by Jim McGee
November 21, 2007 at 10:49 am
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
The conversation about technology and organizations has been enriched with a new blog, Difference Engine, by my long-time friend and colleague, Abbie Lundberg. Of course, as Editor in Chief at CIO Magazine, we’ve been benefiting from her perspective and insight for years. Now, we’ll get it a bit less filtered and a bit more personal. I’m looking forward to it. Here’s a quick sample:
As the debate over the CIO role rages on, we wonder which is the most critical skill set: business, technology or, as some argue, the ability to detect bullshit?
The debate about the best background for CIOs isn’t new. It’s been going on since the mid ‘90s, when Johnson & Johnson first appointed a CIO from “the business,” without hands-on IT experience. The argument goes something like this: Technology is becoming an increasingly integral part of business; ergo, CIOs have to be business strategists. So far so good. But then some people continue the argument to say that because business knowledge and ability is so important, technology knowledge isn’t. False!
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So what do you think? Can you be a truly great CIO without a pretty deep understanding of technology? Does the merging of business and technology make technology knowledge more or less valuable to the individual leading strategic IT?
The Most Critical Attribute of a CIO | Advice and Opinion.
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For me it depends on how we understand the statement about having a “deep understanding of technology” means.
Most IT departments are obsessed with the idea of central control. Most geeks are obsessed with tools.
A deep understanding of how IT serves is what I would look for. How it affects the pace, the risks and the opportunities of the enterprise - does it wall up the enterprise or does it allow the enterprise to interact with the world?
Did Van Horne have to know a lot about how steam engines worked, or did he have to know how rail would affect the world as he built the CP railway. He was an engineer - so when folks talked to him about gradients, bridges or tunnels or track - he understood. But what made him world class was how he used the rights to the land around the tracks and used hotels as hubs and how he linked the railway to the Atlantic shipping and how he advertised in Europe and how he understood how the railway would energise a new form of economy that was no longer all local.
So my ideal CIO would be Cornelius Van Horne, the chief engineer of the CP railway
Jim McGee wrote @ November 23rd, 2007 at 9:28 am
Abbie calls it a good “bullshit detector.” I tend to think of it as having a good design sense for how to balance between the state of the art and the state of the possible.
As an engineer, Van Horne somewhere developed an appreciation for how his technologies imposed limits and created opportunities that went beyond more generic knowledge about managing people or budgets.
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