10 Commandments for CIOs in 2009
Click here to see a slideshow regarding what I believe to be the 10 Commandments for the CIO in 2009.
I will give away the ending here though, as the underlying principles are as follows:
* Reduce costs – Stop spending “stupid” money. Stop throwing money at non-performing people and investments.
* Take savings from cost reduction – Invest in high ROI projects opportunistically.
* Stop pretending – Demand transparency in software development projects, demand visibility into the projected and realized return on investment.
* Your users are customers – Stop forcing software on users as though they are a captive market
* Head over heart – Being fearful and over-reacting will not lead you to good decision making. Look for opportunities to take advantage of others fear to improve your company’s competitive position.
Hunkering down and not investing when times are bad is, almost without fail, the wrong thing to do. Now is the time to re prioritize investments with a scalpel, not an axe. Play reverse robin hood - steal resources from the poorly performing, poorly managed projects - and give it to the well performing, well managed ones. And if you don't know the difference, no time like the present!
Now is the time to make line of business systems easier to use, so you can staff operations with less people and pay less for ongoing training.
Now is the time to start managing projects using agile methods, because you just can't afford faith based project management anymore (as in, I have faith that the PM is reporting the right amount of progress, versus using results that contain passing tests throughout the entire stack).
Now is the time to not only demand that projects have positive ROI, but to actually track that ROI to assure that the promise is delivered.
Now is the time to either treat IT as a profit center - a portfolio of investments in intellectual property that pay off, and outsource those elements that do not meet those criteria to others who can treat it as a profit center.
Now is NOT the time to just stop investing - both at the personal or enterprise level. The 401k investments you make now, near the bottom, are likely to have the biggest return on investment. Same is true for the smart enterprise level technology investments you are making. Assess where you are at. Unless your organizational finances are in total disaster mode at the moment, there is zero reason, other than fear, why you can't treat the current economic weakness as an opportunity to get an even better competitive advantage from your technology investments.
The easy thing to do is simply cut back, hit the IT budget with an axe, and move on to the next thing. Just because it is easy, doesn't mean its wise. In fact, the truth is usually the opposite.