Building a Better CIO

Consider this classic scenario. The IT folk emerge from the depths of Techland, like mole people from the Earth’s bowels, to declare that the organization will convert or upgrade to a new system that will change any number of things about the way everyone else must perform their jobs: a new customer relationship management (CRM) system, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system—whatever.

As IT sees it, the benefits are clear and compelling. Anyone who fails to appreciate the elegance of the shift is a change resister—a stubborn donkey, balking in the path of progress. As the resisters see it, the new system evidently was created by people who neither knew nor cared what they actually do for a living or, for that matter, what the organization is trying to accomplish.

Call it what you will—a lack of understanding, a communication failure, a clash of culture and values between the “techie” mindset and the “business” mindset—that tension is both the genesis and the focal point for certain kinds of postgraduate programs now conducted by a number of Minnesota universities. The program names vary, as do the amounts of emphasis placed on particular topics (system security, ethics, project management, writing skills), but the degrees essentially are like specialized MBAs for people who aspire to be chief information officers (CIOs) or chief technology officers (CTOs). They also appeal to managers in other areas who want to use computer technology more effectively in their businesses.

Alignment

What’s often lacking in people whose education and careers have focused on technology is “the ability to speak effectively with the business side of the house,” says David Bouchard, who coordinates the nine-year-old Master of Management Information Systems degree program at Metropolitan State University in Minneapolis. “The ongoing criticism of IT people has been, ‘They don’t speak our language.’”

The communication gulf has been so pronounced that many companies rely on outside consultants to bridge it, says Viki Kimsal, program director for a master’s degree in information technology management introduced this year by St. Mary’s University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Because IT people often haven’t been trained to think in terms of business strategy and return on investment, Kimsal says, “a lot of consultants have built businesses by saying, ‘I’m the liaison who can talk to both the geeks and the executives. I know both languages and both cultures.’”

The upshot of those communication barriers is that the IT department’s doings can become unhitched from the strategy and operations of the business, rather than aligned.