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Top 5 CIO Tweets of the Week - August 14, 2009

post by Chris Curran on August 14, 2009

This week’s #CIO tweets were overshadowed by John C. Dvorak’s assertion that our nation’s CIO, Vivek Kundra, is a fraud - at least his resume might be. You will need to make up you own mind on that one.

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1. I have been a PC Magazine reader for years, but never got into reading John C. Dvorak’s rants. Never could really understand half of what he was saying. His Tweet Wednesday grabbed my attention though. Apparently it grabbed others’ attention too as it was tweeted and re-tweeted hundreds of times. (I love when people post “BREAKING” news tweets more than a day after the initial message…oh well.)

I wrote Wednesday afternoon on this subject and on protecting and proving on-line identity in a professional context. I think this is important for CIOs as they are increasingly being looked to regarding social media policy within their enterprises. Furthermore, Twitter, LinkedIn and others are increasingly being used to networtk, source job candidates and other more mainstream functions - buyer beware.

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2. Peter and Chris are two of my favorite CIO/IT leadership people I’ve met on Twitter. I’m looking forward to meeting Chris in the UK in the next couple of weeks. The CIO-CTO question is one that baffles many organizations and varies by industry (in the US anyway. I know titles vary greatly in the UK and beyond). For example, several insurance carriers and financial services firms call their top IT leader the “CTO” and call the business unit aligned IT leaders CIO.

As far as CTO goes, I’ve seen several cases. The most popular I think is to call the person responsible for the enterprise architecture (the overall strategy AND its implementation throughout the business) the CTO. I’ve also seen cases in which the CTO owns everything IT not about application development, projects and maintenance, even including IT strategy and planning. Finally, the CTO is also used in high tech companies to mean something entirely different.

Bottom line is that I agree with Chris AND Peter - you have to be clear and it does vary by industry.

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3. Seen this one many times. It’s sickening, really. Who do the vendors think will end up on their team if the end up convincing the “higher up” to lean their way/buy their stuff/approve their proposal?

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4. The article offers some good perspective on thinking about an IT strategy. One thing, maybe the most important thing, missing is to drive the strategy based on the business capabilities needed to drive the organization to its destination. The article mentions basing the strategy on the market, but it’s not enough to just look outside for technology ideas. An IT strategy must be based first and foremost on your own organization’s business ideas and direction.

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5. A pointer from Abbie Lundberg to an great blog post by Susan Cramm, a former CFO and CIO. Any reporting for someone who doesn’t care much is a waste of time. I cover some executive reporting challenges in my CIO Dashboard series.

Peter Kretzman

Thanks for the mention, Chris — great that this now affords me the opportunity to comment at greater length than <140 characters!

I've written on this subject on my own blog (http://www.peterkretzman.com/2007/07/10/the-title-issue-cto-vs-cio-and-why-its-the-wrong-question/). Probably the main thrust of my thinking on this is that there needs to be a single senior executive in a "position that concentrates on shepherding technology systems and strategy, from a high level viewpoint, throughout your company." That can be called CIO at some places, CTO at others, VP of Technology, whatever. The title itself is much less important than the span of responsibilities. Specifically, that person should have, in my view, management oversight of IT operational issues as well as strategy. It's an executive position, not an individual strategic guru. I've seen companies fail badly by not having a clear notion of this, so in that respect, I certainly agree with Chris Potts.
Peter Kretzman

Thanks for the mention, Chris — great that this now affords me the opportunity to comment at greater length than <140 characters!

I've written on this subject on my own blog (http://www.peterkretzman.com/2007/07/10/the-title-issue-cto-vs-cio-and-why-its-the-wrong-question/). Probably the main thrust of my thinking on this is that there needs to be a single senior executive in a "position that concentrates on shepherding technology systems and strategy, from a high level viewpoint, throughout your company." That can be called CIO at some places, CTO at others, VP of Technology, whatever. The title itself is much less important than the span of responsibilities. Specifically, that person should have, in my view, management oversight of IT operational issues as well as strategy. It's an executive position, not an individual strategic guru. I've seen companies fail badly by not having a clear notion of this, so in that respect, I certainly agree with Chris Potts.