Huge thank you to everyone who joined us at the CIO Strategy Meeting in Charlotte last week! We were more than happy to welcome such an engaging group of influential industry leaders and dedicated sponsors in the heart of Charlotte, NC.
This event fostered a plethora of collaboration and thought-provoking ideas throughout the group discussion sessions. Here are a few conversation highlights noted by some of our facilitators that made an impact in sessions:
Coaching and the CIO
Mike Lewis
Chief Information Officer
Trillium Health Resources
One of the number one things a CIO needs to do is listen/observe. You can’t know where to help someone improve, until you’ve identified the fact that they need improvement. Whether that be through your own observation or through them coming to you and asking for help, that effort is important.
And to help someone become a better coach, you need to connect with the why of coaching. For every person that volunteers their time to be a coach, there’s a personal reason they’re doing it. At the CIO level, you can find a lot of people who are willing to help you without having to pay them.
Developing an IT Culture Aligned with the Business Culture
Aaron Higley
Former Chief Information Officer
Campus Crest
How do you create culture on your team? Standardize your expectations, understand the gap between where you are and where you want to go, and continually reiterate those conversations and talk about the path to getting there.
CIO Leadership and Influence
Jason Botts
Chief Information Officer
Chiltern
A leadership lesson for CIOs to adopt in looking to strengthen their partnerships within the business is definitely more involvement in operations. Physically participating, attending, and understanding what makes the business tick. And ensuring that the teams within the IT group are participating with that.
It all comes to fundamentals of respect: establishing trust in building that partnership. IT can be very intimidating. The CIO’s job is to bridge the gap and educate on although it may look easy on the front side, to make it all appear simple takes a lot of complexity and investment in that partnership.
Enabling and Managing Innovation
John Thomas
Executive Vice President Data Science
Red Ventures
A lot of it comes down to creating a culture that enables innovation. It’s important to think about both the things that facilitate innovation and the things that hinder it.
Things that facilitate it are: being able to empower your employees, being transparent about your objectives and what you’re working on, bringing together a diversity of thought, coming up with a way to measure innovation and send people to actually go about innovation, keeping open lines of communication (sometimes the best innovation comes from people on the front lines), focus on collaboration among groups, finding dedicated time, embracing failure, having courage and conviction to change the organization.
On the hinder side: not letting people take risks, organizational inertia, success can be a big hinderer of innovation (if everyone thinks everything is going well it’s hard to come out of that), management, doing things in silos, budget and day-to-day work.
Finally, to close out the event, CIOs assembled into groups to create a lifecycle story around the “Future of the CIO in a Dynamically Changing World,” led by Curtis Hughes, Chief Information Officer for Midrex Technologies Inc. Attendees visually mapped out the CIO journey, discussing where they are, where they should be, where they want to go. Stay tuned for a more in-depth look at these created stories on our blog!
Huge shout-out to our great group of sponsors, Commvault, Tierpoint, and Splunk, for helping to make this event such a smashing success! Be sure to continue the conversation from your respective one-on-one meetings to learn more about how these solution providers can provide the high-quality, efficient, and unique services you seek for your organization.
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Interested in joining us or sponsoring the next CIO Strategy Meeting in Chicago on August 9-10? Simply click here to request more info or email us at [email protected] to begin your registration and onboarding.
Be sure to also view our full calendar of 2017 Strategy Meetings here on our website!