Day 2 at the ITEN Wired Summit has proven to be another day of quality insights from seasoned leaders in IT and in healthcare. This morning, I got the opportunity to watch Bill Hills, retired chief information officer (CIO) of Navy Federal Credit Union. His career in IT spans over four decades in large organization like, Johnson & Johnson. Bill has been a leader I looked up to in the past few years leading teams at the credit union’s IT organization.
During his talk, Bill discussed some of the challenges running IT, the ways he overcome those challenges, and the methods he used to enable technological progress in large organizations. In this article, I will share what I’ve picked up from Bill’s talk, and I’ll be adding some of my own insights.
Challenge: Leaders on the business side are well-read in technology.
This is not a surprise. Good leaders are avid learners. It can be a white paper, a TED Talk, or a book on technology. The challenge for IT leaders here is that they’re getting hit by these leaders several times. Why are we not doing this new technology? When can we implement this new technology on the business side? Why are we not doing this in our company?
Many leaders on the business side of the organization may want to use this new technology for the sake of sales or customer service. Though they have the best interest of the organization in mind, simply implementing new technology is not usually that, uh, simple.
Many IT leaders and CIOs are more focused, or are too focused on technology. The lack of focus in understanding the business and how they speak is a challenge because it carries the risk of misunderstandings, and even worse, misleading understandings. Decisions made in this confusion will have negative impact to the organization, its customers, and its employees.
Solution: Focus in conversations and in learning the organizational leaders’ framework.
CIOs in today’s world are slowly placing their focus away from technology. CIOs are now more focused in learning and understanding the frame of thinking of their counterparts on the business side of the organization. The constant learning on how the rest of the organization thinks and does their business is a crucial exercise to assist CIOs communicate and integrate the IT strategy with the business strategy.
CIOs need to be equipped in making arguments that can translate in the world outside of IT. Knowing the business and hot it works is important, but that alone is insufficient. IT leaders need to learn how to communicate and have progressive conversations with their counterparts across the enterprise. Understanding how they speak and how they process information is as important as having an effective translators in the United Nations. World leaders can’t arrive and execute in important decisions without the total and clarion understanding of each others’ points-of-view. Investing time to know the business, its leaders, and their frame of reference are key in delivering your technological strategy and how you intend to use this strategy to move the business forward.
Believe that everyone in the organization wants to do the right thing for the company. The key in doing the right thing correctly is creating conversations that make sense to everyone. Not just to the super-techies. Not just to the frontline employees. Not just to the middle-managers. Not just to the executives. Embracing the common language within your business is an imperative in delivering and in assisting the definitions of your technological needs.
Bill goes much deeper into the different models he used to help organizational leaders understand and embrace the implications of technology. Those will be discussed in future post.