THE NEW CIO LEADER





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Gartner Executive Programs (EXP) is a membership-based organization of nearly 2,000 CIOs worldwide.

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CIOs and the organizations they serve are at a crossroads. Organizations need a senior executive that will guide the enterprise in the application of IT to meet business goals. CIOs are in a unique position to provide that leadership. But they need to become New CIO leaders, with different priorities and areas of focus than they have traditionally had.

From research conducted with thousands of compaines and CIOs, we have put together a picture of the new, more proactive CIO. Call it the new CIO leader's top ten. We've built the book around these ten issues.


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Leadership and management are different but complementary. Management is about execution. Leadership is about change, specifically influencing others to change. Leading through influence is critical for New CIO Leaders. They must lead their business colleagues by influencing their view of IT but without a formal base of authority or power. CIOs can't TELL their business colleagues what to do, but they can influence the decisions they make.


CIO leadership falls into two categories — demand side and supply side leadership. The demand side is where you lead your business colleagues, helping to determine why, where and how IT will be used to meet business goals.

The first aspect of demand side leadership is developing an intimate knowledge of the fundamentals of your environment — how your business operates, its past, current and expected future performance, its goals and strategies, its industry and competitors, etc. Without understanding your environment you can't lead effectively.


Leadership is about influencing change. To influence change you must have a vision for what change is necessary, what the future looks like. Your vision as CIO has to be grounded in an intimate knowledge of the persistent business needs of your organization. Only then will your vision for achieving business goals be useful and compelling to your business colleagues.


There will always be more IT work to be done than resources allow. Therefore it is critically important to work with your business colleagues to develop appropriate expectations for the use of IT in your organization. To do so, you must achieve consensus on business needs, strategies, and endeavors and the guiding principles or IT maxims that will inform the inevitable trade-offs. Your business colleagues need to be intimately involved in this process so that they know, understand and approve of the guiding framework for decision making on the use of IT in your organization.


IT Governance is the secret weapon of successful New CIO Leaders. Good governance enables you to effectively weave together business and IT strategies and to consistently build credibility and trust. To do so, your governance styles and mechanisms must be matched to your environment and the expectations of your business colleagues.

Your business colleagues must understand how specific decisions are made so that they trust the process and ultimately can be confident in the outcomes.


An IT Strategy contains the key decisions about specific technology implementations over a defined period of time in areas like infrastructure, applications, and architecture.

New CIO Leaders take a portfolio approach with their IT strategy, actively managing the strategy to assure balance and the achievement of business goals.


CIO leadership falls into two categories -- demand side and supply side leadership. New CIO Leaders not only lead on the demand side, with their business colleagues, but also on the supply side, leading the IS organization to meet the organization's goals and expectations. To meet these business-focused expectations, New CIO Leaders need an appropriately organized and focused IS organization.

The New CIO Leader's IS organization must be leaner and more focused on business results by appropriately using strategic sourcing of IT services, by adopting process based working, and by using all the financial resources available to it.


For New CIO Leaders to succeed they need not only a new IS organization but a team that is appropriately skilled and committed to achieving business results. Just like you, your IS team needs new and different competencies to succeed. These new competencies are much more focused on strategic thinking and relationship building than on technical skills.


New CIO Leaders are needed because IT is embedded in every critical business process in today's organizations. However, there is also significant risk associated with this state of affairs IT risks affect the whole enterprise.

New CIO Leaders must proactively step up to manage the new enterprise risks related to IT and new regulatory environments.


Leadership depends on credibility and credibility is built on results. New CIO Leaders ensure that results are widely known and understood by communicating IS performance at every opportunity. They develop "dashboards" that allow business colleagues to see and understand the value received from IT in business terms.


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Even as senior executives have become disillusioned by information technology projects that fall far short of expectations-technology is playing an increasingly critical role in every product, service, and process. This paradox has brought CIOs to a crossroads. They can take a big step back and accept a marginal role as "chief technology mechanic." Or, they can leverage their expertise to step up to a whole new level of enterprise leadership.

The New CIO Leader identifies the dramatically different priorities, skills, and actions required for CIOs to earn an elevated strategic role in organizations. Marianne Broadbent and Ellen Kitzis, advisors to CIOs worldwide, argue that CIOs must focus on winning credibility by consistently delivering results that matter to the executive team.

Drawing from exclusive research conducted by Gartner, Inc., with thousands of companies and CIOs, Broadbent and Kitzis show how the new CIO leaders' priorities and roles will differ depending on their organization's current business context: fighting for survival, successfully competing, or leading its industry. The New CIO Leader outlines an action agenda for setting expectations and identifying what is valued by enterprise leaders, and then leading the information systems (IS) team to deliver on those promises. Broadbent and Kitzis detail ten specific guidelines for mastering the new CIO leadership role-from creating a vision for how technology can improve the business to creating clear and appropriate IT governance to building a leaner, more focused IS organization. They also present a practical self-assessment tool CIOs can use to customize their agenda to their firm's unique strategy.

Every enterprise today needs a new CIO leader. This book outlines the path the CIO must take to become that leader-and to deliver on the promise of IT to yield real, measurable, and bankable results.

Marianne Broadbent is Associate Dean at Melbourne Business School, a Gartner Fellow at Gartner, Inc., and coauthor of Leveraging the New Infrastructure (HBS Press, 1998). Ellen S. Kitzis is Group Vice President of Gartner's Executive Programs, a membership-only program for more than two thousand CIOs.




The New CIO Leader is published by Harvard Business School Press Harvard Business School Press