The Transformational CIO: Leadership and Innovation Strategies for IT Executives in a Rapidly Changing World

Managing Expectations

A CIO at a major global bank once told me that his colleagues often criticized him for “turning every request into a project.” While I can sympathize with the frustration of his colleagues, I can also understand his point of view.

After you've been in the IT business for a while, you know there are no simple solutions. Everything you do in IT involves varying degrees of complexity. And that means that sooner or later something will break, or not work as it was supposed to work, or disappoint someone who expected one kind of result and instead got something else.

Extremely complex projects—and almost all business transformation projects qualify as “extremely complex”—have thousands of moving parts. Each of those parts can potentially fail. Rest assured that some of them will.

If you have committed the time and the effort required to build good working relationships with the CEO and your executive peers, you will be in a far better position to weather the storm when things break.

The credibility and trust you have established in your first weeks and months on the job will be needed when the network goes down, the sales force is locked out of the CRM system, the data warehouse crashes, or the e-mail suddenly stops working.

Most important, if you have been hired to lead a business transformation project, your ability to inspire trust and confidence will be tested time and time again, because transformation projects often take years to complete.

So it is absolutely ...