To address the increasing role that Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are playing in developing and executing business strategies, IBM announced earlier this month the creation of the Center for CIO Leadership.

The Center will also be engaged in research tackling issues that CIOs face and measuring attitudes and needs of CIOs. To kick off the research, IBM conducted a survey of 175 CIO in conjunction with Harvard Business School and MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research. Some of the findings include:

• 69 percent indicate significant involvement in strategic planning;
• 80 percent considered themselves valued members of their organizations’ senior leadership teams; and
• Only 37 percent considered themselves highly or exceptionally skilled in the area of their own career management/development.

SOURCE:
David Nagel “IBM Pursues CIO Leadership Development,” Campus Technology, 10/17/2007, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=52020

CIOs’ vision

CIOs see themselves at the nexus of a radically reshaping business landscape and believe their unique end-to-end view of business allows them to see first-hand the role of technology as an enabler and source of competitive advantage, and they want a greater voice in capitalizing on that opportunity. Yet, today, many companies still have the CIO siloed as a support function rather than engaged as a business leader and strategic partner for process and culture change. CIOs want to forge stronger relationships with the CEO and other C-level and line-of-business leaders to turn this around.

CIOs surveyed believe they can begin to address this gap by:

• Getting involved earlier in the strategic decision-making process
• Forging stronger relationships with CEOs and other business leaders
• Leading high-profile transformation projects
• Being measured more on innovation and growth versus more traditional performance and cost metrics

I don’t believe that importance of leadership for the growth and competitiveness of business organizations is up for debate by most. While we here at 1-Focus International think this is a good start, we see the continued lack of awareness around the issues of human talent. This seems to be particularly true at both the CIO and the CFO levels where the focus is on due diligence, strategy, risk assessment and far less on collaborative leadership and engaging employees. Culture change is always mentioned as an issue but never tackled head on. Why is this? We have our own views on this and will discuss it in the future.

Another recent post from The Practice of Leadership highlights the broader need for developing leaders on many levels and is based on comprehensive study recently published by IBM. The report is available for free from the IBM website after completing their registration form, but an excellent summary with some quotes and graphs can be found at “The Leadership Vacuum” post.

Unfortunately we continue to see poor alignment between the lack of leadership capability with the obvious (to us) inability to engage, motivate, collaborate, foster learning cultures etc. as identified needs in the survey.