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5. Build A Strong Team
Valentine also puts a premium on CIOs who can surround themselves on an ongoing basis with good people. "Leadership and managing a team is essential," she says. "It's important that a CIO establish a track record of attracting and retaining great employees. At the end of the day this is really a people business."
6. Bone Up On Enterprise Risk Management.
With the failure of enterprise risk management (ERM) systems to prevent the fall out from the credit crunch, ERM has become a top priority especially in the financial and banking industry.
"Given how much attention and focus that's come in terms of risk and stable platforms, risk management has become critical," says Campbell. "IT is the center of all that. As a result, you can't really put them [CIOs] in the back room anymore."
Brennan says that even if a company has a chief risk officer (CRO), the CIO should provide technical support. "The CIO in these instances is the partner who can provide the appropriate data so the CRO can effectively analyze the information. I would call [risk management] a shared function."
Adds Paul Groce, a partner with CTPartners in New York, who leads the firm's Chief Information Officer Functional Practice, "Certainly, within financial services organizations, the CIO is ultimately responsible for delivering analytics and risk system. The question of how they're applied is a business decision."
7. Strategize, Analyze
"Today's CIO really has to be a maven in the boardroom," says Austin McGregor's Sterett. "He or she has to be extremely strategic, extremely analytical." Sterett asserts that the top CIOs today see things three, five, 10, 15 years out from a technology road map and from a strategy perspective that can positively or adversely affect a company's performance. "They're much more of a P&L [profit and loss], strategic and technical general manager than the CIO of yesterday," he notes.
Korn/Ferry's Polansky shares a similar view of the CIO's role. "The CIO shouldn't be focused on things like technology cost management and cost effectiveness. That's something that should be delegated to a trusted advisor, like a CTO, or even outsourced so the CIO can act as the business leader and is free to focus on the top and bottom lines rather than the middle line. Today the CIOs role should be focused on driving sales, helping the company become more competitive and working with the business units in innovation."
"Being a business leader and a strategist is what separates the top CIOs from the rest of the pack," adds Jeff Harris of Harris & Associates in Dublin, Ohio.
8) Talk The Talk
In meeting with CIO candidates, Karl Aavik from the Intrepid Consulting Group in Oakbrook, Ill., is often asked the same questions "Do I have a seat at the table-do I have a seat with the senior management team? Or am I viewed as someone who is running the computers in the background?"
Typically, Aavik's response is, "Do you have the skills to earn that seat?"
The only way CIOs achieve this, he explains, is by becoming indispensable to the discussions that go on at that table. "For instance, the CIO need to be able to sit down with the vice president of marketing and talk about how they can leverage technology to better segment customers and get into markets that they're not in," he says. "The conversation can't be mainly about the technology; the conversation has to be mainly about how you find those new markets to enter. The CIO needs to be able to sit down with the VP of manufacturing and talk with him about how they can improve the supply chain operations.
"If the CIO cannot initiate and lead those conversations, then they know why they don't have a seat at the table. It's not because the CEO and the other people don't want them there. It's because they don't have the skills and background to be there."
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