The current CIO is living in a generation of stagnant thought. I am at the CIO 100 event and though I would love to portray our current CIOs as very upwardly mobile and innovative in thought, they come out as grumpy, boring and kind of stone age. CIO 100 is an event which is annual and is meant to recognise and out those CIOs who makes the greatest impact in not only their organisations but also to the consumer and the society.
The award this year has even introduced categories such as Green Award where the CIOs who try to implement technology in more environment friendly way are recognised. I would love to see Social, Interactive and innovation award categories. I guess some of these exists under different names.
Engaging and listening to the CIOs give you a snippet what the mindset is. Many CIOs in the government come out as either totally clueless of what is happening beyond the buzzwords or simply stuck with a system which doesn’t work because of want to maintain the remuneration or simply serve ones country. The former is the most prevalent reason why they stay this much. Ambiguity to counter engagement is common. You will find the CIOs use words like cloud computing which they hear much about but are not well inducted into. So they believe that because everyone is mentioning “Cloud Computing” then they must do it yet they don’t or are not sure whether they are implementing it or not.
The current CIO need not be a boardroom display and an ICT room squatter but the CIO must be virtual in existent, prudent in management and very social in delivery. This is lacking. You need not be eloquent in regards to delivery of slides at workshops but the current CIO must also engage the young ICT minds either through Mentorship outreach missions or ICT community engagement. Many of them are permanently nowhere virtually nor amid the ICT community but they feature well in their company’s boardrooms and constantly visit are based at their company’s ICT rooms.
Even if the CIOs would update and appraise themselves to the current standards, as long as they don’t see the consumer and partners as a team and engage through activities like Barcamps, Developer Sessions, ICT mentor-ship events and so on then believe you me, these CIOs would forever remain grumpy. Sometime to change the mindset in technology and convince an organisation or government to implement system needs just a strong propaganda through the ICT community who will demand technologies they believe works for them. Current ICT implementations must not only work for the organisation but MUST work for the client. Most of those systems we have in Banks, government and non-governmental sectors are not working best for those they are supposed to serve but are saving cost to the organisation delivering it.
A real modern CIO must change this. I see also many CIOs from Companies like IBM, Safaricom, Intel, Polycom, CISCO, Virtual City, Seven Seas among others be very innovative in engagement (networking), delivery and implementation but also very flexible. They never think that they should carry out functions 8 – 5 only but 24/7. They are virtual, ready to engage and not shy to let you drive their mindset whenever they feel not well-informed.
As of now we have to engage with most of our CIOs through those boring exhibition booths, conferences and in classrooms where they learn nothing more than installing and implementing vendor solutions.
Be the change you believe in if you want to deliver now or remain a CIO whose extinction will surprise even the most powerful organisation sooner rather than later.
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