The Chief Information Officer (CIO) Skills University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER)

1
The Chief Information Officer (CIO)
SkillsUniversity of ZagrebFaculty of Electrical
Engineering and Computing (FER)

• Damir Kalpic
• damir.kalpic_at_fer.hr

2
Motivation (1)

• Our graduates are among best brightest?
• Relatively few managers, bosses...
• An Internet dispute between our engineering
  students (Fachidioten) and students of economy
  (ignorant bluffing)
• Technical competence
• Hard to achieve
• Indispensable

3
Motivation (2)

• Other competences
• Social skills
• Understanding of economy business
• Knowledge of essential legal regulations
  practices
• Empathy sympathy (for the user)
• Communication skills
• Holistic approach
• Willingness to bother with issues other than
  technical!
• High payoff to relatively little effort?
• Personal experience Respected literature

4
The (new?)role of CIO

• Presentation in 2009
• From
• Marianne Broadbent and Ellen S. Kitzis
• The New CIO Leader
• Gartner Inc. Harvard Business Review Press,
  2004
• Technology
• cut the costs,
• improve efficiency through
• integration,
• automatisation,
• standardisation.
• Agility
• Management of speed, scope, costs and risks of
  change.
• Balance of change requirements with change
  capabilities.
• Information
• Business insight and understanding to act under
  changed circumstances.
• Innovation
• Presenting on the market new ideas using
  comparative advantage and capabilities and
  developing new ones.

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The (new?)role of CIO

• 10 priorities (Gartner)
• Understanding the essence of environment
• Produce a vision how can IT contribute to success
• Formulate and explain the expectations of
  IT-based company
• Devise an understandable and appropriate IT
  management
• Merge the business and IT strategy
• Build a new IT organisation, to be elastic and
  more focused
• Develop and maintain a high performance for IS
• Manage the new company and IT risks
• Lead, not only manage
• Transfer the information about your IS using
  business language

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The (new?)role of CIO

• Desirable competences
• Understanding the business organisation, policy
  and culture within the company,
• Commercial behaviour,
• Understanding and analysis of competition,
• Leading, in-sourcing and building of trust,
• Strategic thinking,
• Leading, delegation, development,
• Team building,
• Influence and persuasion,
• Out of 25 competencies, CIO must exercise 24 of
  them, to more or less extent. The only one not
  applicable for CIO is Design and development of
  applications.
• It cannot harm of s/he had been doing it, but
  should not continue with it as CIO.

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Soft skills (1)

• Leadership
• Not necessarily the best expert in technology
• Exceed business expectation
• Make IT a source of progress
• Realise it with your staff
• Difference between thinking and leading
• Think analytically
• Act collaboratively
• Admit to be human
• Listen
• Demonstrate your vulnerability
• Humour
• Care
• Maintain relations
• Stay tough

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Soft skills (2)

• Build relationships
• Greatest opponent to become ally
• Informal relations not directly connected to
  hierarchy
• Two major groups of users within organisation
• Wish to improve the IS
• Always complain about IT
• Identify informal leaders and influential
  individuals build relations with them
• They can help or prevent change
• Good horizontal links to peer CXOs
• More and better information earlier
• Relationships outside the organisation
• Trust
• Respect
• Understanding of the others situation
• Maintain relationships

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Soft skills (3)

• Social contacts and communication
• Do not kill passion and interest in people, use
  it!
• Observe the audience reaction and act accordingly
• Avoid impressively sounding empty phrases
• Create enthusiasm
• You cannot lead if others will not follow
• Create our vision
• Motivation
• Action
• Build people firsthand
• Develop the next generation of leaders
• Key stakeholders
• Peers
• Business partners
• (even) the Board of directors
• Technological literacy confidence
• Supplier of talents across the organisation

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Gartner Key Findings

• In many successful organizations, CIOs are
  extending their role and responsibilities to
  become strategic partners of the business.
• These CIOs incorporate architectural thinking and
  processes in their role definition.
• Successful CIOs become catalysts of change in
  their organizations and take an active role in
  the C-suite, collaboratively co-creating the
  business strategy.

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Gartner Recommendations for CIOs

• Collaborate with C-level colleagues and other
  business stakeholders to actively define,
  influence and clarify the enterprise's vision and
  strategy.
• Use architectural processes to explore the
  enterprisewide future consequences and
  implications of the enterprise's vision and
  strategy to provide context and direction for the
  development of implementation and development
  strategies.
• Engage with business stakeholders to explore
  future states and their implications.
• Leverage the current-state architecture as an
  overview of the business landscape to evaluate
  the IT portfolio from a business capability point
  of view, including its relevance, sustainability,
  distribution across capabilities, and capability
  gaps and overlaps.
• Leverage IT's transformational potential to
  translate the enterprise's strategy into
  effective business change.

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Gartner - Architectural Thinking

• Thinking about effective enterprise change
• Holistic It looks at the enterprise as a whole
  rather than at its individual components and
  studies the patterns and relationships that
  define its dynamics and structures.
• Environment-aware It analyzes systems and the
  implications of strategic choices in the wider
  context of the environment that the enterprise
  and its systems operate in.
• Future-oriented Its starting point is an
  envisaged future state of a system.
• Progressive It describes how to move a system
  from its current state toward a desired future
  state.

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IT should know better than the user

• In "Managing IT to Support Rapid Growth An
  Interview With the CIO of NetApp" (published in
  McKinsey Quarterly, June 2008), NetApp CIO Marina
  Levinson discusses the changing attitude of
  leading CIOs
• "Within IT, a big challenge is getting people out
  of the 'order taker' mode. We shouldn't be saying
  to our business partners, 'Tell us what to do.'
  We should instead be saying, 'Tell us what your
  business challenges are, and don't worry how
  we're going to get there. Let's work together,
  and we'll come back to you with a proposal for
  how we can change both the business process and
  the systems supporting it to get you to where
  you're trying to go.

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Literature

• Graham Waller, George Hallenbeck and Karen
  Rubenstrunk
• The CIO Edge Leadership Skills You Need to
  Drive Results
• Gartner Inc. Harvard Business Review Press,
  2010
• Evidence from statistically significant analysis
  of
• 120,000 executives,
• 1.4 million database records.
• Bard Papegaaij The CIO as Architect Leading
  CIOs Use EA (enterprise architectual) Thinking to
  Drive Transformation and Enable Business Success,
  Gartner Research, 23 March 2010, ID Number
  G00174591

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Own experience (1)

• Vedran, Mornar, Krešimir Fertalj and Damir
  KalpicIntroduction of SAP ERP System into a
  Heterogeneous Academic Community, The Third
  Global Conference on Power Control and
  Optimization - Innovation in Optimum Technology,
  Gold Coast , Australia, 2010. 1-8
• Locally successful, full deployment questionable
• Successful at FER
• High motivation
• To become SAP consultants for higher education
• To prove the value of own department
• To correct the distribution of budget between
  departments and between faculties
• To correct the legislation in higher education
• Rest of the University
• Low motivation
• Why to bother with complex SAP?
• Why to show your IT incompetence?
• Why to loose privileges?
• Try to prove that deployment is not possible/
  not legal/ not adequate / etc.
• Some truth in criticism
• Political correctness prevents from saying the
  other half of the truth to obstructionists
• Thank you for your very useful remarks
• Thank you for your warnings regarding the
  contract
• Thank you for having noticed some missing details

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Own experience (2)

• Damir, Kalpic and Krešimir FertaljDevelopment
  of a new information system for Croatian
  forestry, ISOne World 2007 - Engaging Academia
  and Enterprise Agendas,Las Vegas The
  Information Institute, 2007. 23_1-23_9
• Protracted, questionable success
• An attempt to re-educate the semi-qualified IT
  staff in a state owned organisation
• To save their jobs and exploit their knowledge in
  forestry business processes
• The Strategy accepted in 2005
• Every next step prolonged due to public
  procurement
• Delivered a development platform for .NET and C
• Education completed for the platform
• Another firm got the development coaching task
  due to lower price!
• Expected outcome failure!

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Own experience (3)

• Stjepan Pavlek and Damir KalpicObservability of
  Information in Databases - New Spins in Data
  Warehousing for Credit Risk Management, ICSOFT
  2008, Third International Conference on Software
  and Data Technologies, Porto INSTICC, 2008.
  361-368
• Successful
• Good example of a successful spin-off company
• Former students engaged as a Group on contract at
  the Faculty, working for a major bank
• Decided to save the value gained through
  activities on the market
• Fair distribution of ownership among the Group
  members and the former employer
• Establishing of a spin-off company and ceding the
  contract with the Bank to it
• Rare opportunity for a new firm to have
  immediately a major contract!
• Preserved (a significant amount of) enthusiasm,
  creativity and dedication

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Own experience (4)

• Damir Kalpic, Vedran Mornar, Mario Kovac,
  Krešimir Fertalj and Mladen KosAn insight into
  efforts to establish computerization and
  e-services for public health in Croatia,
  Proceedings of the 2005 Networking and Electronic
  Commerce Research Conference (NAEC2005), Dallas
  Southern Methodist University, 2005. 75-91
• Successful but protracted
• Ministry of health lacks a proper CIO
• Too much ignorance regarding IT
• Not enough motivation for success
• Personal motives sometimes prevailing over the
  common ones
• Political games
• Not to admit that the opposition did anything
  well
• Intrinsic problems with public procurement and
  related budget spending
• Money cannot be transferred to the following year
• If not spent, returned to budget and further
  financing cut
• How to act as developer?
• How to act as supervisor?

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Own experience (5)

• Vedran Mornar, Krešimir Fertalj, Damir, Kalpic
  and Slavko KrajcarCredit Card System for
  Subsidized Nourishment of University Students,
  Annals of cases on information technology. 4
  (2002), Idea Group Publishing, Hershey, PA, USA
  468-486
• Successful
• Developed without project nor specification
• Based on wrong specification of requirement
• There are two categories of students (actually,
  more than 24)
• All the restaurants have a professional Internet
  connection (none has professional Internet, some
  had no telephone line)
• It is enough to connect to a central server (what
  if the line is broken while thousand students
  wait to be served?)
• (Extremely) competent project leader and
  developers
• Cheap platform (MS SQL Access)
• For years in exploitation for thousands of
  students daily
• Not a single day being down

20
Own experience (6)

• Damir Kalpic, Mirta Baranovic, Vedran Mornar and
  Slavko KrajcarDevelopment of an Integral
  University Management System, International
  Conference on System Engineering, Communications
  and Information Technologies, ICSECIT 2001
  Proceedings, Punta Arenas, 2001.
• Predominantly successful
• Inappropriate motivation for faculties to deploy
  it
• Serious lack of financing for the perfective
  maintenance
• Changes like Bologna and legislation
• Blackmailing the developers
• Your software is an eventual failure!

21
Own experience (7)

• Damir Kalpic, Krešimir, Fertalj and Vedran
  MornarAnalysis of Reasons for Failure of a
  Major Information System Project, BITWorld 2001
  Conference Proceedings, Cairo The American
  University in Cairo, 2001. 1-8
• Analysis of someone elses failure
• Competent company
• Competent project leader
• Competent developers
• How come the failure?
• Success was (nearly) in no ones interest!

22
Own experience (8)

• Damir Kalpic, Vedran, Mornar and Mirta Baranovic
• Case Study Based On A Multi-Period Multi-Criteria
  Production Planning Model, European journal of
  operational research. 87(3) (1995) 658-669
• Very successful, but not continued
• Paradigm for success
• Everyone highly motivated (existence in question)
• Strong support from the top management
• Efficient CIO
• Not primarily from IT (chemical engineer)
• Highly experienced with the company processes
• Well connected to stakeholders and peers
• Trusted the competent outsourcers
• Understanding and supporting the reengineering
• Authority for the staff
• After existence had been saved
• looking to buy something best in the world
• instead of own efforts

23
Own experience (8)

• Damir KalpicAutomated Coding of Census Data,
  Journal of Official Statistics, Sweden. 10 (1994)
  , 4 449-463
• Very successful in 1991 but not repeated
• The best marks achieved
• Automatic coding of texts in highly flective
  Croatian language
• The next time (in 2001)
• Cheaper Canadian software acquired (Public
  procurement!)
• The coding performed manually

24
Own experience (9)

• Damir Kalpic, Mirta Baranovic and Krešimir
  FertaljHow to Organise a University Based RD
  and Teaching Group in Computing? A Case Study,
  World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics
  and Informatics, Proceedings, International
  Institute of Informatics and Systemics, Caracas,
  1997. 174-181
• Very successful, but for a limited period of
  time / size of the Group
• Business group established (in addition to
  teaching)
• Additional employments due to projects
• Teaching load distributed to all equally
• A fixed amount of virtual money distributed
  monthly according to individual percentage
• Secret balloting of peers regarding the
  percentage
• Actual percentage history (moving averages)
• Highly motivating for a few years
• Dismissed
• Too large and too heterogeneous the Group had
  become
• Tendency towards undeserved uniformity of
  percentages

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Conclusion

• SE is not only engineering!
• Multidisciplinary hard job
• Understand the target system (better than the
  insiders?)
• Empathy for the user
• Communications skills
• Motivation for all the stakeholders
• Recognise and tame the obstruction
• Negotiate well the contract
• Be a hardworking professional in IT