How Should IT Manage its people?

1. How Should IT Manage its people? Chapter 15 MISY 300

2. The Value of People as Assets … is the capacity for creativity, analysis, perception, learning, judgment, leadership, coordination, empathy, and trust. Such capacity is in teams and individuals within the organization, due to knowledge, experience, and skills.

3. The Management of IT People • What should you expect from your CIO? • IT Staff as Assets • IT Staff and Change • IT Staff as Stakeholders

4. What should you expect from your CIO? • Leadership, Leadership, Leadership • Leadership • Management Skills • Communication Skills • Technical Expertise • Business Expertise • Vision – Ability to Create and Manage Change • Ability to Hire, Develop, and Retain High Quality IT Professionals Who can Work Together • International or Global Experience • Industry-Specific Experience • Relationship Skills

5. What should you expect from your CIO?Leadership • A leader is someone who can get people to follow him or her • Look for evidence that he or she is “out front” on a project on initiative, and that the team is following, supporting and enabling. • A strong motivator can help build a strong team • Teams with mixed backgrounds and perspectives is more likely to identify a wider range of potential opportunities and problems • Diverse teams = diverse motivations • Leaders are born, not made • A manager is not necessarily a leader

6. What should you expect from your CIO?Management Skills • Proficiency in directing & supervising people, projects, vendors; accomplished team builders, motivators, coaches, mentors; setting priorities, assigning appropriate resources against this priorities, delivering projects on time and on budget • Competent in making arrangements for managing the supply chain • Solid understanding of financial management and risk management • Management of performance – measurement of IT and software development v. important • Are CIO’s management skills being effectively applied? • Business and the CIO need to agree on clear policy on IT governance – accountability • What decisions need to be made? Who makes them? How do they get made?

7. What should you expect from your CIO?Communication Skills • Ability to articulate strategies and feelings intelligently in a clear and appropriate manner is essential • Both written and verbal communication • Listening skills • Negotiation, persuasion, conflict resolution skills • IT staff’s collective knowledge is > the CIO’s! • Good communication is key to developing good business relationships and sustainable success

8. What should you expect from your CIO?Technical Expertise • CIO vs. CTO • CIO: the leader of the group responsible for delivering IT services to the rest of the organization • Much wider set of skills, knowledge, and experience than just technology • Not necessary but useful to have technical background/knowledge

9. What should you expect from your CIO?Business Expertise • Solid foundation of the principles of accounting, finance, SCM, marketing, sales, and distribution channels (traditional and online) • Further develop deeper understanding of the firm’s specific business models and customers • Ability to problem solve at organizational level, not just IT level

10. What should you expect from your CIO?Vision – Ability to Create and Manage Change • Rapid change in IT make vision and ability to manage change v. important • Change can take many forms and not all changes are sustained in the linger term • BPR and continuous process improvement

11. What should you expect from your CIO?Ability to Hire, Develop, and Retain High Quality IT Professionals Who can Work Together • Often not a high priority for CIO – it should be! • Selection of team is v. important • CIOs should delegate authority “carefully” • Succession Planning – one of most important jobs • Required annually • Not just a set of names – strengths and weaknesses • Contingency plan of succession plan is disrupted • Challenge: shortage of talent • software professionals • CS enrolments down (esp. women)

12. What should you expect from your CIO?International or Global Experience • Appreciation of foreign cultures • Understanding of doing business in foreign markets • Openness and awareness that there are different ways of interacting and diverse modes of conducting business in other parts of the world

13. What should you expect from your CIO?Industry-Specific Experience • The “ideal” CIO would have industry-specific knowledge • Not always possible • Value of industry-specific knowledge: CIO will be able to get to know the business faster, will know what questions to ask and what surprise to expect

14. What should you expect from your CIO?Relationship Skills • Dysfunctional connections and low rapport between CIO and other C-level officers is common reason for failure in firms • Often extends to customers, suppliers and partners • Relationship building: establish and maintain strong understanding, rapport, bind and trust between peers • Ability to build alliances and make good business decisions • Self-preservation is doomed to backfire – doing the right thing will tend to establish credibility and integrity

15. IT Staff as Assets • Investment in people as assets • Training: the development of subject matter knowledge • Coaching: the development of emotional intelligence, situational intelligence or social intelligence • Mentoring: subject matter intelligence (“do as I do and you will be successful…”) • Knowledge vs. intelligence • Coaching and mentoring to become more important in IT Providers if they are to bridge successfully the middle management gap

16. IT Staff and Change • Career in IT is a career dealing with constant change • Successful IT managers are by definition successful change managers • 3 cautionary notes: • Software projects fail (cost, functionality, quality, schedule) because immaturity of IT trams implementing them or expectations of the business • IT providers cab be masters if manipulating change to suit their own goals • IT Providers can get into a mode of “change for change’s sake” – too many changes, too often , destroy the stability of the underlying systems and services

17. IT Staff as Stakeholders • Different levels of IT staff have varying perspectives of the organization • These perspectives are valuable • IT staff at different levels have different needs from the organization, and from the business, re: information • IT staff need to be aware of the different levels and what the business and the IT provider are trying to achieve and how they are trying to achieve it: • What am I supposed to be doing? • Where is the information I need? • What are the priorities in the short term so that I know how to deal with the unexpected?