Seems like every publication with CIO in its name is quick to point out what CIOs care about and draw all sorts of conclusions. I have seen a number of things like "business process improvement" and "IT alignment" as top CIO priorities. Those are terms that are made up by media and consultants. It's not that I don't care about those things (in theory) but they are hardly the most important things on my list. In fact, if you aren't doing them already you are probably not doing a great job (sorry.)
Hiring and maintaining staff
This is my number one issue. There are simply not enough good developers, DBAs or system administrators. Tech people also are notoriously hard to manage and IT management really needs to understand this.
Costs
Anyone running a business has to stay on top of costs. Besides headcount, IT tends to take up a lot of dollars. The arguments for Linux and Windows are very real and there are trade-offs on both sides. Same for things like VoIP and phone services.
Growing the business with only incremental additional cost increases
As above, you need to plan an enterprise architecture that will support the business horizontally so that costs are incremental rather than multiples.
Security breaches
If you are not terrified of losing customer information or having a network breach you are not doing your job. Again, planning and mitigating is part of the job. Don't build SQL server apps that all run as SA for example.
Open Source
Right now I consider two categories: open source replacing expensive proprietary apps, and open source apps for new projects. When I can, I will always choose open source for new projects. Recently, I have been experimenting with Nagios (along with Groundwork) for system notification. I have also been toying with What's Up Gold. Nagios is free but a pain to configure, WUG is $2500 and very easy. We haven't made a decision yet, but in this case the proprietary is much easier to do and the cost isn't that high.
Things I don't care about:
As an analyst I am interested in all of these things, as a CIO I don't really care.
Patents-not even on my radar
Blogs-no one in our company needs to blog
Wikis-we have internally developed apps
Collaboration-same as above
Convergence-we have voicemail to email services that have never been used and no one cares about
Open source code in my apps-not afraid at all and won't pay for bogus open source insurance
Podcasts-my only concern is users sucking down bandwidth
Things that you should be doing anyway
IT business alignment-if your IT group is not serving and enabling the business then you are failing as CIO
Process improvement-if processes are not iterative than your organization will stagnate
Mobile workforce-it's not that hard. Email is the only thing that matters
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on December 29, 2005 10:50 AM
