A good friend who occupies a major position in a prominent global financial services firm is very concerned about the state of leadership in matters involving the management of personal information. To make this point come alive, my friend recently challenged a group of alpha executives attending a Value Studio at the IT Leadership Academy to explain what they would do in the following hypothetical situation:
Researchers at the IT Leadership Academy recently met with several groups, including leading IT practitioners in large and midmarket enterprises; progressive executives in federal, state and local government agencies; hiring managers at vendors; senior executives at IT service firms; deans of major business schools; presidents of community colleges; and strategic planners at staffing firms. The purpose: to ask about assumptions in their organizations that need to be exfoliated.
I recently attempted to identify the skills that next-generation IT leaders think they are going to need in order to be successful when their turn comes to run IT.
Creativity leadership is the new career differentiator for emerging IT leaders. Longtime denizens of the technology demesne are no strangers to the terms leadership and creativity. It's rare, however, to see the words used together. This will change, according to research coming out of the IT Leadership Academy as we move deeper into an accelerated, creatively destructive, innovation-based economy.
Creativity leadership is the new career differentiator for emerging IT leaders. Long-time denizens of the technology demesne are no strangers to the terms leadership and creativity. It's rare, however, to see the words used together. This will change, according to research coming out of the IT Leadership Academy, in the US, as we move deeper into an accelerated, creatively destructive, innovation-based economy.
In the past 60 days, I have been knees-under-the-table with hundreds of IT leaders and scratch-and-sniff close to scores of vendor CEOs. In addition, I've attended more than my share of IT events. One of them, Comdex, brought together the ideas that have been swirling about me for the past two months, with frightening clarity.
Research being conducted in conjunction with the Managing the Information Resource Program at the University of California in Los Angeles indicates that we are a mere 10 years away from the day when every molecule on this planet could be assigned an IP address.
Rudy Giuliani argued that the best way to fight crime is to fight the disorder that precedes it -- those quality-of-life crimes such as spraying graffiti, panhandling, breaking windows, littering and letting buildings crumble and decay. I think you can make a similar argument that the best way to improve ROI for IT is to fight the mental disorder that burdens IT's reputation -- those quality-of-mind crimes such as underinvesting, overinvesting and bad personal information-management behavior.
Information technology leaders are often described as "ambassadors" for our profession. In the first part of the 17th century, the father of the British foreign service, Sir Henry Wotten, described the ambassadorial function this way: "An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country."
We are in a unique period in the history of enterprise computing. The extra-organizational elements of the technology supply side -- venture capitalists, vendors, subscription research firms and systems integrators -- have been struck mute by the perfect-storm convergence of an economic downturn, the utter lack of killer apps in the pipeline and a bordering-on-revenge-seeking buyer dissatisfaction with prior-period technology purchases.
In 1997, I examined why IT professionals at established companies changed jobs. Managers erroneously believed that the top reason people quit was money. They were wrong then, and they would be wrong today. I find that the top reason people quit can be summed up in this sentence: "I won't work for a jerk."
Dickens, Melville and Aesop were no slouches when it came to telling stories. Unfortunately, many professionals in the technology arena aren't as skilled.
Over the past six weeks, I have traveled many miles, visited many CIO watering holes, sat in on several CIO campfires (such as the Society for Information Management conference in San Diego and the Strategies for Electronic Commerce program at Carnegie Mellon University) and listened to many voices.
Much of our thinking about marketing, encapsulated in the mnemonically perpetuated 4 P's - price, product, placement and promotion - is flawed.
One of the more provocative points I make in classes I teach at the University of California at Los Angeles and UC Berkeley is that the CEOs of the future will probably be drawn from executives now working in corporate IT. I say this with total confidence because the environment in which IT executives find themselves today is the perfect training ground for the executive wealth creators of the future.