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09.23.08 IT Needs Better Skilled Leaders  By
Mike Kavis
The chart below shows IT's top 10 Management priorities for 2008 (source: CIO Insight). When you look at this list it is obvious that today's IT leaders need to be experts in more than just technology. 
They need to understand the business and they need to have good people skills. I created the following diagram which I call the leadership triangle. I feel strongly that IT leaders need to excel in all three areas: Business, People, and Technology. 
From the business perspective, not only do IT leaders need to know how the business's products and services function, they also need to be able to speak in business terms. This requires MBA type skills in the area of Finance, Economics, and Accounting. When you produce your business case for initiating a large new technology project like SOA, Green initiatives, or ITIL you must be able to describe business benefits in terms of NPV (net present value), IRR (internal rate of return), and payback periods. When dealing with infrastructure projects like disk consolidation, virtualization, and others you should understand the different rules of depreciation, lease options, contract and vendor management. The list goes on. From the people perspective, the IT leader must be a coach/mentor, great communicator and presenter, skilled in leading through change (organizational change management), a negotiator, a sales person, and a visionary. From a technology perspective, IT leaders must have at least a high level knowledge of a variety of areas including architecture, security, infrastructure, regulatory/compliance, data, quality assurance, operations, etc. It is rare to find one person who excels in these three areas. If you find one, good luck keeping them around for a long time because they are highly sought out. Some companies can accomplish this by assembling a strong leadership team that works closely together towards common goals. This requires the leader of this group to be exceptional from the people perspective. IT must embrace itself for constant change. The next chart shows IT's top ten technologies for 2008 (Source: CIO Insight): Continue reading this article. About the Author: Mike Kavis is a veteran Chief Architect with over 23 years of IT experience including distributed computing, SOA, BPM, data warehouse, business intelligence, and enterprise architecture. Read Mike's blog at Enterprise Initiatives. |
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