CIO Foundation Program
An exciting new CIO program was launched today by Herman van Bolhuis of CIOnet and the Masterclass Institute. Working together with Jerry Luftman from the Global Institute of IT Management he announced a new International CIO foundation program aimed at IT leaders and their leadership teams.
Herman opened the session by announcing the need for the program. The changing global landscape, political and economic pressures, coupled with an explosion in emerging technologies such as Social, Mobile, Cloud, Big Data, to name but a few, have created what he called ‘The Perfect Storm’. Many IT leadership teams and IT organizations are poorly equipped to challenge the storm. 2013 he sees as the ‘Tipping point’. One of the key goals of the program is ‘development of your organization, team and yourself(CIO) leading to a sustainable competitive edge’.
The CIO foundation program covers ‘Managing The IT Resource’, ‘Strategic Issues In Information Management’, ‘Managing Emerging Technology’ and ‘Leadership’. The CIO Foundation developed by the Global Institute of IT Management forms the basis and is supplemented with an associate program from Academic leaders, Executives and Industry practitioners offering additional modules as well as a mentoring program for IT leaders and leadership teams.
Jerry Luftman introduced some of the latest findings from his global surveys. He announced the 6 major ‘IT Headlines’. These being:
- Focus on swiftly reducing Business expenses (costs) & Revenue generating applications.
- Budgets, hiring and salaries – More cautious. Uncertainty.
- Domestic hiring and outsourcing declining, external hiring and outsourcing on the rise.
- Increased attention to Infrastructure spending.
- Growing cloud and consumerization of IT.
- IT Business and IT Alignment fundamental . “….persistent and pervuasive around the world’
Jerry revealed that not only ‘IT understanding of the business’, but even more, ‘Business understanding of IT’ are critical capabilities that need to be developed to face the future. The survey also looked into skills for the 21st century revealing a need for Leadership development and staff training. Training that not only focuses on technical skills but more importantly on developing business skills such as empathy and understanding and interpersonal skills such as communication, teams, adaptability.
Paul Wilkinson from GamingWorks, one of the partner organizations supporting the associate program presented ‘Serious games’ in support of learning and organizational change. He revealed how scientific studies show that experiential learning, or learning by doing is the most effective form of learning. Paul revealed how many CIOs and leadership teams had used simulations to develop more ‘customer and business awareness’, better ‘team working and collaboration’, ‘breaking down silos and improving communication’ as well as helping translate theory (such as ITIL, COBIT, PMI, PRINCE2) into practice. Simulations empower teams to capture improvements to the way they work, helping to create buy-in to a change initiative and overcome costly and damaging resistance.
Paul announced how GamingWorks and its international partner network would incorporate the Business and IT alignment game Grab@Pizza into the program, making use of Jerry Luftmans ‘Strategic Alignment Maturity Model’ to help assess weaknesses, test and experiment with solutions and capture concrete improvement actions to be taken away. GamingWorks, working together with Mark Smalley and the Information Management Coalition from the ASL BiSL Foundation would also incorporate Bookstore their Information Management simulation into the program to help increase capabilities and skills for managing emerging technologies and managing business information effectively. These simulations would also be supplemented with the ABC (Attitude, Behavior and Culture) assessments and workshops to help support and enable leaders to manage resistance and make change happen!
A general consensus from those attending the session was that this type of program and learning interventions were clearly needed if organizations were to ride and survive the perfect storm. More about the program will be announced in the coming weeks. watch this space!
GamingWorks working together with it’s partners have already started capturing Critical Success Factors for Business and IT alignment, using our Grab@Pizza simulation. We have related these findings to the areas in the Strategic Alignment Model. We have also, together with IM coalition been capturing Critical Success Factors for Information Management.