What Keeps Top CIOs Sleepless
What technology keeps you up at night? That’s not the right question to ask CIOs anymore, I’ve learned this week at CIO’s leadership conference here in Huntington Beach, California.
At the last CIO conference I attended, about a year ago, I got plenty of quick, and interesting answers to this question of what keeps you up at night: Security. Wireless. Getting out of the high cost of Microsoft office. Rolling out VoIP.
But not this time.
You’re asking the wrong question, one CIO told me over lunch. This CIO wasn’t alone. This was a theme explored repeatedly during the conference, after keynote speaker Jim Collins, author of the business tome Good to Great, brought it up -- noting that someone brought in to lead a troubled company shouldn’t be asked what he’s going to do to transform it. He should be asked who he wants to have on his bus, for the ride to solving that problem.
Collins has his finger on your concerns, from what I heard. Because almost every CIO I met at this conference, when I asked him or her about current challenges, said this: “People.”
It’s hard to retain mid-level staff people, one CIO for a healthcare provider told me. It’s hard enough to get them in the door from colleges, and then once you do, you have to create some internal competition to keep them engaged, or else they leave quickly.
It’s hard to find some technology specialists, like SAN admins for virtualized storage projects, a CIO for a Silicon Valley finance institution told me. And if you train them up internally, they just hop to another job at the first chance, he added.
It’s hard to recruit people to come work in southern New Jersey, a CIO for a distribution company told me, because even if they’re talented and tired of working in New York city, they want a raise when they switch jobs, and I can’t afford to top the NYC salaries.
It’s hard to imagine, one aspiring CIO of an energy company told me, what my company will do in 5 years when most of the workforce retires and we lose all that institutional knowledge.
People, not technology, are keeping you up at night. Not one of
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