We are seeing signs of increasing CIO turnover following several years of relative stability (at least since the mid-90′s when CIO was coming to mean “Career is Over!”)
I suspect it is in part a byproduct of increasing business-IT maturity, and the “take no prisoners” approach many CIO’s have taken to standardizing and consolidating IT infrastructure, and implementing global common Enterprise Systems. Desperate to get out of Level 1 and through Level 2, the tack taken by many CIO’s has alienated them with their business colleagues.
While the end result is what was desperately needed, and perhaps even the “my way or the highway” approach was called for, I’ve seen a few CIO’s achieve this with high finesse, and in a way that won them business support. I’ve also seen less politically savvy CIO’s take this path in a clumsy and politically naive way that alienated business partners, and failed to sell the business value and all the good things that will be achieved on top of the standardized infrastructure and application platform.
I’ve noted before that the CIO competencies needed to get from Level 1 to Level 2 (in our 3-Level Business-IT Maturity Model) are not the same as those needed to get to Level 3. I’m now also seeing that the techniques CIO use to get from Level 1 to Level 2, unless applied with great care and finesse, may preclude them from taking their IT organizations from Level 2 to Level 3.
Filed under: IT Management, IT Maturity Tagged: | CIO turnover, Enterprise Systems implementation, IT infrastructure consolidation, IT Maturity
