Archive of: CIO

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Great Communicators: Genentech CIO Todd Pierce

Great communicators focus on the perspectives, priorities and frames of reference of the people they seek to communicate with. At Genentech, that means science. Todd Pierce, SVP and CIO at Genentech, views effective communication as the “circulatory system" of business. Everything he does takes that into account.

Being in the drug discovery/drug development business, Genentech runs on quickly gathering large volumes of information and analyzing it effectively. With 30-40 clinical trials going on at any given time, that's a lot of information.

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How IT Can Help Cash-Strapped Government Agencies Better Serve the Public for Less

Government agencies are in fiscal trauma right now. Billions of dollars over budget, many states are taking drastic measures to cut costs. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra and CTO Aneesh Chopra are aggressively pursuing software as a service and cloud computing as one way to cut costs, and the state of Utah is planning a private cloud to serve local agencies.

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Great Communicators: Kimberly-Clark CIO Ramon Baez

Effective CIOs all have their own style and approach to leadership. One thing they have in common is the ability to communicate well at all levels of their organizations. They understand that communication is a collaborative process, as much about asking questions as answering them; as much about listening as talking. It's a conversation.

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Storytelling and the Art of Change

Storytelling is a powerful tool when you want to drive organizational change, sell an idea, or just make a point.

There's nothing new about storytelling. As a species, it's in our DNA. Long before we had books and newspapers, telephones and telegraphs, the Internet and Kindles, our ancestor's sat around the fire and told stories. More than storytellers, we're story consumers. Even people who think they're no good at telling stories generally love to hear them. We just respond better to information when it's delivered with a memorable anecdote or example (i.e., story).

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Leadership Communication: From Ideas to Action

Communicating effectively with business colleagues has ranked as one of CIOs' top three critical success factors for as long as I've been tracking these things -- and I've been tracking them for a long time. I've wondered over the years why this issue hasn't gone away. Why is it so damn hard for IT leaders to get their message across?

First of all, this is not just a CIO problem. People in general are terrible at conveying a concept or message intact from their brain to that of their "listener" (a misused term if ever there was one). As Celtics coach Red Auerbach used to say, "it's not what you say, it's what they hear." Influencing what people hear involves a lot more than just forming the right words.

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A Brief and Colorful History of Technology in Business

I was asked to give a couple of talks this spring giving my perspective on the current state of technology in business. I always think the present is better understood by looking at the past, so I put together a presentation looking at a) how things have developed over the past 20 or so years (not coincidentally, the span of time I was involved with CIO Magazine), and b) the challenges and opportunities I see businesses in general and CIOs in particular facing during this tumultuous time. I've posted a version of this talk on Slideshare, complete with an audio narration. Please check it out and let me know if your view lines up with mine or how you see things differently.

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Experience Matters

In today's tough economy, many companies find they must lay off some of their most experienced (i.e., expensive) employees in favor of lower cost labor. But research -- and history -- shows that experience has value that can't be achieved any other way.

I'm reading a report just out on "Women CIOs & the Art of Influence" from the CIO Executive Council, in partnership with The Leader's Edge (you can access the report on the Council's website). One of the findings shows that when it comes to effectiveness and the ability to influence outcomes, age and seniority matter. Women with more than 25 years of experience and with senior IT leadership titles were more effective than those with less than 25 years on the job and lower level titles. The ability to influence, deemed "very important" by 92 percent of study participants, manifests itself in various ways, including that "more senior IT leaders consider what's in it for the stakeholder more frequently than do their less experienced counterparts."

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The Risks of Being Risk Averse

The paradox of tough times is they usually call for dramatic measures, yet it's human nature to keep a low profile and avoid risk, both corporate and personal. This is the dilemma facing CIOs today.

As I wrote in a column a few months ago, incrementalism won't cut it for many businesses in this economy. But according to Paul Gaffney, former CIO and head of supply chain at Staples and current COO of Desktone, that's the path most CIOs will take.