Strategic IT: Best Practices for Managers and Executives

Chapter 6

Lessons Learned and Best Practices

The previous chapters provided many lessons learned about how chief information officers (CIOs) are successful. As a result, we lay the foundation for the formation of “best practices” to formalize the necessary attributes for rising to the CIO level and, more important, sustaining a leadership role. First, it is important to define what we mean by best practices and specify what components comprise that definition. Best practices are defined as generally accepted ways of doing specific functions and/or processes by a particular profession or industry. Best practices, in the context of the CIO, are a set of processes, behaviors, and organizational structures that tend to provide successful foundations to implement and sustain success. We stated earlier that CIOs needed to help create organizations that use responsive organizational dynamism (ROD) to successfully deal with the volatility of advancing technologies—technologies that challenge the organization to manage a constant state of dynamic and unpredictable change. We also discussed the need for CIOs to integrate with their C-suite colleagues by using strategic advocacy concepts and build the kind of executive collaborations that would allow them to successfully implement ROD. The case studies in Chapter 4 showed that these two issues were consistently the key reasons for the successful accomplishments of the selected CIOs.

Five Pillars to CIO Success—Lessons Learned

In 2011, 30 ...