Monday, 05 July 2010 00:00

The CIO's Role in Project Failure

Rate this item

(0 votes)

CIO nameplate: Who should the CIO report to?

A couple months ago I asked the question, "Who should the CIO report to?" on the LinkedIn's CIO Magazine Forum. Surprisingly, over 100 people responded, so many that the group's moderator moved the discussion to the jobs section. Maybe they were tired of the attention this old, beat-up subject was getting. I surely did not think responses would be quite as passionate as they were. However, my interest lay in another area, not in the answers to the direct question, rather the reasoning behind them.

The Question Behind the Question

To insure getting the desired detail, I framed the query further. In the months prior to posting, I had participated in a roundtable discussion with a number of CIOs of $500M+ companies. This topic came up and a few felt adamant that the CIO should report to the CEO. However, as the discussion evolved, most softened their stance. In the end, there were two general groups of thought, both relatively close in concept:

The CIO needs to be a respected peer of others reporting to the CEO, regardless of the actual reporting structure for the CIO.
The reporting structure needs to be set up based on the technical prowess of the CEO. However, there was a wide diversity of reasons—technophobic CEOs, older risk-averse companies, and corporate cultures opposed to having a non-core competency reporting to the CEO.

The responses to the CIO group posting were about the same—primarily that CIOs should report to the CEO, the next most popular choice was the CFO, and a smattering of COOs and CTOs. Finally, a few folks who refered to who the person was and how well they understood the business. Feel free to join the group review the responses.

It Depends on the CIO

The latter group interested me—it depends on the CIO. The majority that said CIOs should report to the CEO seemed to feel this would give the CIO the credibility to do the job. This is problematic. If you lack the leadership skills, IT competency, or business knowledge to earn respect of the C-level peers, how will reporting structure change that? Rightfully so, if the CIO does not deliver value to the business, he or she will be fired. The only way to deliver value is to understand the business. Not IT, the business.

On the other hand, if you have that knowledge and the CEO's direct reports still fail to recognize you, there is a problem. Reporting to the CEO will not fix that; the cultural problem needs fixing first.

Failing Projects

Now the other angle, the view inside IT. In generalities, IT budgets allocate two-thirds to keep the lights on and one-third to deliver business initiatives. Understanding the value of Forrester's MOOSE (Maintain and Operate the Organization, Systems, and Equipment) is simple—keep everything running all the time. There is only a minimal requirement to understand the inner workings of the business. Analogous to the power company, you need to know the amount of power to supply and little about how it is used.

The other third, initiatives, is quite different. Building or implementing new systems requires business process knowledge, comprehension of business goals, and the variables that affect them. It requires embedding knowledge of multiple processes into a system that can be easily modified in concert with ever changing business environment. This requires IT to understand how the business runs, rather than how many neat features are in a new application.

Lose site of the business and IT managers start making stupid decisions. People second guess management, architects begin thinking the goal is delivering technology, and project managers cannot differentiate between critical scope and nice-to-haves. The Garage Syndrome^TM reigns, projects start to fail, moral diminishes and the organization spirals downward. The business loses trust in IT's ability to help streamline its operations.

**Want to read more?**

Strategy, alignment, communication of goals is not easy. Our Vision To Value white paper talks about focusing your team on the key strategic corporate goals and ensuring everyone in your organization knows the direction.
Look at the White Paper

The CIO's Role

The solution is the CIO. If the CIO understands the business' issues and demands his or her direct reports do the same, the organization's attitude, culture, and drive will change to deliver solutions with a business focus. Everything, including projects, runs better since the focus is away from implementing an application and centered on solutions for the business. This top-down attitude engages everyone in the project's chain of command to understand what is critical to quality.

The reporting structure of the CIO is irrelevant. It is the CIO's complete and thorough understanding of the business that makes the CIO and the IT organization relevant.

Read 15245 times

Tagged under

Related items

Filling Execution Gaps: How Executives and Project Managers Turn Corporate Strategy into Successful Projects

What Filling Execution Gaps Covers

Filling Execution Gaps

by Todd C. Williams
ISBN: 978-1-5015-0640-6
De G Press (DeGruyter), September 2017

Project alignment, executive sponsorship, change management, governance, leadership, and common understanding. These six business issues are topics of daily discussions between executives, middle management, and project managers; they are the pivotal problems plaguing transformational leadership. Any one of these six, when improperly addressed, will hex a project's chances for success. And, they do—daily—destroying the ability companies to turn vision into value.

Check it out on Amazon or the Filling Execution Gaps website

Without the foundation of a common understanding of goals and core concepts, such as value being critical to success, communication stops and projects fail.

Without change management, users fail to adopt project deliverables, value is lost, and projects fail.

Without maintaining alignment between corporate goals and projects, projects miss their value targets and projects fail.

Without an engaged executive sponsor, scope increases, goals drift, chaos reigns, value is lost, and projects fail.

Without enough governance, critical connections are not made, steps are ignored, value is overlooked, and projects fail.

Too much governance slows progress, companies cannot respond to business pressures, value drowns in bureaucracy, and projects fail.

Without strong leadership defining the vision and value, goals are not set, essential relationships do not form, teams do not develop, essential decisions are not made, and projects fail.
Filling Execution Gaps: Building Success-Focused Organizations

Executives define vision, strategy, and goals to advance the business. Projects enable companies to meet those goals. Between strategy and projects, there is a lot of work to be done—work that lays the foundation for project and operational success. Through experience and research, six common gaps exist in organizations that inhibit project success—an absence of common understanding, disengaged executive sponsors, misalignment with goals, poor change management, ineffective governance, and lackluster leadership.
Get Recognized as a Leader: Four Core Leadership Actions

Leaders make decisions. This requires a core set of actions to gather the best information, hear out the concerns of others, and making a decision that everyone will follow—even if there is not unanimous agreement with the decision. Although there are hundreds of actions leaders must take, there are four core actions that all great leaders do—listening, dialog and discussion, selling a vision, and eliminating blame. This session will discuss those actions in a roundtable format that we call a "What Would You Do?" session. In these sessions, the presenter acts as a moderator spending 10 to 15 minutes per topic working with the audience talking about what the action is, how to best do it, and hearing from the group on how they have carried out the action. This brings significant audience interaction, involvement, and broader education.
Build Your Leadership Style: Six Leadership Strategies

Salespeople, Project managers, and business leaders, to name a few, need to change their leadership style for every situation. Situational leadership is more important for these roles than nearly any other role in an organization. Central to this leadership style is commanding the six core strategies—directive, expert, consensus, engaging, coaching, and affiliative. These sets leaders the foundation for building the most appropriate leadership style for the conditions surrounding the current events, people in the room, and external conditions. In this roundtable session, which we refer to as a "What Would You Do?" format, the audience debates the use of each strategy as the presenter poses various conditions and dilemmas that face leaders daily. This creates an educational, interactive and entertaining presentation that builds cohesiveness in your group and relationships that last long after your event.
Strategy-Execution Gaps
The statistics on strategy execution are dismal:
- 59% of middle managers fail at resolving conflicts in corporate strategy.
- 45% of middle managers cannot name one of the top five corporate goals.
- 64% of cross-department/functional issues are poorly resolved.
And maybe as you could expect from this:
- 53% of companies cannot react timely to new opportunities.
You do not need to be a rocket scientist to know that this trajectory is not going to launch most companies’ latest strategic plans successfully. In fact, these data might make you feel that middle management would be better suited as test dummies for the next generation of manned space-vehicle. Granted, the data show there is a dearth of leadership in middle management, but the executive tier has a culpable hand.