Martha Heller
Columnist
Martha Heller is CEO of Heller Search Associates, an IT executive recruiting firm specializing in CIO, CTO, CISO and senior technology roles in all industries. She is the author The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership and Be the Business: CIOs in the New Era of IT. To join the IT career conversation, subscribe to The Heller Report.
How Vail Resorts uses IT to profile skiiers
Kirsten Lynch, CMO at Vail Resorts, says her partnership with the CIO leads to better guest experiences.
Energy Company's IT and Business Units Share Responsibility
At Energy Future Holdings, CEO John Young emphasizes the human factors behind IT, supports standardization and expects the CIO to work with business partners.
How IT Innovation Helps International Speedway Engage Racing Fans
The chief marketing officer at International Speedway offers insights into how innovative technology can improve the guest experience.
How CIOs Are Making Security an Enterprise Necessity
Information security is often seen as more trouble and cost than it's worth. Until it fails. How can CIOs truly make it part of enterprise risk management?
Start recruiting IT talent now
To lure top tech students into the enterprise, CIOs must sell youth on the idea that Silicon Valley isn't the only place where IT is fun.
Finding the Talent Your Business Needs
How CIOs are meeting the challenge of a small high-tech pool by making the most of the teams they have
Skills for the CIO class of 2015
IT management is changing. Here are some of the types of experience and knowledge that companies will be looking for in their CIOs.
Busting CIO myths
Close examination finds that some of the beliefs that CIOs hold dearest about their role in the enterprise may not stand up in the real world.
How to successfully bring business into IT
It's a tough time to be a CIO. The widespread glee over consumer technology has created your most demanding customers yet. The ease with which business leaders can adopt cloud services means less clout for your centralized IT...
How CIOs drive M&A success
Here's a paradox for you: Successful acquisitions involve IT early, yet IT is typically brought in too late. Here's another: People are critical to a smooth acquisition, yet M&A teams often pay scant attention to employee...
Moving past old technology to new value
How CIOs are managing being tethered by their IT infrastructure.
Helping the business better understand IT
If you asked a random employee which organization embodies your company's culture, what would she say? Marketing? HR? Sales? I'll bet you my entire shoe collection she wouldn't say IT. In most companies, IT is so far removed from the...
Providing ROI Faster, Better
For the last several decades, you've dealt with a business community that had trouble seeing the value of IT. Now your partners have a deep appreciation of IT. Your job must be much easier! If it isn't, then you've discovered the...
Taking on IT Leadership in a New World
Whether we like it or not, CIOs have a new economy, a new age of computing, a new (and highly demanding) set of technology users, and of course, new paradoxes. Technology is harder than ever, but your customers think it's easy. Your...
Bringing IT and the business together
CIOs use language, metrics and advocacy to bridge the separation between their departments and the rest of the company.
Stop Your Company From Looking Outside for a CIO
When I ask CIOs about their successor, I get one of three answers: Fifty percent tell me, "I am grooming two people, but they still have some development ahead of them." Roughly thirty percent say, "I have someone who could be CIO...
How to Gain Stakeholder Engagement
While one might hope that business leaders, who have everything to gain from process improvement, would recognize the importance of their own leadership role in driving change, we all know that is not always the case.Most CIOs have...
The Built-in Challenges that Set IT Up for Failure
Last month, I introduced the concept of the CIO paradox, a set of pernicious contradictions that permeate the core of your role. I also issued a challenge to make that paradox a thing of the past. To be sure, what I propose is a...
How IT is Set Up to Fail
Ten years ago, I started asking CIOs a question: When you walked into your job, what did you find? The answer, roughly 90 percent of the time: "I inherited a mess. The IT organization had major delivery problems and no credibility...