a new role. In researching “Five Ways to Bungle a Job Change”, authors Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams interviewed 400 executive research consultants, 500 high level executives and the heads of Human Resources at 15 multinational companies.
“It all kept coming down to the same thing,” Robin Abrahams, research associate at Harvard Business School, told CNN.
“Five mistakes came out consistently, no matter who we asked.” she said.
Lack of research
The report identifies four areas which were conspicuously absent in job seekers’ research.
Groysberg, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and Abrahams reveal that executives fail to assess potential employers for financial stability or how they might fit in culturally to a new organization.
Job seekers also assume that official job descriptions accurately reflect the role as well as failing to properly investigate “job-market realities for their industry.”
“They really don’t do their due diligence,” Abrahams said.
“Think for a moment if you were going to invest a year’s salary in the stock of a company. How much due diligence would you do on that company before investing your money? People don’t do that when they are changing their job.”
Leaving for money
Moving jobs for a pay rise is, according to Abrahams, a result of people thinking in the short term and is no guarantee of success in the long term.
“You know when you change jobs that there are going to be some losses involved — moving your family for example — so the money helps people with feelings of loss aversion. It’s also a story that you can tell to other people and they will understand.
Abrahams, a research psychologist, has a special interest in the psychology of narrative. It’s important for people to explain themselves to other people she says.
“If you tell people you’re getting $10,000 or $50,000 more, everyone gets that. But If you are saying long-winded things like ‘it’s for my personal development’ or ‘I’m truly happier doing this’ you can only say those things to your closest friends and even they might not care or understand.”
Going “from” rather than “to”
Executives at the top, as well as people lower down the career ladder are sometimes so desperate to leave their job that they don’t plan their career moves and lurch from job to job instead of waiting for the right position.
“Ask yourself: ‘are there opportunities still left at my old company or do I really need to leave?’” Abraham said.
“It’s very easy for one or two pieces of information — whether its ‘my boss insulted me’ or ‘these people are offering me $25,000 more’ — to overwhelm everything else. Don’t make a job change based on one piece of information,” Abrahams added.
Overestimating yourself
Abrahams says that people overestimate themselves in two ways.
“They generally think they are more competent than they are and tend to have what’s called a self-aggrandizement bias — overplaying the extent to which you saved the day and your own contribution,” Abrahams said.
This “excessively optimistic” opinion of themselves leads them to underestimate how long a job search can take.
“A lot of people aren’t even thinking through the competition,” Abrahams said.
Thinking short term
A short term perspective, Groysberg and Abrahams say, can feed into the mistakes above and many of the headhunters they spoke to cited it as a “serious career misstep in its own right.” Abrahams say executives should pay attention to all sources of information available to them about a new role. If you are lucky enough to find the job of your dreams this year, Abrahams — who writes the “Miss Conduct” social advice column for the Boston Globe — has some words of wisdom. “On-boarding is absolutely crucial. When you start a job, etiquette and good career management tactics are the same really. Find out who you need to know and get in front of them. Do everything you can to start building up your social capital. Definitely come with a listening perspective, no matter how important you are.” Burning your bridges with your old company has never been a smart move. Even more so now in the modern business world, Abrahams says.
“Globalization and people changing careers will mean that today’s boss maybe tomorrow’s client or vendor, subordinate or rival for another job. You simply never know.”
Source: CNN / Harvard Business Review
How to get headhunted in 2010
Posted by Frank Mortimer in Executive Search, Finding A Headhunter on January 13, 2010
Below an article from Efin.careers. Quite all right although you could add a lot of other stuff to it: P.e. make sure you’re listed in the relevant social networks. Also the time that a candidate waits until he or she is approached by an executive search firm is long past us.
In this day and age candidates are actively involved in managing their next steps and professional online tools are available also to high end candidates (p.e. www.lintberg.com) to get in touch with head hunters and to be informed of new opportunities. Anyway for what it’s worth:
1) Put yourself about
Most articles on how to get yourself headhunted (and there are many), suggest you need to get your name out there. And how better to do this than to become known as a great authority on your subject? This can be achieved via appearances at conferences and frequent citations in the media.
Such things tend to have a snowball effect: once you’ve appeared at a conference or in the press once, you’re more likely to be asked to speak or provide a quote in the future. With luck, headhunters and their researchers will then spot you, add you to their databases and call you when a suitable opportunity presents itself.
2) Frequent the company of respected professionals
If putting yourself about publicly is helpful, putting yourself about in the right circles privately is crucial. All the headhunters we spoke to for this article told us they source candidates through recommendations from people already known to them.
“Most of our people come from referrals,” says Alex Tracey at Clifden Partners. “You need to make sure you have a big network of people who like and rate you.”
“It’s all about the company you keep,” says Ray Baptiste of search firm Marlin Hawk. “Good people recommend good people. Everyone understands that the people they put forward reflect on their own reputation.”
3) Let your frustrations be known
As well as knowing ‘good people,’ you need to let those people know that you’re ripe to be headhunted. This carries the risk that your boss may become aware of your frustrations. However, it also makes it more likely that your name will crop up if one of your esteemed friends is headhunted themselves.
“The most effective way of getting someone to call you is to let your friends know that you’re actively looking and are open to conversations,” says Tracey. “The best referrals we get are those where someone recommends Bob Smith because he’s fed up and will be receptive to a call.”
4) Ensure your clients rate you
As well as asking peers in the market for recommendations, headhunters and line managers will also ask clients for names.
“If we want to hire someone, we simply phone our most friendly clients and ask them who their favourite people in the space are,” says the head of research at one brokerage firm. “We then tip the headhunter off. The same applies for any client facing role.”
5) Be a big earner
This may be a slight chicken and egg situation, but you’re more likely to be headhunted if you earn lots of money and are at VP level or above than if you’re an analyst or associate.
This is because headhunters are paid a percentage fee according to first year total compensation of the person they’re placing. The incentive to move a lowly paid analyst is therefore minimal. However, headhunters do exist to ferret out top analyst/associate talent for private equity funds.
6) Fall into a minority group
Needless to say, you will have little control over this, but your allure to headhunters may be increased if you fall into a minority group. “Most of our shortlists are full of white, upper class males,” says the director of one financial services search firm. “If we find someone who can do the job and who doesn’t fall into this category, they make the shortlist more diverse.”
Achieving your childhood dreams
Posted by Frank Mortimer in Interviews, Uncategorized on August 26, 2009
An important part of moving ahead and growing your career is to be very conscious of what it is that you really want and then knowing how to pursue it. One of the best and certainly the most moving lecture I’ve ever seen on this subject is by Randy Pausch.
Essentially it is a lecture by a man who knows he is only a couple months away from his death and has only the truth to tell you. Very touching and very educating.
Randolph Frederick “Randy” Pausch (October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was an American professor of computer science and human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pausch learned that he had pancreatic cancer, a terminal illness, in September of 2006. In September 2007 he gave an lecture entitled “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” at Carnegie Mellon. The lecture became a hit on YouTube. He then co-authored a book called The Last Lecture on the same theme, which became a New York Times best-seller. Pausch died of complications from pancreatic cancer in July, 2008.
Click on this link:
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