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Do CIOs Know (Their) Business? [Part 2]
In my last post we started the discussion of CIO's business knowledge. An Accenture study had indicated a big disparity between the CIO's understanding of the business and general manager's perception of the CIO's understanding.
"While 73 percent of IT executives said they believe they understand their company’s business extremely or very well, only 43 percent of general business managers said they believe that IT executives have that level of understanding of the company’s business."
We discussed 2 questions. The first is how well do CIOs understand business generically. To help assess this I listed 10 question as a simple test of business knowledge. The second question is more specific -- how well do CIOs understand their business. As promised I've this post included 10 question to address this more specific question.
The same caveats apply The quiz is of course, capricious, subjective and arbitrary. However, since you pick your own scoring method how well you do is up to you.
So on to the questions.
- Can you name your top 5 customers?
- Can you name your top 5 competitors?
- Can you name your top 5 suppliers/vendors / service providers?
- What's your company's market share?
- What differentiates your product/services from the competition?
- Could you give a visitor a tour of your operations and explain your operations?
- What is your company's product/service value proposition?
- What is your competitive advantage?
- What is your supply chain strategy?
- What is the economic driver(s) for your business that management uses to forecast?
How did you do? How important is it that the CIO truly understand his/her company's business?
If this topic was of interest, you might also like these:
- Kent Blumberg's post "So you wanna be a General Manager?"
- Change Your Vocabulary and Change Your Focus
- Revisiting the CIO Reporting to the CFO
- Or the posts in the "Strategy & Management" category
Doing accounts . . ." photo by septuagesima
Posted by Mike on
November 5, 2007 in
Information Technology
, Strategy & Management
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Mike,
Those are great questions! About the time any CIO thinks they get it, they need to ask themselves those 10 questions.
I've been in a couple of companies where I was sure I knew what was going on. Now, I'm not so sure. Some of the answers were obvious to me, but others made me really think about what I "know". Depending on which business managers you ask as to how well they would rate me as to knowing the business.
Good stuff!
Tom
Posted by: Tom Fluker | Tom Fluker | Nov 5, 2007 8:38:40 AM
Tom,
Thanks for the comment. I always appreciate your willingness to share your experiences.
Like you there have been time when I thought I knew the business inside and out only to learn that I really didn't understand certain crucial aspects. I guess the trick is to always look for new opportunities to learn.
Mike
Posted by: Michael Schaffner | Michael Schaffner | Nov 5, 2007 6:43:03 PM