subject: How To Be A Chief Information Officer With A Seat In The Board Room [print this page] In large organizations, Chief Information Officers usually hate change. They hate it because they are worried about things going wrong. This leads them to resist making any changes but those absolutely necessary, and the consequence is it's easy for their colleagues in the boardroom to marginalize them.
It is easy, however, to see why CIOs feel the way they do.
When a CIO agrees to change a computer in any large organization, their agreement affects more than that single server. Each one is related to many others in sometimes complicated ways, and this results in a web of complexity which must be considered in detail before each is agreed.
Because these are systems which have been running for years, in all likelihood, the chance is very real that no-one will know every detail of every system which may be affected when the change is implemented. So, when the change finally goes live, there is every possibility that something unexpected will happen.
Even the smallest changes are risky for a CIO. They try to mitigate the risks by doing their changes when processing loads are low, for example, on weekends. They'll have multiple people standing by, equipped with comprehensive back out plans just in case anything goes wrong.
As you'd imagine, all this costs money. Those costs quickly add up. When you add into this the fact that there will likely be multiple changes scheduled to occur in every single change window, you can see why it is all so expensive to change systems.
These are all good reasons CIOs avoid change. But by doing so, they leave themselves out of strategic discussions in the boardroom.
Some sophisticated CIOs have decided to address this head on by creating their own innovation efforts to find strategic-level investments they can make. The goal in doing this is not so much to deliver new change, but to prove to board level colleagues that their technology organizations are fit partners at the board room table.
