What Keeps You Up At Night?
Yesterday I had the opportunity to participate in a CIO Roundtable put on by Kaylin Olson at HireSynergy. It was a great discussion around the theme of "what keeps a CIO up at night?" We started out with an interesting list of possible topics including:
- Outsourcing
- Developing a customer service attitude in IT employees
- Employee retention
- Do more with less
- Security and dealing with spam, malware etc.
- Developing critical thinking skills in our employees
- Balancing the goals of the business unit
- Over promising and under delivering
- Users getting "seduced" by IT vendor promises
- Getting IT employees to think in business terms
It was a great discussion with everyone contributing valuable insights. A lot of the discussion was on outsourcing. How do it properly, the pitfalls, the drivers etc. This eventually evolved into an extremely interesting discussion on the need of IT to sell ideas (and IT itself). Unfortunately we ran out of time before we got to fully explore but the issue the "sales" issue seemed to strike a chord with everyone.
This was a very thought provoking session and very enjoyable as it makes you put aside the everyday issues and step back and think about all those important issues that you never get to spend as much time on as you want.
So, what keeps you up at night?
Yawn (2:48am - 05.12.06) photo by wiseacre photo
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Posted by Mike on
June 14, 2007 in
Information Technology
, Strategy & Management
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If I were an IT Manager or CIO, I'd probably also be thinking about disaster recovery.
As a programmer/analyst I find myself occasionally thinking about whether I programmed that calculation correctly or inadvertently missed someone from that SQL statement. At other times, I've had random thoughts about other development challenges.
Posted by: Daniel Johnson, Jr. | Daniel Johnson, Jr. | Jun 14, 2007 1:48:43 PM
Daniel,
Interesting that you mentioned Disaster Recovery. One of our host questioned its omission especially given that we are in Houston and it is the beginning of hurricane season. Everyone agreed it is a significant issue but one that is always with us and is being addressed. The near hit with Hurricane Rita did a lot for awakening an awareness of just how important DR really is and getting it funded has become easier as a result.
Mike
Posted by: Michael Schaffner | Michael Schaffner | Jun 14, 2007 5:06:53 PM
Just to pick out one of those categories, what do you actually *do* about employee retention?
As a guy who finds unhappy employees for a living, I've very rarely seen any company that tries very hard at all to retain their employees.
Dan
Posted by: Daniel Sweet | Daniel Sweet | Jun 15, 2007 7:28:17 AM
Dan,
I don't think I've ever seen a company do a good job of this either. Because of the boss/employee relationship being so personal I guess it is how much effort the boss puts in to it. Caring about your employees, treating them nicely, giving them opportunities, communicating with them and recoginizing their efforts all go a long way towards making your shop as a place people want to work.
Mike
Posted by: Michael Schaffner | Michael Schaffner | Jun 15, 2007 8:39:23 PM
Finding retaining good people keeps me up at night. If you have a talented infrastructure team, Disaster Recovery shouldn't be an issue.
What keeps me up at night these days is finding a good landing spot for my employees. My company is being acquired, and I couldn't handle having them leave and not be happy at their future employerr.
Dave
Posted by: Dave | Dave | Jul 23, 2007 1:40:01 PM
Dave,
I guess the old saying "it's not the technology, it's the people" really applies. It is a constant effort to find good landing spots within your company too.
Mike
Posted by: Michael Schaffner | Michael Schaffner | Jul 24, 2007 9:17:05 AM