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Monday, October 18, 2010

Time for CIO’s to Lead from the Front

I came across an article that echoes a lot of the discussion we had in the second half of today’s class. The article points out the importance of CIO’s to move away from solely leading from the back (contributing to their company through work on projects behind the scenes to deliver business strategy at speed and scale) and start leading from the front (start proposing, encouraging and challenging their enterprise to take advantage of new opportunities often created by technology innovation).

This idea is very similar to the challenges we discussed today for executives that have to balance innovation (the front) and implementation (the back). The article goes on to discuss that is especially important for the CIO to lead from the front because of the increasing reliance on technology to help generate revenues, cash, and productivity for companies.

To me this seems like an obvious concept that all CIO’s should adopt, but I think it is important to remember that sometimes company norms and other factors may deter CIO’s from being able to do this. It may be a lot harder for CIO’s to change their leadership posture than simply deciding they want to embrace innovation. The CIO may need to convince the company, shareholders and other C level executives that the Chief Information Officer needs to have more of a balance between implementation and innovation responsibilities.

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