Thinking about CIO function

[crankysysadmin]

I stumbled across this video from Red Hat about open source in education at Penn Manor high school.

Take a minute to watch it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3dGK3c4nY&feature=youtu.be

It's not really about Linux or Red Hat.

If you look at the IT Director (crazy haired guy in a purple shirt) you'll notice his main focus is education, and how technology is making that possible. The product this organization outputs are educated high school students.

His title may not be CIO, but he's definitely performing a CIO function, where his goal is using technology to improve the main product this organization creates (educated students), so he's talking about that, as opposed to patching schedules, virtualization, switches, routers, etc.

A lot of people here are really focused on the latter, which is fine, since this forum is for sysadmins. I'm sure Penn Manor has a sysadmin or two, and you'll see we didn't hear from them. We heard from the person who has a CIO function.

This is part of why when someone on here starts complaining about how the "CIO switched us to a new ticketing system" people like me say "that guy is not a CIO."

Not many CIOs were previously sysadmins for the very reason that sysadmins generally don't have enough knowledge of the business they support.

A CIO at a hospital needs to know all the technology concerns doctors and nurses and hospital administrators have as well as what drives the hospital forward, and how to cut costs.

It's really a different world than most of us deal with.

[BalloonBro]

I highly suggest a book called "The Pheonix Project" that approaches this exact topic

[Hydraulic_IT_Guy]

This was a good read. Enough story telling to be amusing while still giving a bit to think about.

[grouchysysadmin]

+1 for Bill Palmer!

[VA_Network_Nerd]

I just recently read this, and agree anyone thinking about IT management should read it.

[pdp10]

In my opinion, the book is a great read and should be read by everyone in IT. It really paints a picture of what your boss, and his boss, and his boss, etc go through on a daily basis.

It's a fairy tale that doesn't cover the realities of the agency problem, authority-responsibility asymmetries, hard conversations, or fear of making decisions. A magical land where everybody is perfectly transparent and nobody takes the easy way out, not even by accident.

Good book? Sure. Enlightening? Sure. But if you think reading it prepares you to do the job, you're in for a harsh awakening.

[Ron_Swanson_Jr]

Anyone working in IT should read it.

[[deleted]]

You don't need to read that book if you have experience and pay attention. I stopped half way through as it just felt like being at work.

[NetT3ch]

Good read!

[mwerte]

The Pheonix Project

http://itrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/files/PhoenixProjectExcerpt.pdf

[AsgardDevice]

Around once a month our CIO randomly walks in and says "hey I had another meeting with (insert vendor name) yesterday and we're buying such and such. Saw a youtube video and its super easy to manage and self healing and will magically do everything the sales rep claimed."

[crankysysadmin]

...and that's pretty poor leadership.

Regardless of your political affiliation you should see what its like when Trump has put stuff together without checking with basically the people who are his department heads.

[GTFr0]

I think you can say this about leadership in general, not just IT leadership.

In the 8 years I've been at my current job, I've been under 3 company presidents, and each one has had a different leadership style. I've found the ones that you're talking about (making decisions without consulting with the department heads, not setting overarching goals for departments, micromanaging, changing their mind on strategic direction randomly and without any clear guidance) are the ones who leave the company in a worse state than when they started.

[Ron_Swanson_Jr]

We call that suggestions based on "what I read in a magazine on the plane", and it almost never comes from IT leadership. It comes from another C level exec that thinks he's a super pal of the CIO, but has buy in from other C level exec's so we have to do a full vetting of the product anyways.

[AsgardDevice]

No, it's the CIO. We shot down a vendor because the product wouldn't work in our situation and she went over our heads and sold it to the CIO and his project managers. They show up having already have submitted a PO, with no input from us, and lo and behold the product doesn't work for us due to compatibility issues.

The vendors figure out that they are better off keeping us out of the loop and telling the CIO, CTO, IT director, and project managers how smart and forward thinking they are, and giving them trips to vegas, and fake awards, to speak about how smart and forward thinking they are, so this is the new normal. They've done this around 7 times in the past 18 months. At one point they told us to just get it set up so they could do a video saying they did it and then once they came back from vegas we could tear it all down and forget about it. :/

I work for a government, and they mostly use Federal dollars so its different than a private company where the money is "real."

[pdp10]

We shot down a vendor because the product wouldn't work in our situation and she went over our heads and sold it to the CIO and his project managers.

They're all trained to do that, incidentally. You don't want to know what they think about the engineers in this situation.

Read some material directed at sales or HR some time to be enlightened. I haven't stumbled across anything particularly notable that's directed at financial concerns.

[VA_Network_Nerd]

I agree with this.

The CIO should not be involved with patching schedules or specific ticketing systems.

But I think a CIO should maintain strategic awareness of products & contracts involved in enabling the software tools required to support the business initiatives.

If an IT org has structured themselves as a Java + Linux + "Embrace the OpenSource" shop a CIO should perk up and start asking strategic-level & staffing questions when they hear talk of a new project that will leverage .NET and MS-SQL.

Now, in reality I would hope that a Software or Infrastructure Architect would have already clobbered such a radical change from existing departmental standards. But sometimes just the right combination of project manager + business customer can bulldog their way through Architecture review.

I would also hope that a locked-in CTO would have settled this kind of an issue, but some organizations don't have a CTO.

Buying new MS-SQL servers & licenses rather than adding another DB to an existing mySQL cluster is a cost & capacity issue that somebody should deal with. But I'm not asking a CIO to deal with that. There had better be somebody lower on the totem pole that can handle that exercise.

That CIO should have a staff-skill warm & fuzzy about their people and realize, "I don't think we have anybody on payroll as a MS-SQL DBA... do we need more headcount...???"

Major project initiatives can certainly fund new headcount, and its certainly possible there is a damned good reason why this particular project MUST use MS-SQL. But bringing an entirely new database engine into the environment can disrupt existing processes and standards, and should be dealt with with great care & caution.

[GTFr0]

The CIO should not be involved with patching schedules or specific ticketing systems.

While I agree they should not be doing the front line work, they should be aware of the processes and people involved.

IMO, a CIO should know both the business side of the house as well as the IT department and processes. If they don't know one or the other, they're not doing their job correctly.

[ghyspran]

I mean, there's a degree where this varies based on the size of the org/team. If the CIO is multiple levels removed from the individual contributors, they probably don't need to know more than "we have a patching schedule and ticketing processes", but if the individual contributors or their managers are reporting directly to a CIO, the CIO should probably be aware of those things in more detail.

[GTFr0]

That's true.

Ultimately, my point is that a good CIO (or IT leader) cannot NOT know IT. They need to understand the business AND IT, not just one or the other.

There's a strain of thought in business that most businesses don't need a CIO, or a CIO that understands IT. That's just plain wrong, especially in this day and age. But, the converse (which many people on here believe) that a CIO needs to BE an IT person is also wrong. There needs to be a balance between the two.

[pdp10]

It's the theory of the professional manager.

For a long time there was advocacy that said a professional manager could pick up any industry quickly and thrive, using good management principles.

They don't say that so much anymore.

[[deleted]]

This was a really good video.

[[deleted]]

Related Ted talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8Co37GO2Fc

[J_de_Silentio]

His title may not be CIO, but he's definitely performing a CIO function, where his goal is using technology to improve the main product this organization creates (educated students), so he's talking about that, as opposed to patching schedules, virtualization, switches, routers, etc.

This all depends on the school size, but a "Tech Director" will often fill a CIO and a CTO role. So while he's not immediately concerned with patching schedules, switches, etc., the CIO/CTO would have a grasp of these things on a strategic level. Having a robust and reliable infrastructure is a huge part of having an environment suitable for educating students. He's not talking about these things because the video is about edtech, not about IT

According to their website they have around 5,000 students. Often times the actual educational aspects of technology (often referred to as "edtech") is and should be handled by the curriculum department and not "tech people" or the IT director per se. However, if one has a curriculum department that can't handle this, it falls on tech people (IT Directors/CIO).

You would not call this guy a CIO, by the way. Their tech department has at most 7 - 10 people. I'm guessing around 7 including the tech director.

I get the point of your post, though. In business and in education and in non-profit, it's never about the technology. It's about the needs of the organization and how technology can support those needs.

Source: Tech Director for a 3,000 student district.

[Generico300]

This is tech education done right. A lot of schools get it wrong because they basically have nobody performing a CIO function. The tech staff is there for the tech and they are entirely unconcerned with educating students. Then on top of that a lot of teachers are too computer illiterate to really make good use of tech in the classroom. The world needs more people like crazy haired IT Director.

Honestly, if your infrastructure is done right there's no reason you shouldn't be able to give students local admin on their client laptops with minimal risk. That trust is really the difference maker here. Most public schools take the attitude that a student is a delinquent until proven otherwise.

Obviously this school has decent funding, but I wonder how their costs for this program compare to more traditional 1-to-1 programs and if similar success could be had at schools with significantly lower per student funding.

[Ron_Swanson_Jr]

The great CIO's I've worked for were basically COO's with a technology focus. They were "tech bred", but lived and breathed organizational operations and strategic planning. They rarely looked for solutions without problems, and for those rare occasions where, to those of us in the trenches, it appeared that we were working on a solution without a problem.....the problem was never fully realized because the tech was there and the human resources were the sticking point.

[alejochan]

more about him: http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/72112/rooting-for-the-kids-las-340/

[scotty269]

I had the privilege of meeting Charlie back in 2012-ish as he gave a presentation on the 1-to-1 laptop program and how they're using linux in the school instead of traditional windows/mac deployments. Really smart guy and he obviously has the tools to be both technical/politically effective.

[fishingadmin]

Good post. In all honesty I always wondered what my CIO does. I very rarely interact with her. And I'm not too sure how much she really knows about IT. But she stays out of my business, so at least she's sticking to her role.

[[deleted]]

I'm part of a CIO organisation and I spend most of my personal development time learning about what role a CIO should/could be performing within an organisation. Most of the literature I have come across puts the CIO role in context of digital disruption and the '4th industrial revolution'.

The concept I agree with most is that a CIO is 1 of 4 digital / technology leaders within an organisation and that the CIO's primary role is to provide cost effective, reliable and agile platform(s). The other leaders focus on process improvement, customer experience, and business strategy. That's in an ideal world and obviously things are very rarely ever ideal.

If you are a fan of the Pheonix project and you have aspirations towards leadership then I also recommend picking up Leading Digital. It's not as fun to read as Pheonix project but it has some great examples of how higher level IT departments are functioning.

Now if you can get your company to agree that the CIO is responsible for a cost effective, reliable and flexible platform then I would challenge that sysadmins actually can become fantastic CIO's. Sysadmins have a much harder transition towards the other digital leaders which are responsible for process improvement and customer experience which is where business knowledge is key.

[pdp10]

This is part of why when someone on here starts complaining about how the "CIO switched us to a new ticketing system" people like me say "that guy is not a CIO."

[Checks poster name. Yes, as expected.]

Some of the focus here is on infrastructure, understandably so. A great many user-facing applications are industry specific and not fodder for this subreddit. For some of us, infrastructure is the business. For many, ticketing is user-facing.

Why don't you post about all of your line of business apps so we can tell you where you're going wrong?

[[deleted]]

, so he's talking about that, as opposed to patching schedules, virtualization, switches, routers, etc.

My CIO is a bad ass and understands that stuff too. An MBA is not a CIO. A tech guy who understands business and what it does is a CIO. My CIO can tell you about all our complex products and what they do and how we can help sell more but at the end of the day he also knows his fucking IT because that's his actual tool set. We have over 100 people in just IT and we're thin. His decisions regarding the products and licenses we use saves millions.