CIO should communicate up.  CIO should communicate down.  And sideways.  And across the company boundaries.  And take responsibility for the strategy, for keeping the lights on, for company’s competitive advantage, security, ethical behaviour of company employees, and so on and so forth.  Any CIO can easily fill 5 pages with his duties.

But we are talking about communication here.  So, let’s assess CIO’s time allocation assuming he has 5 direct reports and total of only 50 people reporting to him – a “walk in the park" job for a CIO, right? 

   Down

   Each direct report probably needs at least an hour a week (5 hours).  Each employee should have an ability to access CIO.  Let’s say they value CIO’s time and initiate a conversation only once a year (.5 hour a week).  However, a CIO should talk to his people at least, say, twice a year for 30 min (1 hour a week).  Total for “Communicating Down” – 6.5 hours.

   Up

   If CIO doesn’t spend at least an hour a week talking to his CEO, then he is in trouble.

   Sideways

   COO, VP Marketing, VP Sales, VP HR, regional managers (let’s say, 5), VP Accounting, VP Compliance, let’s add two more unspecified VPs.  An hour bi-weekly.  Another 6.5 hours a week.  (I’m not even including the second layer, the Directors who report to VPs, although communicating to them is a must).

   Across – Clients

   Would an hour a week be sufficient?

   Across – Vendors

   Let’s total this to an hour a week, which would mean 30 min per vendor once every 2-6 months.

   Across – Colleagues and other tech execs

   An hour a week would be barely sufficient, I’d say.

So, allocate roughly 17 hours a week for “talking” to people.  (I realize, of course, the very generic nature of this assessment, so it’s as good as measuring an average temperature among all patients in a hospital.  But run your own assessment, I don’t think I’m off much). 

Now, “just” talking wouldn’t do you any good, because your counterparts would want to see a value from communicating to you.  So, you need to allocate time for chewing the information, planning and acting on it, checking the result, communicating it back to the source and assessing the feedback – be it your subordinate or CEO.  I’d say this activity requires at least as much time as “pure talking”. 

So, it looks like we are in the vicinity of 30-35 hours a week for communication.  One may ask, what else a CIO’s job is, if it’s not communication, but a CIO probably wouldn’t ask this question. 

And, by the way, you probably noticed that regular meetings – project related, strategy related, exec meetings, etc. – are not included into our calculation, although they can be considered “communication” too.

So, am I saying that CIO’s job is impossible?  Didn’t you already know this?  If you did then I just demonstrated to you an example of useless communication by wasting 5 min of your time without bringing any value back to you. 

Eugene Nizker,

Evident Point Software

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