People is right. What people do how the interact with others, human resources isn't just a division it's the orbit from your planet to your future business and cross sectors and the missing link in many good companies. People do, people provide, people change, people are unpredictable, people are distorted and some tire quickl, keep them engages, thinking, excited. Getting folks with the natural energetic fire in the belly leadership wins others over longer term (back to the old jack welch theory) Getting Leaders instead of average managerial types can be rewarding in the long haul of retaining intuitive energetic fun loving people for others to rely on, look forward to, relate well to, gain confidence from-Good People like other Good People. Plain and simple.Every CEO CIO sleeps much better at night knowing they have the right comradery
-the quality of affording easy familiarity and sociability
nestled into their work force to care for the old churn ratio. Finding what others believe in and like to do outside their work is key. Interests, sociability is scalability-scalability
How well a solution to some problem will work when the size of the problem increases. The higher the leader engages sociability the better scalability to resolve churn.

The main thing that keeps CIOs sleepless is if he/she doesn't know or have clue of getting to know Business, Processes, Impacts and Risks cutting across almost all hierarchy levels where he is part of it.

As a matter of fact,these days, CIO are given more P&L responsibilties. So a CIO/or his representatives must be in all parts organiztional chart/s.

For example, if an orgaization chart is drawn, all possible ways, Top, Down, Left, Right, Matrixed, Cross Functional and Vendors. (let me say it is better to add vendors in extended org charts)

If a CIO can navigate in almost all and ALL critical areas on Risk based approach then he will be a great CIO. This is at the least. There are many other areas that can add to be a great CIO.

What I thought was interesting in the talks with CIO's at the conference in Huntington Beach, is that the primary concerns they have (i.e. what keeps them up at night) are more and more in line with leading a business - thinking more like a CEO, rather than the tactical issues of IT (ex. keeping the data center up 24x7) as I think is well articulated in this article. In line with being a business leader is making sure you have a staff that can execute soundly on the direction that is set from the top and be invested in the process. One CIO quoted Lee Iacocca to me, who said (or something close to it), "I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way". That was his way of making sure the right people are "on the bus" as Jim Collins said during his address.

Dexter Siglin
CIO Executive Council

While concerns for CIOs have changed over the past year, the challenge of maintaining operational excellence is still a major issue. An organization's reputation and revenues are very much dependent on system and application availability. But on average, these applications operate at only 82% availability. I don't know about you, but that stat could keep me up at night.

Whereas in the past, application performance issues were handled by the individual IT silo staff, it's now critical for CIOs to pay more attention to what effect these issues and outages have on users and customers. As was the case with the recent Blackberry outage, no one was aware of the problem until the service went down. By then, customers were dissatisfied and RIM's reputation, as well as the reputation of its IT staff, was damaged. CIOs need to take a different approach and stop investing in monitoring tools that pick up problems after the fact. The real solution lies in learning technologies that leverage existing monitoring tool investments but also predict and prevent problems before they occur.