If you have been following the trilogy of “Boardroom vs. War Room” you already know where we are. In Part 1 I discussed the importance of being valuable within your organization and reaching a position of importance should have nothing to do with a fixation on title. Getting to the Boardroom has everything to do with the company you work for and the value proposition you bring to life. It has little, and perhaps nothing, to do with your title. Part 2 was a deep dive into the value of the War Room and how a Senior Information Technology leader or Chief Information Officer can be relevant and critical in the trenches too. In the last part I want to walk you through how you can be the bridge between the strategic nature of the Boardroom and the tactical nature of the War Room.
It is often good enough to be a great strategist and help the senior leadership of your company push towards and capture their goals. It is often good enough, in a specific type of organization, to be the default hands on tactician that keeps the lights on and the systems churning. Different companies need different outputs from their CIOs and CTOs.
My experiences indicate it is easier to find one or the other. It is much more difficult to find someone who can do both. Furthermore, it is often not even a consideration to put someone in the position of Chief Information Officer and expect both. However, it is clearly an emerging trend to expect senior IT strategists and leaders to be capable of interfacing and bringing value across the spectrum. Perhaps it is the increasing technical sophistication of the emerging work force or maybe the increasing complexity of the systems and platforms that support business objectives and it is possibly nothing more complicated than every day we do this thing – bring technology to bear on complicated problems – we are simply expected to be better through experience. Regardless, I have one simple piece of advice for everyone who desires to make the greatest impact possible on their organization by being the bridge between the Boardroom and the War Room: start each day out as the Chief Problem Solver not the Chief Information Officer.
The Chief Problem Solver is a mental state where the challenges of the organization become your personal challenges. The struggles of your peers become your struggles. The tools and skills you command are used purely in the interest of the people who derive value from your organizations outputs. It is an apolitical state of mind that fuels trust and generates momentum out of the Board Room and into the War Room.
Let’s break it down into two parts.
Part 1 – Who else has as much capacity to affect change the moment they leave the Board Room? Most of your peers in finance, marketing, operations and sales have diminutive staff and budget allocations compared to you. Few have the tools and expertise to make – yes “make” – solutions out of what appears to be thin air. Consequently, you the CIO turned Chief Problem Solver have enormous collateral to walk out of the Board Room and make the strategy jump to life in the War Room.
Part 2 – Who else has the process, infrastructure, nomenclature and training to instantly support strategy turned into tactics in the form of a service? ITIL is an excellent example of how we can shrink wrap and manage change like a commodity. I am not suggesting it is easy and if you have a basic foundation in ITIL concepts you can appreciate the enormous amount of rigor and commitment it takes to run IT as a service, but we have the tools and knowledge to support the tactics that realize the strategy and this is an advantage to creating a sustainable problem solving organization.
Put these two things together and you get the idea pretty quickly that one of the best outcomes of pushing yourself towards an equal presence in the Board Room and the War Room is this: the organization can rely on you to make strategy come to life and problems go away. This is a unique and valuable role for Chief Information Officer, SVP or IT Director and not easily replaced or duplicated. Being in the space of Chief Problem Solver makes you relevant when the strategy is created and critical when the tactics come to life.
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