The Chief Information Officer's Body of Knowledge: People, Process, and Technology

Chapter 1

Collaboration and Teamwork

Robert Slepin

Imagine for a moment a professional sports team walking onto the field of an athletic competition. Its team members are confused about the strategy for the game and who is playing what role. During the game, communication and coordination errors occur. Not surprisingly, the team loses. Now consider this same team suffers from a systemic failure to effectively learn from its mistakes. It consistently fails to recognize the root causes of its performance problems and invest adequately in improvements necessary to achieve better outcomes. This chronically losing team, unable to effectively and efficiently harness its individual talents as a cohesive unit, loses again and again to far better prepared competitors. Not a pretty picture—and yet this scenario can be observed in businesses and information technology (IT) organizations where words such as collaboration and teamwork are inscribed onto corporate values cards but do not consistently come alive in day-to-day actions. The good news is there are actions a chief information officer (CIO) can take to help the company and the information technology (IT) organization achieve higher performance by creating a culture of collaboration and teamwork.

In this chapter, we discuss warning signs and underlying causes, issues, risks, and opportunities for cultivating a culture of teamwork and collaboration consistent with a high-performing IT organization, including:

Signs, symptoms, and ...