Heller Martha - The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership

Praise for Martha Heller and
THE CIO PARADOX

In The CIO Paradox, Martha Heller has clearly articulated the many contradictions that permeate the CIO role. But more than that, she includes rich examples of how successful CIOs have managed to break through these contradictions. IT leadership is a balancing act, as Heller demonstrates in this entertaining and insightful book.

Carol Zierhoffer, VP & Global CIO, Xerox

Martha does a great job of capturing the paradox of not just the CIO role, but of Enterprise IT as a whole. In a world that greatly admires technology and over-rewards the start-up, how is the brand of the enterprise CIO and the technology teams that support our business so weak? As a CIO who has survived this paradox for more than a decade, I appreciate the insights of The CIO Paradox.

Robert B. Carter, EVP & CIO, FedEx Corporation

In The CIO Paradox, Heller has her finger on the pulse of the major contradictions that plague the CIO role today, including being hired to be strategic, but spending most of our time being operational. Her recommendations on how to overcome major paradoxes offer concise and helpful advice to CIOs on becoming more successful in the role.

Gregory S. Smith, author of Straight to the Top: Becoming a World-Class CIO

Martha Heller has unparalleled access to CIOs. She advises them, writes about them, and recruits them. With her terrific book, The CIO Paradox, she lets us in on all that she has learned and the advice she has given. The result is an invaluable resource. Martha demonstrates that for CIOs to be successful in this day and age, they must achieve balance in their skills, plans, and methods to eliminate blind spots and to achieve sustainable success for their departments and for their companies.

Peter High, President, Metis Strategy, LLC and author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs

What makes The CIO Paradox a compelling read is the understanding Martha has of the vast challenges todays CIOs are faced with. Throughout the book you have those aha! moments that energize any reader who works in or supports the IT profession. The organized, blunt fashion in which she states the paradox, while injecting the perfect amount of humor, is terrific, as are her conclusions. This is not a book about IT that will bore you!

Pamela J. Stenson, SVP & General Manager, CIO Executive Council

A must-read for all CIOs and those aspiring to the role. The CIO Paradox is a compendium of our colleagues most valuable and sometimes painful lessons packaged up and told in a compelling and straightforward manner. Heller has distilled years of CIO experience into a pragmatic guide that not only helps CIOs everywhere to improve their game, but forces them to reflect on where they have been and, more importantly, where they should go next.

Timothy C. McCabe, SVP & CIO, Delphi

Martha Heller has captured the essence of the exhilaration and the stress that come with being a CIO in the 21st century. In The CIO Paradox, she has articulated the complex and critical set of issues that confront CIOs every day, in every enterprise, in a witty and constructive way. Having lived the CIO role over four different decades, I was able to relate to her paradoxes and her assertion that to be successful in this young and great profession you must move from being an either, or manager to an and, and leader. It will be exciting to see more and more of our next generation leaders break through these paradoxes.

Charlie Feld, Founder, The Feld Group Institute, and author of Blind Spot IT: A Leaders Guide To IT-Enabled Business Transformation

First published by Bibliomotion, Inc.

33 Manchester Road

Brookline, MA 02446

Tel: 617-934-2427

www.bibliomotion.com

Copyright 2013 by Martha Heller

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-937134-27-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Heller, Martha.

The CIO paradox : battling the contradictions of it leadership / Martha Heller.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-937134-27-3 (alk. paper)ISBN 978-1-937134-28-0 (ebk.)

ISBN 978-1-937134-29-7 (enhanced ebk.)

1. Chief information officers. 2. Information technologyManagement. I. Title.

HD30.2.H46 2012

658.4'038dc23

2012032981

For Mom and Dad

Foreword

By the time I met Martha Heller in the fall of 2006, Id been hearing her name bandied about for years. CIO magazines Founder and CEO Joe Levy had regaled me with tales of this entrepreneurial, business-savvy editor who was helping him launch a new CIO professional association.

That venture eventually blossomed into our CIO Executive Council (one of our magazines most successful startups ever), as Martha sailed off into a new career as an executive recruiter.

You should meet Martha, Joe kept saying. Youll really get along. I suspect he was thinking I could learn a thing or two about business acumen from her, but he was too much of a gentleman to say so. Journalists tend to live on the outer banks of the revenue stream, where making money is (alas) one of the last things on our minds.

So there I was, moderating a luncheon panel of Boston-area CIOs, and the time had come for audience Q&A. This is a dreaded moment for moderators, handing over control of that microphone. (What if nobody has a question? Theyve been awfully quiet so far.) I was also aware that 95 percent of IT executive audiences are serious introverts. Public speaking is about as appealing to them as snake-handling.

Thankfully, the curly-headed, commanding presence who rose to her feet that day was Martha. We have a question at our table. Well, actually, we have several, she said, getting an immediate laugh as she took over the room and kept the conversation moving. I met a kindred spirit that daysomeone who loves talking to CIOs and hearing their stories every bit as much as I do.

Whenever Im tempted to call Martha the CIO Whisperer (for she does have the ear of the IT leadership community nationwide), I remember she never needs a microphone to make herself heard. Whispering is not one of her core skills.

Weve been colleagues and friends ever since that long-ago panel discussion, trading CIO contacts, story ideas, career advice (and fashion tips about stage-worthy outfits). A few months after I took over as CIOs editor in chief in 2009, Marthas CIO Paradox column made its debut in our magazine.

Readers were so responsive and engaged with her ideas that we cleverly realized how well the CIO Paradox would work on stage at our events. The other half of my magazine job is creating and running a dozen CIO conferences during the year. Im constantly filling pages and stages with CIOs and their stories, so I take advantage of Marthas talents as a speaker whenever I can lure her away from her day job. We believe those face-to-face sessions with CIO audiences across the country have continued to refine this fascinating topic.

Simply put, the CIO paradox is a hot mess of contradictions built right into the CIO role.

This is the only C-suite-level job regularly declared to be on the verge of extinction. You dont hear many debates about whether CEOs or any of the other chiefs (of finance, HR, marketing, operations) have a future. Yet everybody seems to have something dire to predict about where CIOs are heading.