Vendor Feed Forward (not feedback)

I have been inactive for a while, wondering what is it that I should write about. There were a few instances when a burning issue or something I felt about strongly, but that urge passed quickly.

Surprise (not really), corporate blogs are becoming big with companies putting up blogs which talk about their products and services. These use broad based trends to promote their solution and why you as the CIO/decision maker should be running to them to help solve your problem.

After attending a few events in the last 3 months and having been subjected to a barrage of vendor pitches, I wonder why they never learn from their past mistakes ? Almost every event has a technology vendor as a sponsor and by virtue of the money spent, they get a few slots to address the audience.

Guess what do they do with their valuable time ? Talk about their products, which anyway everyone in the audience knows about, wasting precious time which could have been used to engage in a dialogue or seek their participation to explore opportunities. You will find 80% of the audience busy with blackberry phones or doodling away; some brave ones walk out while a few interrupt the speaker with their snores ! And to add to the misery, they want feedback !

So I requested a few organizers to create a forum for feed forward (as opposed to feedback) to help the poor things understand what we want to hear from them. It would be a great service to the IT fraternity if vendors listened and used the information gathered in their planning on what to do with the timeslots.

But then we are not rewarded for going against conventional wisdom. Marketing and Sales organizations will want to make presentations on what they have or will there be wind of change ?

CFO and CEO as CIO ! Wow !

This has been an eventful week for me to say the least. I came across two instances of other CXOs moving to take a CIO role. This is a big paradigm shift from the earlier trend where the role of the CIO was rarely up for grabs within the enterprise with other peers wanting that job.

In the first instance, the CIO quit without appointing a successor. She was fairly successful with what she did to transform the IT setup and bring in technology which the business benefited from. Her abrupt departure put the CEO in a spot. Not having visibility into the IT Organization's talent, he decided to take on additional responsibility as the CIO to understand the team and hopefully appoint someone from within. Few months into the role, he is helping the group understand the role of the CIO and also conducting his own review of possibilities within the team. The option to hire from outside always existed. So far he is doing a reasonably good job of holding the technology fort :-)

In the other instance, the CIO moved to another role within the company, and one of the business unit CFOs has taken up the role of the CIO. That should be an interesting one to watch for. One of the edits of a publication mentioned the challenges faced by the business leaders when the CFO became the CEO; most of the leadership team departed over a period of time as the mindset transition did not happen along with the role.

Lastly an enterprise I know has been attempting to fill the CIO position for the last 6 months with little success. Another one has the position vacant now for more than 12 months ! What does this bear for the CIO ? Is the position really important for an enterprise ?

If yes, how can a company continue the direction set by the CIO, which they agreed to, forward ?

If no, then maybe we need to bring back Nicholas Carr back !