7 habits that make CIOs successful

DD Mishra, managing consultant, CIOSpecialist

Habits are generally inherited and come from associations while skills are learnt through personal experiences. Habits are more closely associated with culture. As we learn from hump back whales, rather than changing the culture, we can pass on the habits.

Empower: Empowerment means giving up power to others by increasing the ability to make choices. While I have seen automation of processes is often adopted as best practices, they are usually disliked by many as it takes out the flexibility from the organisation and people. It also puts lot of control through compliance and contract.

Building applications, systems and infrastructure in a way that it gives control to its users and customers brings, we bring empowerment which results in success.

Engage: Engaging your ecosystem with your business creates wonderful opportunities. There are various means of engaging with ecosystem. Use concept of gaming; allow people to vote or provide suggestion so that they feel themselves part of a change or a transformation or a new system implementation.

A new idea portal will fly more if you give an idea which one can redeem, allow end users to do thumps up, link with reward process and allow betting & debate on it. You will not just see more ideas from people, but more engagement to help you filter the right ones.

Enable: Enabling with technology definitely makes IT darling of business. If you have given good reporting features, you can enable people to see reports on their mobile. While IT has constraints, going beyond them and making end users feel the delight through enablement provides wonderful opportunity for business and IT alignment.

You can enable users to work from home to ensure that they are able to manage their schedule and be more productive.

Democratize: Democratization of information is key to engagement of people. Business is an ecosystem and organisations are communities. Organisations do not gain by systematically hiding information from own employees and as engagement is the key towards employee loyalty and success through high productivity, democratisation of information will make organisation successful.

Socialize: Sometimes sociology is more important than technology and lack of it may bring an end to the CIOs career. Being an IT leader, this skill can help in driving change through the organisation and help in transformation & change management initiatives where it fails more due to political reasons and less due to technology or process.

Strategize: Culture eats strategy for lunch and marrying the culture with strategy to create right initiatives is an art which makes a CIO successful. Your change management will have high risk of failure if your strategy is directed towards changing the culture. Giving senior management tablets may open your gate towards BYOD or cloud! Often, strategy is implemented through series of tactical endeavours carefully crafted towards success.

Communication: Successful CIOs will be the ones who first communicate good news as well as bad news. One of the key things which make the difference to CIOs role is the communication which happens internally as well as externally. Perceptions are created due to lack of communication and perception over a period of time becomes reality.