From the category archives:

Role definition

Skills that have mattered to me as a CTO/CIO

November 19, 2007

This time on a more personal note: I’ve been reflecting lately about the various specific skills that helped propel me in my career, and how I picked those up. These are mostly metaskills, rather than specific technical capabilities. A number of technologies that I spent a long time becoming expert in are not listed, for [...]

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Nightmares before Halloween: bad dreams of the CTO/CIO

October 31, 2007

In honor of the season, I thought I’d share a few recurring nightmares, ones that unfortunately don’t seem to confine themselves to the fall time frame. All of these are chronic worries that have truly kept me up at night; most of them stem from actual real-life situations I’ve encountered. 1. Your CEO calls you [...]

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Career tips for the CTO/CIO path

October 2, 2007

One of the most frequent questions I’ve gotten after starting this blog pertains to how one can work up to the CTO or CIO role in IT. This isn’t all that easy to answer, other than with some platitudes. Every career is different; every individual takes a separate path. I can’t exactly recommend to people [...]

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‘Rithmetic: quantitative approaches necessary in the CIO/CTO role

August 5, 2007

We’ve established the importance of targeted reading and writing for the senior information technology executive. I’d like to turn my attention now to the third R, ‘Rithmetic. Even though the “soft skills” of management are probably most crucial to a successful executive, IT is one area where quantitative skills are a regular (and, sadly, often [...]

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Why reading and writing both matter more than you’ve been led to believe

July 29, 2007

It’s probably already evident that a lot of the focus of this blog is going to be on “blocking and tackling” principles related to running information technology at a reasonable-sized company. Curiously, those basic principles often seem to get ignored, which is one way that lots of companies end up in crises of information systems [...]

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The perils of a new CTO position

July 25, 2007

No matter how experienced or battle-scarred you may be as a senior information technology executive, starting a new IT executive job is laden with not only what are politely called “opportunities”, but also an intoxicating amount of mass euphoria. Here’s what you’re almost invariably walking into, no matter what the company is and what the [...]

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Two additional models for CTO/CIO behavior

July 21, 2007

Although the Five Pillars of Purview are a useful framework for what amounts to functional decomposition of the CTO/CIO role, let’s take a step back, or higher, and look at the meta-behaviors that the senior technology executive needs to exhibit in order to succeed. These augment the Five Pillars by lending them some philosophical background. [...]

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The Pillars of Purview of the Successful CTO/CIO

July 14, 2007

So, as we’ve now discussed, you, the CTO or CIO, brought in to oversee the technology areas of your company, are paradoxically not really there predominantly for technology. Even if you like to think of yourself as a technogeek (and most of us do, frankly), if you want to be effective in the overall role [...]

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