My CFO thinks he knows technology

After a weeklong discussion on the new business opportunity that clearly defined the process and the strategy, the CMO thanked the IT team and the CIO for their active participation. Then he said something that resulted in pin drop silence and uneasy calm: I think the solution should be ready within a week from now ? You know in college we used to write code and release programs in a few days. The CIO decided to clarify different reality for enterprise solutions that require a bit longer for time measured in weeks and months.

The CIO had invited the CFO to the IT meeting to interact with the team; every month he used to call some of the business leaders to give the team differing perspectives of how they contributed to the business and made a difference. In an endeavor to show off his technical prowess, the CFO asked about the storage environment: why don’t you use the NAS for the ERP ? SAN is expensive; you should know how to economize ! I have been involved in many technology projects and want to help you to choose most optimum solutions !

I had the privilege of working with many CEOs who were tech savvy and challenged me to find new ways to use existing investments as well as keep scanning for new technologies which could be disruptive in the future. The joy of working with such CEOs multiplied the not just my enthusiasm but also kept my teams motivated to put in their best to keep us ahead of the curve. This obviously created a culture of tech adoption that infected the rest of the CXOs to create an enterprise that enjoyed the benefits that IT can bring to the business.

Life gets interesting when some of the CXOs think they know technology better than IT professionals just because they worked in a tech company or studied a programming language in their school. Above are just 2 samples of such dialogues which keep the CIOs challenged and humored at the same time. They would make a great compendium to keep the IT fraternity smiling for a long time; the question that keeps raising its head is how to address such “know IT all” and “been there, done that” situations without creating a scene.

In conversations with many CIOs sharing experiences a few strategies emerged which had worked for most of them. To begin with the general consensus was to humor them by letting them speak out their heart and then keep doing what is in best interest of the project, team and the company. They need a platform to voice their knowledge which makes them feel better about themselves; most are happy doing just that in a harmless way without realizing that their wisdom is no longer relevant to the current technology realities.

The balance select minority of self-professed and declared IT experts who really believe that they know, unaware of when to stop are a challenge that needs handling with care. In positions of influence or power, they can be seriously disruptive to progress. This elite group wants to stay involved, sit through review meetings, add value to discussions with vendors, and get into minute details of deep technology that is best left to the techies. The group had no silver bullet though everyone had faced and managed such individuals in their careers.

Some CIOs had escalated such incidents where possible to the CEO or the Board to get them off their backs. Another avenue appeared to be to get an external third party or consultant on board to provide an expert view to counter the often antiquated, incorrect or incomplete knowledge. For the rest it was about the adverse impact on their deliverables which they were unable to control. So they struggled with shifting goalposts and changing timelines driven by the inane and absurd; they just had to grin and bear it.

One CIO had decided to take on such a CXO head-on and not accept the nonsense; he corrected the CXO in meetings and gave alternative and at times contrary views which almost every time put the CXO in an embarrassing and compromised situation. Unable to withstand the humility of the situation, the CXO confronted the CIO: Why do you keep countering everything I say as if I know nothing ? You make me feel like a chump ! What makes you so right all the time as if you know everything ? Stop doing this else …

The CIO moved on to newer pastures leaving the company to the mercy of half-baked buzzword laden CXO.

Tale of 3 CIOs, people join companies, people leave their bosses

X had just completed 4 years in his role and grown to take on additional business responsibility. He had built a team which worked across business units and corporate IT on the forefront of some of the new technological innovations. Accolades came from peers and industry acknowledging his ability to take risks and succeed. Life appeared to be going well for him and he was enjoying his professional life. After a few quiet months or was it quarters, he was suddenly looking for a change with agitation that was alien to his happy go lucky nature.

Having spent almost a decade in the company, Y had seen career growth that would be the envy of many; his profile encompassed local and global responsibility. Staying with one industry through his career made him a specialist of sorts and he became a star. His efforts outside of work also made him quite popular in his chosen field. His company had maintained leadership in a competitive industry locally and globally carving a niche with their products. Out of the blue one fine day he called seeking greener pastures.

He was a jolly good fellow and so said all of us ! The life of any gathering, ready with a joke (sometimes too quick), Z had steadily risen through the ranks with some help from his Mentor. Through the 5 years in his company, he had strengthened the foundation and completed seemingly impossibly difficult projects that his predecessors could not. Promoted every alternate year, he had taken new challenges as they came and successfully dealt with them. Over a drink he broke down seeking to leave the company that launched him.

The 3 incidents above spanning 3 different companies and 3 different industries had the 3 CIOs reaching out to me within a span of few months. Maybe it was coincidence, but it was almost as if there was concerted action against my former team mates. All of them had high levels of anxiety and all of them wanted to get out as quickly as possible. Their stories were quite different and then they had many common elements too. They were victims of the same malaise which appeared to be more widespread than reported.

Take the first case, the company management reins passed from founder to the next generation. X found joy working with him as his new manager with an Ivy League pedigree used technology as a native. He drove the company fast and furious, recklessly at times as seen by the old school, he wanted to get somewhere in a hurry. X attempted to run with him and soon found himself at the receiving end frequently irrespective of root cause. He soon realized his non Ivy League or named Institute stature made him an outcast in the inner circle.

Y had done well through the years growing from mid-level to heading the function eventually. His sharp and quick eye for detail made him a popular choice to be included in any team struggling with a tricky problem. The company saw CEOs change thrice over his tenure; all of them nudged him to greater heights. Law of averages caught up with him; the latest CEO hired across layers from his previous company sidelining most old-timers. Y used the last resort calling global compliance which saved his position but killed his career.

Z had a new manager who was task oriented; the resultant change in workload gave Z a high. He rose to every occasion and delivered to promise. Some of the initiatives were industry firsts giving the company a competitive talking point. He was outspoken which was not a negative, his quick wit and mannerism portrayed him of lesser maturity. His work was commended but his manager thought he needed to grow up. Thus despite the success a search for a senior leader above him was launched forcing him to introspect and seek options outside.

Success is no longer a guarantee for continuity; political hues and cronyism seem to be the new mantras required in large doses. Managers are looking for comfort within their teams in new environments thereby throwing enterprise culture and values out of the window. In the quest to succeed, tolerance to such behavior is accepted as part of the game. Collateral damage with some exits does not appear to perturb owners and Boards. By the time the realization hits the company, the damage is already done which takes a long time to recover.

Sick IT, Healthy Life

I have been sick for most of the week; on Monday there was a niggling pain which I hoped would go away like it did most times. By mid-week it had aggravated considering I ignored not just the pain but also the cause which I was not consciously aware of. Once the connection was made I aggressively tried to remedy the situation, except that it was out of control now and needed expert attention. On Thursday the Doctor looked gravely, a long prescription and pronounced that it required a specialist to treat it.

The specialist sympathized and made it look innocuously simple to fix; for him it was a routine escalation to manage. On Friday he did what he was good at and fixed the root cause with knowledge that the rest will fix itself if I followed the defined SOP. The prescription was not too much, the lingering pain and inaction that restricted me to a bed with limited ambulation was. Daily checkup visits add to the agony as I am now in a state of mind, when will this ordeal end and I declared fit and healthy again to get back to work.

When you have a lot of time to do nothing, run out of music to listen or have no inclination to read with half the senses dulled due to heavy dose of pain killers and antibiotics, you start thinking; Doctors also refer to some of the extreme thoughts as hallucinations. To me my chain of thought was lucid and it created many correlations in the swarm of random disconnected millions of thoughts. Analogous to associations created in a data warehouse by a skilled analyst, I picked associated groups which made a lot of sense.

Early pain = project not on track; you know something is not working, you think it will get better, it doesn’t. Falling sick = project misses milestone; you get the vendor consultant to help, he refers to subject matter experts who have been there done that. SME educates on root cause, defines road ahead and KPIs to keep the project healthy. Recovery = always slow and painful; getting back on track takes a lot of effort, following the prescription, no shortcuts. Most of the time you do get back on track with no further slips; you have lost time, money and momentum.

I realize how we can create correlations between totally disconnected facts and make them look like similar data sets or for that matter draw analogies that sound quite logical. The event graph appears to follow a perfectly aligned path drawn by the same artist. Retail has been doing this with disjointed sets of data and have hit upon success many times; we don’t know what happened to the ones that did not work though. But then maybe life does have predictability that it wants us to find and we are getting better at it.

But I am digressing now, rambling about febrile correlations. IT gets sick quite often; whether it is business as usual or new initiatives, they do face challenges and require fixes from specialists and experts depending on the nature of ailment. We have prophylactic technology to keep things going while the next piece of hardware finds itself being resilient or more reliable than a decade back and networks become self-healing and storage can survive failure of a disk or two; Software still requires human intervention.

Human life expectancy has in the same vein gone up as we find better medicines for micro classified diseases. Our way of treating different patient types has been evolving rapidly with Internet of things allowing embedded Nano sensors connected to Big Data repositories analyzing symptoms as they happen and trigger corrective actions almost instantly with novel drug delivery systems. Okay, maybe the entire chain is not yet feasible, but getting there. Affordable access to such innovation would definitely be a paradigm shift.

As IT gets better, projects get more manageable, technology commoditization makes itself ubiquitous, IT wouldn’t matter ! What would matter is how we apply it to real life and help solve problems that have eluded solutions thus far. As more solutions go open source or relinquish patents for global availability, there would be a new world order where healthy humans will score over sick IT. Some of us will be part of this evolution if it happens within this generation. I hope our contributions would have made some difference.

A year of active blogging

Many moons back, this column was conceptualized based on the intermittent musings posted on Oh I See. It has evolved with feedback from readers and critics in equal measure who keep providing me with feedback, headlines and thoughts that can be converted into a column. The weekly frequency has settled down to a couple of hours over the weekend — after many hours during the week has been consumed in figuring out what matters — amongst the many wanting attention.

CEOs, CIOs, students, techies and business readers have written back with their views; some in agreement, a few in disagreements. I learned different perspectives from both — views that added to the richness that I consume and try to disseminate across this column. The Gonzo approach (a la Hunter Thompson) to Oh I See appears to bring out the warts, moles and at the same time, airbrushed images that attempt to make them palatable. Until a few weeks back, I was ignorant of this branding, until it was pointed out by the editor at TechTarget. I am simultaneously suitably impressed and humbled.

Celebrating a year of Oh I See and reflecting back on the various topics that were brought up, discussed, debated, challenged, analyzed, I hope that you would have gained something; a laugh, a connect to the CIO reality. If nothing else, it’s a smile or a frown — hopefully not a grimace. But if your reaction was indeed extreme, did it stimulate you enough to write back? And if not, then you better do it the next time.

Last week was great. I managed to catch up with some old colleagues whom I had mentored. It was heartening to see them achieve new peaks in their career. The event that brought us together from different parts of the world was better than most, since it had limited product pitches (which were relegated to one-on-one meetings, though some did escape). The learning was indeed that irrespective of geography or industry (specific and additional challenges could be regulatory), experiences across the globe seem to mirror each other with fair consistency. Similar challenges and opportunities observed during discussions with peers from China, Japan, and other countries reinforced the belief that the human factor overrides all other forces.

Is there a Holy Grail for the CIO that can overcome the nemesis of IT? Something that manifests itself as one or more of “Alignment”, “Change Management”, “Budget pressures”, and “People issues”.… Someday, I hope to find the illusive mantra that CIOs can universally apply under most situations to overpower Medusa.

Back to Oh I See and the journey through the year, I hope the coming year will have a lot more to discuss and write about. Amongst the feedback, my favorite quote comes from someone who aspires to be a CIO. “I don’t need to read books or take management training from any business school any more. Your regular articles on different sites like STL center, Oh I See, IT Next, etc are enough to fill all the required skills and capabilities in me to get and justify with the position like CIO /Head IT.”