CIOs: Scatter Eggs in Multiple Baskets
CIOs, to succeed as a forceful business change agents, must expand their trust past their CEOs.
That's a noteworthy point made by Marc Cecere in the first part of a series of reports—How CIOs Can Drive Business Change—issued this week by Forrester Research. In the five-page report, Cecere writes:
CEOs can sponsor business change, but execution and acceptance of change requires the commitment of business leaders and end users. Furthermore, a broad base of allies may help insulate the change effort from CEO turnover. "Just by changing the CEO in our firm, all previous relationships, trust, and confidence disappeared for a time, halting our change initiative," a CIO noted.
In all, Cecere and his Forrester colleagues offer 16 key success factors, including a group that focuses on key enablers of credibility, communications, strong teamwork and competitive information. The following chart is based on phone interviews Forrester conducted last year with 12 members of its Leadership Boards' CIO Group and two other non-company experts.
Among other success factors: build for the long term, fix staff problems before they hurt your credibility and restructure to find the strongest players. Cecere writes:
Direct reports can be a barrier to assessing and developing the strongest players in the organization. This is especially difficult for CIOs who are new to an organization and need to actively seek and speak with skip-level staff to find talent: "I had to move bosses out of the way to find the high performers."
