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.

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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

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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.