Even if you’re not a C-level company executive, you might find opportunities to speak with board directors and develop a meaningful and valuable relationship with them. You may get lucky and have an opportunistic encounter, like running into a board director in your building’s elevator, at a charity event, or during a conference.
Are you prepared and confident to turn a chance encounter into a
career-changing opportunity?
Ten years ago, it was less likely for CIOs and Digitial Trailblazers to form a partnership with their CHRO and human resources departments. At that time, IT was largely focused on run and grow initiatives with little focus on transformation – and the term digital transformation was in its infancy. Meanwhile, many employees perceived HR as untrustworthy and only sought their services to complete performance reviews, gain support for promotions, request approvals for new hires, and handle difficult employee situations.
How to measure business value is a question many agile teams ask me, given how much rigor I ask them to put into estimating and capturing story points. Should product managers and product owners have an equivalent responsibility to define a business value metric, use the metric for prioritization, and be held accountable for actual business value delivered versus estimated?
“Managing up is a career development method that involves working with your boss to create value for both of you.” This is how Google’s AI explains managing up, a set of career management practices for developing relationships with your manager and other higher-level executives.
I confess – I sucked at managing up during my days as CTO and CIO. From my
naïve lens, I equated managing up to ass kissing, allowing my introversion
to mask and underinvest in this critical career management practice. I
believed that demonstrating strong communication, delivering continuous
results, and fostering a culture of innovation and transformation were all I
needed to promote my career aspirations.
“The pace of technology change is increasing, and you must reevaluate your digital strategy and priorities. Frequently. You will always be transforming, and your organization must establish transformational practices as essential core competencies.”
It’s been just over two years since I finalized the
Digital Trailblazer manuscript,
my book of stories and 50 lessons for people leading digital transformation
initiatives. These were my remarks in the book’s preface, and I wrote it
well before genAI took the world by storm.
Manufacturing, construction, and other industrial businesses can leapfrog from technology-lagging organizations to ones driving competitive advantages. A chief challenge is escaping legacy mindsets, especially in small and medium businesses where technology is a commodity component that’s bought once and used well past its depreciation date.
A couple of years ago, I led an agile transformation program for a major hospital system. Their vision statement was to pilot process changes and new technologies to improve patient experiences while simplifying work for doctors, nurses, and administrators. They asked me to train their project managers on agile methodologies and apply agile/scrum to several project types, including electronic health record system deployments and M&A integrations.
Digital transformation leaders – people I call Digital Trailblazers – wear many hats, and one that’s come up several times during our Coffee with Digital Trailblazers is the role of vision painter. As a vision painter, we must understand business strategies, learn market needs, capture customer feedback, and identify technology opportunities. Our objectives include painting a future vision, and sometimes tailored ones for different stakeholders, to guide our organization on opportunities worth pursuing and learn their customer impacts.
Ten years ago, I wrote an article for Engineering News Record on how construction businesses underspend in technology. I referenced Gartner’s survey of technology spending by industry, showing construction dead last, which was the same ranking it held the previous year.
I invited several experts to my weekly Coffee with Digital Trailblazers to discuss change management, easing adoptions, and minimizing the productivity dip. Participants heard a change management playbook.
We used the
productivity dip
(illustrated below) as a reference model as it’s a useful tool to illustrate
desirable versus problematic change management programs.
CIOs, CTOs, and Digital Trailblazers – we have a problem.
While many organizations have adopted agile methodologies, there’s a gap
between what leaders expect from these practices and what they deliver. This
year’s State of Agile report (the
17th of their annual reports) shows the gap is widening and
points to some of the underlying issues for technology leaders and
Digital Trailblazers
to address.
Every year, a new round of surveys shows that 40-60% of organizations are struggling with digital transformation. One recent survey shows that 51% of respondents have not seen an increase in performance or profitability from digital transformation investments. Other early surveys quote that 70-90% of digital transformation initiatives have underperforming results.
I’ve spoken with several CIOs who were the first to hold the role and title at their organizations. It’s a unique experience, so I thought I’d share some thoughts.
When a new CIO comes on board, there’s often a mix of excitement and angst
among the leadership and staff. Leadership wants to believe that what drove
the need to hire a CIO materializes without too much time, cost, and
disruptive changes. The staff wonders who this new leader is and what they
will ask of them.
This is my fifth year of sharing my top book reads of the previous year, and you can review my previous lists here: 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019.
This year’s list includes my usual mix of leadership, emerging technology,
and books about growing small businesses. I was in a cerebral mood compared
to previous years and missed reading any fiction books, but I did read
Patrick Stewart’s autobiography,
Making it So that trekies will love,
and Hertog’s On the Origin of Time,
which Stephen Hawking fans should read.
I just read about how CIOs are taking it slow regarding generative AI in the enterprise. “The hard thing about this is you don’t have data on people’s level of productivity,” said Sharon Mandell, CIO at Juniper Networks, while Kathy Kay, executive VP and CIO at Principal Financial Group, created a study group of “a combination of engineers and business people and are curating probably 25 use cases.” The article quotes a Morgan Stanley study finding that only 4% of large company CIOs launched significant generative AI projects.
You should evaluate your career progression and goals regularly, especially in this super-charged world where generative AI impacts many job functions and more businesses are accelerating digital transformation initiatives.
If you aspire to grow professionally, take on more challenging roles, and
help your organization build competitive advantages with technology, data,
and AI, then becoming a
Digital Trailblazer
should be one of your career goals.
