In
this post over at
CIO.COM,
Susan Cramm makes the point that the average I.T. professional who feels he is ready to be a CIO isn't ready at all. She makes a call to CIOs to inform their people that they need to get more "business experience" and to develop "senior level relationships."
Her charge is noble, necessary and terribly difficult. Many I.T. professionals lack skills critical to being successful in a C-level role. To many I.T. professionals, a vertical career track requires technical depth and specialization. Consequently they spend a disproportionate amount of time developing technical skills and not enough time on skills that would help them get into and navigate within the boardroom.
Skills like:
Communication. My department works on hundreds of simultaneous projects. In addition, we operate hundreds of different products and services continually. It's critical that we keep our customers and our management aware of what is going on in the shop. I plead and beg our engineers and project/program managers to write very simple, understandable status reports. It is a constant struggle. A member of my office reviews (and in the past has typically re-written) every one of them. We have a
hard time talking without jargon and acronyms.
Relationship Management. When I worked in computer games at Microsoft I often had to "check out the competition" and so played an awful lot of games for a couple of years. I remember telling my wife, Lani, about this great new game called Everquest where you could meet new people, develop friendships and have fun together, all in a virtual world. She said, "Gee Joel. It sounds almost as fun as real life." Hmmm. Sarcasm. The fact is that relationships are easier on line than in real life. If things aren't going well, you log out or you just "block" the other person. You don't have to co-exist in a meaningful way--the biggest source of conflict is deciding who gets the +4 magic, +4 intelligence mace you picked up off a monster your party just clobbered. I know I.T. guys who get along socially just fine in on line games and who struggle to go out to lunch periodically with their customers. "I don't really have anything to talk about with them." "I'm too busy."
Business Acumen. Our shop is going through some growing pains this year as one of our focuses is on writing effective business objectives for a project. It's hard. Engineers think about solving problems very naturally. We don't always think about cost justification. Why does it make business sense to upgrade your application server? "Well, the cache is filling up and we're queue'ing requests. That's why." Upgrading may make all the sense in the world to a technologist who understands what's under the hood, but a business person might decide that the business consequences of not upgrading are acceptable in light of the cost of upgrade. This is particularly relevant at the Church where we have to take extra precautions to keep costs low. Many basic business skills like cost-benefit analysis, contract negotiation, and others are not even taught in computer science or information technology programs, and when those skills are taught, they atrophy in I.T. people who are not being required to use them.
In our department, we're taking steps to help our professionals develop these skills. I'll talk about those steps in the next post.
