Just How Effective Are You?Just How Effective Are You?

ROOM TO IMPROVE
Improving communication with peers and learning the business--neither of which is a new concept--are still probably the two most important skills CIOs need to improve to ensure their effectiveness. Specifically, the research shows they need to work on inspiring and motivating people and improving negotiation skills: When scoring the effectiveness of such skills for CIOs in general, the average was 54% for motivating people and 72% for negotia- tion skills; but when respondents rated their own CIOs, the average dropped to 46% for motivating people and 57% for negotiation skills.

The disconnects that exist in the CIO-effectiveness spectrum don’t surprise many IT veterans. Scrutiny of CIOs has picked up recently, says Ron Edwards, a CIO for the past 12 years who’s currently at Crete Carrier, a trucking and transportation company. "Only in the last five years or so has the CIO role become hard to define and hard to accomplish," Edwards says.

Clarence Bastarache, CIO at EntreCap Financial, a commercial financing company, agrees that the difficulty in measuring CIO effectiveness spawns from the evolution of the role. "As CIOs, we’re [now] expected to be a master of all trades, not just a jack of all trades," he says.

One of the most distinct data points to emerge from the research shows that CIOs need to spend more time with colleagues. All categories of respondents strongly disagreed with the statement that top tech execs can be effective business leaders without spending more time with CXOs, LOB managers, or customers.

INTROSPECTION
CIOs do more self-evaluating than any other executive, according to the survey. "I don’t know of any other C-level people who scrutinize themselves among their peers like CIOs do," Bastarache says.

Some of it might be just a healthy dose of introspection. "Is part of that because our value is not obvious?" asks Pacific Coast’s O’Dell. "Or is it a common characteristic that gets us where we are in the organization--that explicit enjoyment of solving a problem?"

The biggest surprise? Nowhere did any of the four groups rate customer centricity high among needed skills for CIOs. Most marks were just above the 50% range, and in some cases, that skill was cited by less than half of the respondents as necessary. Only 10% of CXOs want to see CIOs increase their customer focus. In this age of customer intimacy, that stands out as an anomaly for any executive, particularly one with a direct impact on a company’s ability to analyze and service the customer.

It doesn’t mean that it’s a lost skill or one that’s losing favor. Says EntreCap’s Bastarache: "One way I achieve alignment with the business is by showing that I know how to book a deal or ... perform a title transaction. People thought I was crazy when I’d go handle a teller’s job for half an hour, but it’s the only way to really learn how technology helps them."

So while this research takes another step toward understanding how to measure CIO effectiveness, it doesn’t end the debate. All sorts of metrics are needed--from the quantifiable, such as meeting budget goals and sustaining ROI, to less concrete ones that measure effectiveness by comparing perceptions across the business landscape.