A Tale of Two CIOs (Saturday 2nd October 2010)

One aim of the Information Leader in Organisations module is to understand the differences and similarities in information leader roles in different organisations.

First, Chris Puttick, CIO of Oxford Archaeology presented on 'More with Less'. The charity sector is a great place to look for innovate solutions to provide great IT to a demanding (and often non-mainstream) user base with very little money. His talk invited the MIL students to think about what was impossible and lead to a very interesting discussion of the trade-off between cost-cutting and risk.

The contrast with the last speaker of the day couldn't be more start. Leon Schumacher, Group CIO of Novartis. He presented work he was a part of with the CIO Executive Council, a global CIO network. Their Future State CIO model is a principled analysis of CIO role and competencies. It examines the transitions required between functional IT roles and the transformation/strategic roles that information leaders seek. We are quite grateful that the CIO Executive Council allowed us use of this model as a basis for analysing a number of issues that arise during this module.

Though the companies and budgets they are worlds apart (in terms of budget, Leon's phone budget is probably larger than Chris' whole IT budget), what unites them is a passion and commitment to using information to make their organisations more effective and a broad skill-set that allows them to achieve this. The two speakers embodied that message splendidly.

MIL: These are who I get to enjoy teaching...

Computer Weekly have profiled the first group of Master of Information Leadership students in support of our scholarship competition - the article is here.

I have to say its been a joy to teach them. The teaching approach is really paying off and David and I are seeing the improvement in their academic work and their professional practice.

I'm looking forward to the April intake joining us!

Brief: Have I coined a phrase.....?

The concept of cultural maturity has come up in a number of modules on the Master of Information Leadership. There appears to be a plethora of maturity models ever since Crosby (1979), and most aren't that different). So I'd like to say we should recognise this orgy of identikit model construction with a new IT acronym (my proposal seems to have caught on with the MIL students, anyway)...

YAMM = Yet Another Maturity Model

Looked on Google, and it drew a blank so I'm claiming it. Feel free to use it  - but say it was me....:-)

Fame at last? Time will tell...

References

Crosby, Philip (1979). Quality is Free. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-014512-1.