Hunting Bad CIOs In Their Natural Environment 112
onehitwonder writes "Bad CIOs are a blight on the IT profession, the organizations that employ them and the IT staff who toil under them (usually cleaning up their messes). Yet bad CIOs manage to migrate largely undetected — like the mythic Big Foot — from company to company. In the process, these bad CIOs lay waste to businesses and information systems, destroy staff morale, pillage budgets and imperil shareholder value. To help rid the world of this scourge, CIO.com has compiled a list of behaviors common among bad CIOs that recruiters, hiring managers and IT staff can use to identify them during the recruiting process."
Bad Sign #1 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bad Sign #1 (Score:5, Funny)
All IT Management is Suspect !!! (Score:1)
Bad Sign #2 (Score:3, Funny)
A point of disagreement with TFA (Score:2)
Re:A point of disagreement with TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A point of disagreement with TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
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Societe Generale's 4.9 Billion Euro loss was attributable to someone who allegedly still
had access to middle-office systems after moving to the front office, along with
the skills to BS senior managers over his positions. Failure in process.
They failed to remove access and they failed to follow up on sketchy stories.
Same with the recent extortion attempts at two different banks in Lichtenstein;
former bank employees pulled dat
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i.e. no firewall says "gee normally this guy pulls 10 customer records, but today he pulled 1,000! What's up?
Yeah, that's a tripwire activity - if you log record access, you can identify common usage patterns and alert when the numbers get out of whack - if 10 is normal, set alerts at 20 and 40. It's still a human process after that; computers are good at filtering, though.
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sorry but replacing that Linksys router with a WatchGuard Firebox is a good idea. MOST companies and Schools have a Joke for their infrastructure. And upgrades ARE needed.
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hey... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey, I think I work for this guy!
[anonymous for job security reasons]
Bad category? (Score:5, Funny)
Is it for sure that we can't shoot them?
Re:Bad category? (Score:5, Funny)
Just a Bad Manager; Move Along . . . (Score:4, Informative)
"Nothing to see here folks. Move along." -- Leslie Nielsen in Naked Gun
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Re:But how do we get rid of them? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't. Once someone reaches "C" level, they have something akin to diplomatic immunity. Even if they screw the shareholders out of billions of dollars and run the company into the ground, the only thing that might happen is they get fired, get a huge golden parachute, and some other company will immediately scoop them up for even more salary and stock.
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Two points stand out on the top-10 list... (Score:4, Insightful)
FTA:
Thats website is a f*cking mess (Score:1, Informative)
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Also, they apparently provide a print version. What are you ranting about?
Article in a nutshell (Score:5, Informative)
then a sublist....
Behaviors observers should note when the CIO has settled in his new habitat.
and then there is a sublist within that second main list (in case you werent confused yet):
MORE SIGNS OF BAD CIOS
Re:Article in a nutshell (Score:4, Insightful)
Number one sign of a bad CIO... (Score:2)
... He/she insists all articles be broken up into multiple pages so as to force more page views thus increasing advertising revenue while making the internet suck even more.
True Story (Score:2)
Yes, we had a CIO that couldn't distinguish between NNTP and HTTP and couldn't tell the difference between Internet Explorer and Outlook.
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Yes, I stopped reading after I realized that the signs for not hiring a bad CIO are that he doesn't have the required skills.
Things like "goes from one job to another", "doesn't work well with others", "doesn't know what he's talking about" don't help much.
I would have preferred more useful information such as don't hire Mister X who has worked at cie. Z because he's useless. At least I could have contributed to that list.
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These "bad CIOs" just sound like standard psychopaths [wikipedia.org]. Why not identify the real problem? Avoid hiring psychopaths, no matter what job you give them, they will be trouble no matter what you do. They are more interested in causing trouble and seeing people in pain than doing actual work.
Not just CIOs (Score:2)
Bad CIOs do not understand the Tao (Score:5, Insightful)
Because their time is wasted in meetings.
Why are programmers rebellious?
Because the management interferes too much.
Why are the programmers resigning one by one?
Because they are burnt out.
Having worked for poor management, they no longer value their jobs.
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>> Because their time is wasted in meetings.
You probably come from a different background than me, but in my case this has been the opposite.
Especially in a smaller company without its own fleet of business analysts, meetings are extremely important. The programming team I work with has been non-productive for a long time simply because they've been *doing the wrong thing*.
It doesn't matter how much of an uber-programmer you think you are, if you aren't mee
Re:Bad CIOs do not understand the Tao (Score:5, Insightful)
Meetings between two people are incredibly productive, but their use drops off dramatically the more people you add. Most of the communication in a large meeting is between some subset of the group, with the rest being bored. Another common trap is to use meetings for one-to-many communication. These are much better handled asynchronously, because otherwise the speaker has to go at the speed of the slowest listener. The only time a meeting is the correct form of communication is when everyone invited to the meeting is an active contributor to the discussion. If someone is just there to listen, their time is probably better spent sending them a copy of the minutes later.
I'd thoroughly recommend the book Peopleware to anyone interested in this subject.
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I love being briefed about meetings only to discover that software I've written has mysterious features and properties that I did not create! And now these phantom features need to be heavily used/extended on a very tight budget.
Simple rule: no matter what happens, programmers can't win (except
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Too many developers think they know what's right and refuse to communicate with the business/stakeholders to figure out what really is right. Thankfully that boss of mine was finally fired, but we're still left cleaning up his messes.
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It's a lot harder to get away
FYI (Score:2)
.... or (Score:2)
Because their time is wasted in meetings.
or because they spend too much time messing around: working on things they consider interesting, rather than the job they are paid to do
Why are programmers rebellious?
Because the management interferes too much.
or because they have too much spare time and not enough to keep them occupied (Idle hands are the devil's tools)
Why are the programmers resigning one by one?
Because they are burnt out.
or because they are bo
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1) Imposing greater discipline over programmers
a) More closely monitoring their work
b) Banning Dilbert,
2) Increasing workload by laying off some of the programmers and reassigning the work to those remaining
Certainly these methods (a.k.a "the floggings will continue until morale improves") are not uncommon... know of an
Re:.... or... or (Score:1)
Or because they can't program; think that their job is writing code and nothing else; can't work with others; ...
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Without management you may not have a job to work on. Or you will need to manage it your self dealing with interdepartmental politics as well explaining when it is. Late.
Often when people get burnt out it is because the fail to act when problems occurs. Tell the boss that you will do the job to best abilites but it is causing stress.
Yes the
Learn from the bad CIO.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I reported to a bad CIO for years. First off, the mind of a politician isn't much different from that of a corporate-climber. I found the same mind in my experiences with attornies. It's enough to make anyone appreciate the misanthrope Jonathan Swift. At the core of all these folks is a basic deceptiveness invented, grown and maintained with one single goal: power.
I've read Ringer and I've read Lewis. Ringer says, "Look out for number One." Lewis rebutes (although he wrote this before Ringer by decades), "a life devoid of virtue is simple a life looking out for number one.... and void of its purpose...." Or something to that effect.
I could write a novel containing my thoughts and experiences on the bad CIO, but in short I believe being absent any real talent, being totally goal-oriented and power-hungry, they practice basic machievelian manipulations and mob psychology to intimidate people into staying in line.
In my experience, any true and honest person that happened into an officer position at a corporation is quickly devoured by the meat-eaters.
If you want a life and job filled with honest work, non-game-playing individuals and good sleep at night, then read the signs and minds of those around you, build yourself, bend the questionable intentions of those around you into tools that form who you are, and, as Shakespeare put it, "to thine ownself be true." Eventually, you'll find that job and slowly realize "yes, I'm here. I can just do a fulfilling job and get paid."
Trust me, it happens....
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That's a cool word
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Love the grammar-nazis. Just don't be an ops-nazi. Really hate those guys in irc channels....
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no one recognises their own voice (Score:3, Insightful)
Likewise, when you recount a CIO's (or anyone else's, for that matter) behaviour to them, they won't recognise it as "bad". So there's little point in writing an article on recognising bad CIOs and then publishing it in an article for CIOs. They'll all either agree or disagree on the points, but none will see their own behaviour described there.
From a company's perspective, the only questions that really matter are whether the CIO being interviewed has a record of delivering programmes of work on target, on budget. That they can successfully turn around a failing (but not turn around a successful) IT department and that they positioned the IT dept. to allow a company to grow efficiently.
It doesn't matter if they name-drop or brown-nose. Anyway a hiring CIO just wouldn't recognise the pattern of behaviour - whether they, themselves, are good or bad.
Spotting Bad CIO's. (Score:3, Interesting)
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Seem like 'bad candidates' for any position... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Geeks (primarily IT types) love to believe they are the only employees that have to deal with these problems. Moreover, they believe that all IT types are productive members that do nothing but significantly contribute to a company. An employee is an employee, no matter what field they work in. Some will be great, some will be horrible, and most are nothing more than average.
I am so sick of the PHB vs. IT, CIO vs. IT, users vs. IT, everyone vs. IT complaints. Based upon the majority of posts v
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That is to say, IT are not the only paranoid, self-entitled, whiny babies.
Or, alternatively, it's not just IT who get the
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Sure... but the higher in the food chain they are, the more damage they can do.
(The corollary, of course, is that a competent executive can have a wide effect in a good way.)
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Erm, are you sure you mean that? Using technical jargon to intimidate and confuse is rampant in accounting and sales, in my experience.
Problem not unique to CIO's (Score:5, Insightful)
In practice, because shareholder elections are a farce, most boards are compromised by being populated by other executives, typically leading companies in the same or similar industry as the executives they are supposed to oversee. This frees executives from shareholder control, essentially giving them reign over other people's assets. Lavish stock grants entrench executives by giving them share ownership which in turn increases their control over the board.
Freed from oversight, executive goals diverge from shareholder goals. The limits to this divergence are mostly appearance based. You can't appear to be diverging from shareholder goals too much. Image is everything. To achieve this, executives typically vet those they hire based on loyalty. Many employees, while they profess to understand this, do not. So I repeat. To achieve the goal of appearing to promote shareholder values, executives hire first and foremost on the candidate's ability to be loyal to the hiring executive. This results in the typical knuckle dragging tribal culture found leading today's corporations.
Saying that solving this problem is hard, is a major understatement because you are talking about making America's ruling class accountable. Solutions like co-determination do exist, however, but would require the right political climate to implement.
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Right, and most companies are run like little pockets of communism inside a capitalistic system. We mostly hope for a benevolent dictator and a competent politburo, but rarely get either.
So, who has a model for running a company in a capitalistic manner?
How to spot a bad CIO (Score:5, Funny)
ATMI (Score:3, Insightful)
I formerly worked at ATMI, and they employed the dumbest CIO they could find. He has no IT training or knowledge, claiming his managerial accounting background will allow him to do the job. The CEO is a guy that surrounds himself with yes-men, and Kevin Laing is his personal puppy of a CIO.
Kevin hired an infrastructure director, who was trying to gown up in our clean room and couldn't find any left handed rubber gloves. It's no wonder the companies stock has been flatlining for the past 5 years.
Those poor bastards still working there will never get an annual bonus, because the CIO blows the budget horribly every year. The Help Desk manager has run off all the competant staff with full blessing of the CIO, I just don't see any upside to this guy at all. If the CEO and CIO were fired tomorrow, I'd guess there would be a jump in the stock just because they would be gone.
Key attributes of Kevin LaingRe: (Score:1)
wrong way to recruit (Score:4, Interesting)
Bah. The correct way to recruit, for any position not just CIOs, is to look around and identify top talent, then *invite* them to your company. Posting an ad and then trying to decipher resumes is really not an intelligent way to hire anyone, let alone CIOs. You should, of course, post an ad and have a brief look at resumes in case there's some talent out there who has no connections to you or is invisible, so that they have a chance to reach you. But in general, most good talent is visible in some way, so you can watch them from a distance, identify their weaknesses and strengths, and then invite them when you need them (this of course doesn't guarantee that they will come, but it is for this reason that you should always keep a list of multiple potential CIOs that you could invite rather than just 1).
As for the article... it suggests CIOs who change company too often might be bad. That's not an indicator of anything. That's not even a good heuristic. They may change employers for a great number of reasons, only some of them having even the slightest to do with their own performance, and many times the performance of a person is contingent on their environment. A resume cannot tell you anything about a person or their future performance. Academic degrees, even from top tier schools, mean nothing, and you cannot even trust references as you never know how and why a person recommends another, and basing your decisions on past employment record is not useful if you can't know what they were doing while being employed there (they could be playing chess all day thanks to them being the son of the company's president, etc).
There is only one way to know whether a person will perform well: you have a set of requirements, and the person in front of you claims they can satisfy them. The way to know rather than guess their future performance is to *test* them, in real or near-real environments.
How to test a CIO? You first have to identify what a CIO has to do within your company. Oftentimes, CIOs design processes and rules for information sharing, protection, and processing. So, if in your company you find that your CIO will likely spend their time coming up with improved processes and monitoring them, then why not get them do exactly that during the interview instead of trying to guess the unguessable from a resume or asking stupid interview questions with no meaning? One thing you could do is to have them manage a small team composed of employees in your company for 15 mins or half an hour or so, asking the wannabe CIO to devise rules that would enable the team to finish a simple virtual job quickly over the company's LAN, then simply hire the CIO who were able to make the team work faster during these 15 mins. This may cost some money, though, so you could build a computer simulation to do the same: the simulation would model some essential business processes, and the wannabe CIO would have to think of ways to let the simulated business components share information in the most effective way, then you would configure the simulator to run the policies the CIO suggested (or chosen from a multiple choice menu), and you would keep the time. Assuming the simulator was built in an intelligent way to capture the essential parameters of reality (which isn't an easy task, of course, which is why I recommend using real human teams for testing if you can spare some time), the CIO who thought of a policy that led the simulation finish faster would get hired. This doesn't even need to be done during the interview, it can be done remotely, eg over a Web-administered pre-hiring test, so you would need to invest absolutely no time and money in testing wannabe CIOs from the moment you build the test. One word of warning, though: the test must be built as to encompass emergent characteristics and complex noninear behaviours, just like real life, so that no one can predict the simulator's run time from the initial parameters.
And another word of warning: Some talent dislikes being tested too much, which is why you shouldn't ask them to be tested for more than 15-30mins at a maximum, and only once.
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I disagree. It's at the very least an indicator of changing companies frequently.
In some positions, you can live with turnover. Others really benefit from continuity. In my mind, that includes a lot of technical and accounting positions, the C*O level included. In those positions, the more history you know, the more effective you are.
Especially with software
Bad sign #7 (Score:2)
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though as a slashdot reader I would rather laugh along with you through gritted teeth
arts degrees teach you some valuable skills missing in some vocational courses. If said CIO has enough experience in the field then what degree he/her has is irrelevant.
I would rather follow a cio who has a liberal arts degree, then couldn't find a good paying lobbying job so went helpdesk, level 2 eng
Re:Bad sign #7 (Score:5, Insightful)
He? (Score:3, Informative)
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The ego train (Score:5, Interesting)
The cult of personality CIO is probably the most destructive and wasteful of all of them. They're particularly dangerous in government. The last big contract I worked had one. He brought in "his" people to manage projects. Some of them were, in my opinion, charity cases. A couple had qualifications that included boarding their horses at the same riding academy. They had unproductive jobs and were bossy and abrasive on top of that. I watched them waste millions of dollars, produce nothing tangible or productive, then get promoted. The talented people took other jobs and left.
It's very demoralizing when you're trying to do the right thing for the customer and be cost effective, then see someone ride in with his toadies, blow millions on something that never had a chance of working in the first place, then get moved up the chain. Makes you question if there's a margin in being practical and productive. I always thought that if you made good business decisions in IT, the customer would eventually come back to the value proposition. But it doesn't always work that way and I'm starting to question whether that's naive.
I certainly have several first-hand experiences where the incompetent, impractical and wasteful have flourished.
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The toads will self-destruct at some point.
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A funny but sad example (Score:3, Interesting)
- Implemented a strict dress code that applies at all times including weekends and nights. Facility operates on a 24/7 schedule
- Not allow for Hawaiian shirts on Fri even though it is a military tradition
- Not permit flex scheduling like leave early on Friday's
- Schedule an all-hands meeting for 3 or 4 on Friday afternoon and did that routinely.
- Implement strict rules on Internet surfing such as not allowing you to change options on IE. Firefox and Netscape not allowed. The options does not allow you to bypass pop-up commercials.
- Put in a boat load of offices and cubicles in the basement but did not put in matching capacity for bathrooms. People complained and his response that if you didn't have to wait more than 20 minutes to use the toilet, then it is considered sufficient.
- On the subject of bathrooms, when he went to use the toilet, he would kick everyone else out.
- Implemented a traffic safety hotline where you can get reported for speeding and then get disciplined when you got into work. He tried to implement a vehicle inspection program since he complained about modified vehicles such as trucks and his pet peeve was dark window tinting. Luckily he was shot down on that.
Overall, this person thought he was so important.Re: (Score:1)
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A couple of off-duty cops would probably be just as effective, and cheaper too.
Here's a summary... (Score:2)
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Nobody dares give bad references anymore, for fear of being sued.
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Nobody dares give bad references anymore, for fear of being sued.
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I don't think this matters at all. Honestly, I'm not sure anybody ever gave bad references. Why would somebody put down a reference if he knew it would be bad? And unless somebody was a colossal ass, why would you dish dirt on them to a stranger? Most people are nice, and will say nice things.
So given that all references always say good things, what good are they? Well, the
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> Nobody dares give bad references anymore, for fear of being sued.
That, of course, is hyperbole; and anyway, nobody has ever been sued for damning with faint praise.
The CIO website is such an eye-sore (Score:2)
The Board of Directors at CIO need to fire
The next step: How to Prevent Bad CIOs (Score:1)
How to Identify Bad CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CFOs .... (Score:2)
Bad C?Os are a blight on the the organizations that employ them, national business community, academic reputations, domestic and international economics, and the health and welfare of the public. The list of behaviors common among bad C?Os will prevent you from hiring them into your organizations. If they're already there, it will give you good reason to eliminate them. The list is summarized by the bottom line.
In simplistic
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Eh? How can something be both evil AND amoral?
n6kuy, you win, you're right "AND" should be "OR" (Score:2)
The amoral person never considers morality (right/wrong) of their actions and decides to allow or perform the act.
The amoral person is not evil, the amoral person is totally fucking nuts, and a significant danger to people around them.
The evil person is not insane, but is a significant danger to people around them. If the evil person was POTUS, then there is a (Hitler-Level) significant danger to
We need a LIST! (Score:3, Insightful)
Updward Feedback (Score:4, Interesting)
One interesting approach is a list of about 15 traits, and employees pick the top 3 that the manager needs to improve on. This avoids a "blunt" ranking that many organizations dislike, but at least gives the top layer feedback on the biggest problems.
360 degree feedback (Score:2)
The basic idea is that you get evaluated by superiors, subordinates, peers, you yourself, and sometimes customers. In other words all the stakeholders in your job performance.
Its very effective, but complicated in a paper based system. A simple web app could handle it quite nicely though.
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What about bad CEOs? (Score:3, Informative)
An outfit I worked for a few years ago had a good CIO and IT department, when measured against other companies IT departments. But we were (and I stress were) a great engineering and manufacturing company. IT was, in times past, only a tool used in that busiiess process.
At some point, the folks on mahogany row became bedazzled with the culture of information and forgot exactly what it was that we were supposed to be doing. In corporate speak, they neglected their core competencies. The IT department did a great job in standardizing processes and tools and upgrading systems where cost/benefits warranted it. But this was all measured with metrics viewed from the information systems side of the house, not the production side.
Pretty soon, we had cheap and efficient IT systems. But the engineering and production systems suffered where their requirements didn't meet the IT template. Processes that had been developed to give our company an edge over our competition were dropped in favor of using industry standard tools.
I'm certain that our CIO will receive the respect and admiration that he deserves along his career path. He did what he promised, within schedule, budget and with quality. But our profit margins and market share suffered as we became a commodity.
Unless your business is the IT business (Google, Microsoft, etc.) they are just tools folks. Far too many CEOs and BoDs were dazzled by the shinney server racks.
Interesting note: About a decade ago, when we were looking for better ideas and processes, our managers traveled to Japan to see how companies like Toyota and others achieved their efficiencies and profits. Along with lots of good process ideas, they brought back an interesting observation. The Japanese hadn't really bought into big enterprise-wide IT systems. Some of their best processes used clip-boards and paper.
What's the Point? They'll Get a Reward (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204702770 [informationweek.com]
This was a running joke inside our company as the man was considered woefully incompetent and borderline retarded by all who worked in IT. His true gift was looking like CIO and convincing IT magazines that he was good.
You'll laugh (Score:1, Interesting)
So, it's hard to take any of those lists seriously.
No one dares report a bad CIO (Score:2)
One bad sign (Score:2)
bad CIO's (Score:1)
I certainly have dealt with a few real winners... (Score:2)
- No knowledge of actual standards (including refusal to believe in almost any Open Source options, the only one he agrees to is the MySQL boxen because he has no choice)
- No actual technical knowledge. Claims to have been in management so long, its all antiquated. To which I wonder how you can be useful as anything other than a glorified secretary if you do not actually understand anything about your operating environment.
- Fixation on paper