Opinion: The 10 secrets of bad CIOs

Computerworld - In my decade as a CIO, I've seen a lot of turnover in the IT industry. Each time I hear about a CIO being fired, I ask around to learn the root cause. Here's my list of the top 10 ways to be a bad CIO.

1. Start each meeting with a chip on your shoulder. If a CIO presupposes that every request will be unreasonable and every interaction unpleasant, then every meeting will be unproductive. I find that listening to naysayers, understanding common ground and developing a path forward works with even the most difficult customers.

2. Set priorities yourself. Although the CIO should make some budget decisions — for instance, on infrastructure maintenance — customer-driven governance committees should help set the priorities for application development. Good intentions won't prevent mismatches between customer expectations and IT resource allocation.

3. Protect your staff at the expense of the organization. I work hard to prevent my lean and mean staff from becoming bony and angry. But I can't just say no to customers, so I work with them to balance resources, scope and timing. When compliance issues or strategic opportunities suddenly arise, I do my best to redirect resources to these new priorities, explaining that existing projects will slow down. It's important to tolerate some ambiguity, accept change, support the institution and, if a resource problem evolves, ask for help.

4. Put yourself first. Being a CIO is a lifestyle, not a job. Weekends and nights are filled with system upgrades. Pagers and cell phones go off at inopportune moments. On vacations, I get up an hour before my family and go to bed an hour after them to catch up on e-mail and the day's events. It's far worse to ignore it all for a week.

5. Indulge in tantrums. Walking into the CEO's office and saying that you will quit unless your budget is increased does not win the war. The CIO should be a member of senior management, and all resource decisions should be made by consensus, even if the outcome is not always positive for IT.

6. Hide your mistakes. A network outage my organization experienced in 2002 resulted in what was called "the worst IT disaster in health care history." Since I shared my lessons learned with the press and our customers, everyone understood the events that caused the problem. Transparency may be challenging in the short term, but it always improves the situation in the long term.