IT Leadership - few quick tips...

 Ref: Marianne Broadbent and Ellen Kitzis - "The New CIO Leader", HBS Press, 2004

Here are a few qualities for Executive Leadership within IT and by no means are these exhaustive.

Credibility - You may get it by delivering results that enterprise leadership care about and delivering them everytime, on-time and on quality. However, delivering on time and budget alone, cannot guarantee credibility. There is no finite list of to gain credibility.

Adaptive Change - Leaders foster "adaptive change" in any group of people. Adaptive change, says Heifetz, is the kind of deep change that requires people to alter their habits and comfortable ways of acting, even the way they think and feel. Leadership is about change and influencing others to change. It’s focused on doing things differently. Because it’s about change, leadership requires vision, strategy and inspiration.

Vision - What is your vision for your organization and the role information and IT can play in it?

Communication - Communicate the vision and always have a "whats in it for me " for the audience...!!

Emotional Intelligence and Primal Leadership - emotional intelligence accounts for 90 percent of what distinguishes truly skilled leaders from those less able.

Four basic dimensions of Emotional Intelligence -
(a) Self-awareness: the ability to recognize our own feelings. Many of us are raised to pay little attention to what’s going on inside.
(b) Self-management: the ability to manage our feelings and emotional life. All of us have ups and downs, but the emotionally mature person can recognize feelings and avoid being captured and controlled by them.
(c) Social awareness: the ability to recognize the feelings of others. The key skill here is empathy, the ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes, to feel what he or she is feeling, to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes. As someone described it, sympathy is feeling for someone else, while empathy is feeling with someone else. Empathy is virtually the foundation of everything else in human relations.
(d) Social skill: the ability to act on and accommodate effectively the feelings of others.

...

Further References:

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/ronald-heifetz

http://danielgoleman.info/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-CIO-Leader-Setting-Delivering/dp/B003IT6HES/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1291500569&sr=8-2
http://www.gartner.com/5_about/news/gartner_press/NewCIO3.jsp

...first Data Capture

If you are in the early days of a "consulting assignment - look for the following, at the minimum.

Business Model - what does it sell? How does it sell? Who are the customers? How do they retain these customers?

How do they make profits ?

Operating Model (public sector mainly) - what are its missions? how are they measured? how are they imprved? etc. what are the main numbers? ROI, EPS, Earnings, return on assets...What business performance metric is the most important to the enterprise?

Strategic Intent - Many definitions of course. Gary Hamel's work in this is extensive and well known. Go through the material in his Value based management principles. (See references for more details)

Leadership Style
- Commanding: “Follow me because I say so!”
- Pacesetting: “Follow me—do what I do.”
- Visionary: “Follow me because I see the future!
- Affiliative: “Follow me because we’re in this together.”
- Coaching: “Try doing it this way.”
- Democratic: “What do you think

...

Further References:

Prahalad et al - "Competing for the Future" -

http://www.amazon.com/Competing-Future-Gary-Hamel/dp/0875847161 http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_hamel_prahalad_strategic_intent.html

on Blogs: don't just read All..

Hypothesis: Writing blogs yourself, would lead you to focus, on a limited set of blogs to read. One way to use blogs effectively.

Issue: There is no time to read ALL blogs, about a particular subject. We often feel like we are missing out.

Question:

(a) Do you need to read ALL blogs?

(b) How else can you make more use of blogs, available on a subject?

While this sounds interesting, many of you may have felt the same. There's just an awful lot of it available on the net and vast proportion of it "free". Where do we start; how much do we read? My view is - start "writing" blogs instead. Here's, why. In writing one, you will find reasons to plough deep into a topic or a sub-topic. For example, if you start looking for blogs in "Enterprise Architecture", and hope to "read it all" - where do you think that would lead? nowhere! Instead, if you start writing about a particular topic of your interest within the broader remit of EA - say, "Architecture Development methods", then that would get you somewhere. Again, there is a ton of material (blogs) available on that - not just TOGAF. Therefore, get even more specific. Architecture Development methods from TOGAF. Typically, you do this like you did when you chose a dissertation topic in school. Getting to a narrowed down research topic, solves at least the initial steps of clearing out aims, goals, methods etc. Likewise, narrowing down your search for a blog, would assist in achieving focussed set of blogs or articles to read. This all starts when you write a blog yourself. Your questions will naturally come to mind.

Architects?

At a recent social gathering, I landed up in a semi-serious chat around what is it that Enterprise Architects actually do. This is not an unexpected question, particularly, when you had just finished responding to the previous one -- "What do you do?". In fact, I had a rather quizy kind of a crowd - who, I think, were not that behind on technology but were not that familiar with architecture within an IT business.

No, I wouldn't go about describing all that here - just wanted to share my little takeaway from that evening. i.e. Be Prepared! Image is crucial to consultants. You never know, who you just met. Explaining something in short and simple language is not always easy. I was only there for a special "dinner" and as you can imagine, it soon turned into a long conversation of ideas, history, stakeholders, Enterprise, IT, business-IT alignment, transformation, IT jargons etc. and all kinds of things. I thoroughly enjoyed the journey talking through it and even listening to what people had to say or knew about all this. As you can imagine these conversations may well aid in preparing for a similar business situation. Try to Imagine -- what if, a potential customer asked the same set of questions to you in an elevator? what if one of your co-passengers in an airplane or train had an interest to know more about your area of work and what it means in the contexts of IT industry.

Another, key thing to keep as a one-liner is "we solve BUSINESS problems with IT". Try to keep some "business problems" to help them relate to. They usually fall into a few broad categories like:
- Reducing Costs
- Increase Operational Excellence
- Improving Customer Intimacy
- Increase Customer Value
- Increase Business Agility - adopt changes easily

For e.g. -- In a large, healthcare programme, one of our key goals were to "reduce waiting times for a patient waiting for consultation" .. This would improve "customer value" and deliver "operational efficiencies". Architects started analysing the healthcare busness processes that were involved in the delay. Enterprise and Business Architects worked on this part of it. They worked with the client's key partners, stakeholders to understand the current-state of the processes. Leading on, they gathered figures to guage the "process ineficiencies" in terms of cost, time, quality and volume. Finally, they derived future-state processes that aimed to reduce the waiting times. These re-modelled, future-state, processes were then enabled with appropriate technology solutions to achieve "speed" and efficiency, accurancy, security and scalability, leading to ultimately solve the business problem.

Linking these stories back to your role (architect, designer, PM, developer, tester), would lead you explain, firstly what your role means and secondly, how organisations solve business problems with IT.

to articulate well...

To be able to "articulate" something in a clear and succinct manner is more than a "skill" to have. One of the main challenges, architects face regularly, is to express the "business problem" or the solution for it, to a wide and diverse group of people (stakeholders often), coming from a variety of backgrounds, interests, industry experience, business area, technical experience and culture.

In order to develop skills in this area, here are some tips:
Try Free-writing - There is nothing better than writing about your observations, feelings, experiences - whatever comes to your mind. Just keep writing. Use a good editor - MS Word is perfect!!
It is far easier now than it was a few years ago; given that we now have so many enabling technologies - BLOGS for instance would be one of the best enablers. You may just write something in a text editor and keep it to yourself. You might add random review comments on books, films, food or anything. If you are willing, there are web-sites which offer readers to add "free commentary" or reviews - for e.g. Amazon.com / co.uk ... If you want to put down a review - just do it!! It would help you "express" your thoughts and critical ideas. Putting your thoughts down in a blog, makes you socially commit to the material too. This is even better as it develops your thinking and writing skills.

Here are some web-sites that may inspire and help you, if you are interested -
http://writing2.richmond.edu/wac/freewrit.html
http://myweb.wvnet.edu/~jelkins/writeshop/writeshop/elbow.html
http://ezinearticles.com/?Writing---Expressing-Your-Ideas&id=5366296

Try blogging free on the internet - Try creating a blog account in www.blogger.com . Its free! You will get a blog site called .blogspot.com that you may share on your website or just among friends.

Maintain a journal - this can be a notebook (paper) or an application on your phone or PDA or PC. Make sure you have one. There are fewer alternatives to maintaining a good journal. Keep a note of everything you see, feel, hear so that you can come back to it in future.

NB: I will write more later on this subject. There are a handful of good sources I can point you to.