Become a More Effective IT Leader

IT leaders have been told by the media, vendors, and analyst community that their role is changing from technology leader to technology strategist, from producer to enabler. Many struggle to reconcile this view with their limited budgets, aging technologies, and growing backlog of unsatisfied user needs.
Day-to-day issues take more time than they should, which leaves too little time for strategic leadership.
Because strategic initiatives invariably create long lasting development, operational, supplier, and HR challenges, IT leaders find it difficult to remain focused on them.
IT leaders face management challenges as they strive to deliver evolutionary and revolutionary changes under spending constraints.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

There are three external forces currently driving where IT leaders focus attention:

Financial constraints are impairing the IT leader’s responsiveness to threats, opportunities, and staff turnover. This pushes the leader’s focus towards cost containment, resource management, and budget projections.
Utility computing and SaaS are gradually eroding the CIO’s empire of physical, software, and human assets. This drives a near-term focus on managing a substantial change to IT that threatens the long-term redefinition of IT’s role.
Globalization, disintermediation, competition, and economics have intensified corporate speed-to-market expectations for IT enablement of business needs. The IT leader is pressured to take a meaningful seat at the corporate strategy table.

Impact and Result

IT leaders reading this material will be compelled to take the following actions:

Delegate real authority to their direct reports in order to get out of the day-to-day IT issues.
Diminish their involvement in vendor relationships to free up more time for leadership activities.
Deepen their commitment to understanding and shaping the strategic business vision.

Become a More Effective IT Leader Research & Tools

1. Reconsider how you allocate your time.

Become a more effective IT leader.

2. Compare your time allocations to those of the most effective IT leaders.

Learn which changes tend to drive positive results.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Table of Contents

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Author

Barry Cousins

Contributors

Morag Condon, Vice President Information Technology, Dundee Wealth
Diane Salois-Swallow, CIO, York Central Hospital
Stephan Henze, CIO, Windsor Foods
Peter Smith, CIO, CCH Australia, Ltd.
9 other organizations contributed information to assist with the development of this solution set. Due to the sensitivity of the information, these contributors requested confidentiality.