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Seven Common Management Obstacles
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December 11, 2006 (Computerworld) --
Staffing shortages constantly weigh on the minds of IT leaders, who walk tightropes to synchronize the precious resources and manpower available in their own shops with the priorities and problems flung across a variety of business units within the company.
For the IT executive charged with both fiscal restraint and technical innovation, the challenges are many. However, Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders homed in on seven key issues that dog the performance of many CIOs.
Skills and staffing shortages top the list. Not far behind is the nightmarish situation of executive managers withholding support for high-profile technology projects or setting unrealistic deadlines and expectations. Add to this list of common woes insufficient budgets and the problems that stem from miscommunication and threaten a possible breakdown in business-IT alignment. And if these internal struggles aren't enough, IT leaders must also hustle to keep pace with technology.
Wise is the CIO who isn't afraid to tackle these and other problems head-on and does so with an air of forthrightness, says Don Riley, CIO at Mohawk Industries Inc.
"The more transparent you are, the more people will trust your department," he says. "By transparent, I mean proving that you have nothing to hide in terms of the way your team is performing, whether you are on or off budget and what resources you have available. If you hold back, they are only going to find out anyway."
1: Skills and Staffing Shortages
CIOs must ensure that they have the right expertise in the IT trenches not an easy task, particularly for those at companies with aging infrastructures, notes Marc Cecere, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.
"Large companies in particular have many old systems," he says. "The expertise for these older systems is disappearing rapidly, and vendors are dropping support. It is not simply a matter of finding Cobol programmers. More importantly, companies must keep the expertise they have for specific applications, especially those that have been customized over the last couple of decades."
Along with keeping seasoned employees happy, CIOs must keep a constant eye on the newest crop of IT professionals and groom them through mentoring and training initiatives.
"We have a scorecard, or index, that we have created around employee development that includes about five or six elements," says Daniel Hill, senior vice president and CIO at Chicago-based Exelon Corp., one of the nation's largest electric companies. "Mentoring and training programs are a big part of that. We also use targets to measure the performance of how well our IT employees are aligned with particular engagements."
Working furiously to retain staffers and promote from within still may not be enough, and IT leaders must be prepared to look elsewhere.
"Create relationships with a couple of local firms or offshore companies and negotiate rates long before you need people. This way, you will have access to temporary or long-term resources," advises Donna Slyster, senior vice president and CIO at CHEP, an Orlando-based supplier of industrial pallets and pooling services that many large food, chemical and automotive corporations use in their supply chains.
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