By annie shum | October 20, 2009
Oct 19, 2009, By Tod Newcombe
When it comes to leadership, there’s nothing like a humble beginning. Take the example of Teri Takai, California’s CIO and one of the country’s leading IT executives in government. Just about everybody agrees that Takai has burnished the CIO’s role as a leader in the public sector. Yet at the start of her career, she was a duck out of water when it came to leadership. “I was awful,” she said, recalling her start as an IT manager at the age of 28. “I had no background or experience in managing people.” Worse, Takai began as a manager in a foreign country where the cultural chasm was deep. “I was a short Japanese-American telling them how to do IT. How was that going to work?”
In fact, it ended up working very well. Takai’s exposure to different cultures while working internationally for Ford Motor Co. taught her valuable lessons in communications, perceptions and leadership. “Being exposed to different settings makes you think about leadership,” said Takai. “It makes you consciously think about it.”
Not every public CIO has the sort of varied background that Takai has used to her benefit. But leaders are made, not born. They have mentors, they listen and ask questions, and ultimately take risks that nonleaders wouldn’t pull the trigger on. Consider federal CIO Vivek Kundra. Like Takai, he has an international background and private-sector experience, and is willing to take risks in order to innovate. Despite Kundra’s short tenure serving as the District of Columbia’s chief technology officer and his relatively young age, his impact in two years there caught the eye of the incoming Obama administration. As a result, Kundra took on one of the most prominent leadership roles in the CIO community.
From Obscurity to Overdrive
It wasn’t long ago that many in the IT community joked that the acronym “CIO” stood for “career is over.” CIOs were technologists who were expected to keep the proverbial lights running. They were supposed to be good at engineering IT and were expected to competently manage people — mostly other techies who were doing tech work. That was about it. Meanwhile, job pressures and lack of visibility added up to short-term assignments that averaged barely 24 months in duration, according to some studies.
However, this decade marked a new era in the CIO’s role. First came the “change agent” persona and its expectation that the CIO would help the organization adapt as technology sped up the exchange of more information, integrated disjointed work processes and digitized services. The result has been more emphasis on the CIO as a leader rather than a manager and tech person.
Marianne Broadbent and Ellen Kitzis detail how CIOs are shifting toward more effective leadership in their book, The New CIO Leader: Setting the Agenda and Delivering Results. They point to several factors driving this trend, including the “growing dependence of all organizations on technology.” This has given rise to the CIO as a “chief integration officer and chief influencing officer, or in the words of one CIO, from ‘career in obscurity’ to ‘career in overdrive.'”
Along with their change agent role, the new public CIOs increasingly report to the CEO, which includes mayors, county executives and governors — and at the very top, the president and his Cabinet. According to Broadbent and Kitzis, new CIO leaders who have a seat at the CEO’s table will identify where opportunities exist for their specific enterprise to move to the next performance level. For that to happen, however, CIOs must be willing to take a lead role as an enterprise executive and coach their business colleagues about the potential business uses of particular technologies.
This trend is playing out in the public sector, according to Bruce Dearstyne, an expert on CIO leadership in government and an adjunct lecturer (formerly professor of information management) at the University of Maryland. “A lot of CIOs are being called on, either directly or indirectly, to help government reinvent itself,” he said. “Government’s chief executives sense there’s more potential to be had, right now, out of good information management.”
To cont.: http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/731561
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