The latest installment in this life lesson involved my recent iPhone upgrade.  After the announcement that a new, improved iPhone was ready, I jumped on the site and placed my order. Shortly thereafter I received confirmation that my wonderful new slice of technology — whiter, slimmer, lighter, faster, sharper, and smarter than ever before — was winging its way around the world to me and was scheduled to arrive on a Friday. 

Every day, like a child waiting for Christmas, I checked the UPS tracking site. On Thursday I awoke to discover that my new iPhone 5 was on the truck! I’d be getting a whole lot cooler a whole day earlier! Little did I realize that the end of my iPhone’s journey would be the start of my journey into technology hell.

I should have known better. I’d had problems before. But this time, I reasoned, would be different. I was standardizing on Apple — both hardware and software — and surely the elegance of its engineering would mask all the underlying complexity and transform my world into one where I could manage my business on any of my devices, with data automatically synching in the background.

The first 24 hours of hell involved an operating system upgrade. In order to use all the latest, greatest iCloud features, I upgraded my OS to Mountain Lion. I didn’t need to, but optimism overcame wisdom. Just as I clicked the “Download” button, my husband came home, saw what I was doing, and lovingly asked, “Are you crazy?”

Yes, apparently, I was. After I restarted my computer, some kind of mysterious background process started that consumed more than 90% of my CPU capacity for the next 12 hours. A new day brought normal CPU utilization levels and with them a renewed sense of (misplaced) optimism.

Day two of techno hell involved the iCloud. Sporadically, I would get some kind of a server error message with a bunch of meaningless (to me) letters and numbers. After spending an hour with an Apple genius (at the Apple Store), I was referred to Apple’s iCloud team. My (virtual) appointment was for 6:00 a.m. sharp the following morning. Before I was fully awake, I learned that I had exceeded the calendar data limits on iCloud, and there was no way to archive a portion of my old calendar entries. I was left with the option of 1) not using iCloud or 2) wiping out my calendar. Since I don’t really ponder the past all that much, I decided to start my life over.

In addition to the weird server error, I also was unable to invite attendees to a meeting using Apple’s Calendar application. Surely a user error, right? Unfortunately, no. The genius who replicated my problem couldn’t fix it, and referred the issue to the Apple engineering team.

At this point, I knew I was stuck. A long career in IT has taught me that nothing good ever comes quickly once an issue escalates to engineering. It was time to jump off the Apple bandwagon. I called in a favor with an in-house IT guru and we agreed that it was time to go back to Microsoft Outlook and use a product like Office 365 to synch up my devices.

The third (and final) day of hell involved getting back on the Microsoft bandwagon. The Outlook installation was a breeze. All my years of meetings magically appeared, as did my e-mail history. That was a relief. I didn’t have to start my life over from scratch.

I checked out a few options for hosted Microsoft Exchange and decided to go with Office 365. Ordering and installation looked pretty easy. Well, of course. It always does.

Without the benefit of comprehensive installation instructions, I was left to surf the Net, visiting chat rooms and watching YouTube videos. My desktop and Office 365 started to synch, but my iPhone was playing hard to get. As a last resort, I submitted an online support request to Microsoft. And believe it or not, Microsoft (via Mumbai) called me 15 minutes later and whispered the magic words necessary to get my iPhone synching with Office 365.

For the past 30-plus years, technology has tortured us. It’s always too little, too late, and costs too much. In the anticipation and excitement of the new, it’s easy to forget the past. Don’t. Never forgive. Never forget. Stand on my shoulders and keep these lessons in mind:

• Lesson #1: Make sure the gain is worth the pain. Wait to upgrade existing technology until you can hardly stand it.
• Lesson #2:  Always stay away from the latest version. There is no reason to be the first to implement anything. Ever.
• Lesson #3:  Don’t trust the hype. There is no such thing as a single vendor solution. This is why you need your own IT people. They’re skilled at integration. Your vendors aren’t in the business of making it easier for you to buy other vendor’s products.
• Lesson #4:  Get your hands dirty. Unless you’re engaged with the tools, it’s impossible to understand the trade-offs and make the right decisions when problems arise.
• Lesson #5:  In the end, it will be good enough, but it won’t be perfect. For example, yesterday I realized that the calendar on my phone was missing a couple of meetings. Yikes!

Still, I’m loving my new technology. I just don’t want any more — for a long, long time. . . .

Originally published at CFO.com

If you’re tempted to ask your boss, “Am I your guy?” don’t bother. 

My guess is that you probably already know his answer.

After years of focusing on costs, businesses are searching for top line growth and they’re finding that their organizations are not up to the task.  For incumbent leaders, the realization that after years of hard work they’ve built an organization that, in the eyes of many, is not working is tremendously humbling.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the support functions (finance, IT, human resources, and legal).   All roads leading to business change wind through these departments.  But take a look at a company’s typical project list and it’s clear that these roads more often than not are congested.  Increasing throughput is a function of focus and resource flexibility – capabilities that are often in short supply.  Most organizations have left the concept of “focus” in the ditch, fearful that making hard choices will lead to wrong choices.  And resource flexibility (people, process, and technology) is at an all-time low even as productivity is at an all-time high.  We have fewer people working harder with (sadly) little time to figure out how to work smarter.

Rather than asking your boss a question that will raise, rather than squelch concerns, it’s much more productive to ask yourself:  “What would my successor do?”  After all, if you think you may be replaced, you might as well replace yourself (with your new-and-improved self) and get your boss thinking about how you are the answer to his prayers rather than the cause of his problems.

Firing yourself isn’t easy.  Over time we have a tendency to shape our organizations in our own image.  Problems that were easy to spot when new to the job become almost invisible.  Similarly, relationships that were full of promise in the beginning evolve into static roles and routines founded on assumptions that, good or bad, are difficult to change.

But you have time on your side.  Companies don’t like to fire employees – especially senior leaders.  You’ll have plenty of time to become the new-and-improved-you as long as you start redefining your leadership agenda (your goals, strategies, tactics, and relationships) early. When is early? Early is the moment your gut tells you something isn’t right: when influential peers starts taking pot shots; when a serious operational glitch garners bad publicity and reveals systemic vulnerabilities; when a new boss starts asking questions that are difficult to answer; when each day consists of more adversity than accolades. 

To be your own successor, mirror the behavior of newly hired counterparts:

• Don’t complain, don’t explain.  Complaining makes one look small and weak.  Explaining why something is messed up makes you appear defensive and close-minded.
• (Re)Learn the business.  Identify critical stakeholders – down, across, out and up – and conduct interviews (using a structured questionnaire) to reintroduce you to your business – customer needs, competitive positioning, objectives, strategies, initiatives, performance, challenges, and opportunities.
• Make new friends (and keep the old).  Rethink the power structure (who has authority and who influences those that do) and rid yourself of any preconceived notions about who is naughty or nice.   Adjust your style to accommodate the needs of others by thinking deeply about how others like to communicate, process information, make decisions, and manage conflict.
• Play offense.  Uncover and communicate the bad news before anybody else does.  For example, if you’re concerned about what an audit may reveal, commission the audit (or the benchmark, or organizational assessment) yourself.
• Ask for what you need.  Newbies are bold about airing ugly truths and equally fearless about asking for what they need to be successful.  If there are disasters in the making, kill the initiatives.  If your direct reports can’t fire themselves, help them along.  If processes and technology look like a Jackson Pollack painting, call it a “transformation” and get ready for three years of hell.  If you need more money and people, make the case.
• Sell, sell, sell.  You know what you want.  You know what your new friends want.  Connect the dots.  Make sure people see themselves in the reflection of your plans.  Deliver quick wins.

Becoming your own successor takes a lot of time.  Find it by extracting yourself (as best you can) from day-to-day operations for a period of 60-90 days.  Things may get a bit worse, but the downside is slight given the opportunity to map out a plan that will make things much, much better.

The economic crisis and subsequent lackluster recovery has IT spending at significantly lower levels than 2008.  Companies that have delayed investments – in people and technology – are finding that they are now at a competitive disadvantage.  New competitors, without the burden of legacy IT environments bowing their backs, are leveraging low-cost, fast-cycle disruptive technologies. These fast-moving competitors are pushing industry incumbents to build new IT-enabled capabilities or risk falling farther behind.

Is your company falling victim to this save now, pay later strategy?  Consider the following:

1)    Has your company reduced IT spending as a percent of revenue over the past 5 years?

2)    Does your company have the IT capability needed to exploit new technologies and reshape the company’s operating model, creating “smart” products and services, and enhancing its relationship with customers and suppliers?

If you answered “yes” to the first and “no” to the second, you need to engage with your CIO in a conversation about treating IT as an investment that builds rather than destroys IT capability and value.  Contrary to conventional wisdom, if your CIO isn’t asking you for more money, she probably isn’t doing her job.  You see, when it comes to IT, it takes money to make money and it takes money to save money.

The first point is obvious.  IT should be managed as an investment, not as an expense.  The only factors that should gate IT spending are the quality of the investment opportunities and the capacity of the organization to manage IT-enabled change.  Without a doubt, there is a plethora of exciting investment opportunities.  In my research, business and IT executives estimate the expected return from their potential sustaining investments at 30%, and their innovative investments at 80%. 

The real limiting factor is the organizational capacity to manage IT-enabled change and drive adoption, and thereby realize investment returns.  On average, demand for IT outstrips supply by at least two-to-one.   When asked about supply constraints, few technology and business executives mention money.  Rather, they complain that their companies are woefully short on the internal skills necessary to work with external suppliers (that is, the people with project management, business analysis, and solutions architecture skills) and are constrained by the complexity and hard-to-change nature of their current technological foundations (consisting of a myriad of technologies built over time to serve siloed operational needs rather than architectures built to support change and enterprise needs.)

The second point is less apparent but equally important.  A large portion of IT spending (on average 70%) is required to keep your existing technology up and operating safely.  Lights-on costs increase as your company grows, as new security risks are identified and new regulations imposed, as applications are implemented, and as the technological foundations become more complex.  The only way to save money on lights-on costs going forward is to invest money in order to reduce the total number of technologies you support while adopting new technologies that can do more for less (such as server virtualization and performance monitoring, among others).

CIOs that are doing their jobs will spend whatever budget they have and will keep coming back to you for more.  Of course, these “pay-and-gain” CIOs will do so (one hopes and should expect) in a responsible manner, in partnership with you and other executives to ensure that the company is:

1)    Realizing value from IT-enabled business investments;

2)    Driving down “lights-on” costs – and technology complexity – making it easier to introduce new changes, more quickly;

3)    Building the skills necessary to lead IT-enabled change and leverage external suppliers – in and out of IT.

From a financial perspective, conventional wisdom has long held that the competent CIO doesn’t negatively impact general and administrative expense margins and always delivers their share of any requested G&A cuts.  But this conventional wisdom needs to change.  IT isn’t an overhead expense; it’s an organizational asset that needs to be managed as an investment with a steady hand and an eye fixed on enhancing the company’s long term competitive capabilities and options.

Originally published on CFO.com.

Don't even think about it.  Exploiting technology is a full-time job best guided by a seasoned pro.   Case in point: in my career, I've had the good fortune to work both as a CIO and a CFO.  But with 13 years of IT experience versus 2 years of finance before I assumed my C-level roles, my best day as a CFO wasn't all that good.  And, for CFOs cast into the CIO role without significant IT experience, their best days will be just as bad.

Technology may be getting easier to use, but managing IT is getting harder for four important reasons:

1. There is an increased urgency for IT-enabled capabilities. The consumer is empowered and the world is flat.  Loyal patrons are visiting your stores to get smart about the products they are going online to buy.  Only the paranoid and fearless will survive.  Slow-go IT is no-go IT.
2. There are endless possibilities for exploiting IT. But all this opportunity can be a little scary, and it makes prioritization far more difficult.  The only safe harbor is focusing on opportunities the make sense from the point of view of the customer.  Internally focused initiatives need not apply.
3. Existing resources are tapped out. Demand for IT outstrips supply by at least two to one. There are more project starts than completions.  Everyone is too busy and getting less, not more, done because of the inefficiency inherent in juggling too many projects.  Getting the most out of scarce resources is a function of staging — both project starts (so that there aren't more projects going on than there are people who can focus on them) and project funding (to encourage iterative delivery and ensure that funding can be shifted to the most promising opportunities).
4. Technology is everywhere. Your employees are buying what they want and using it for work.  Access to your company is traveling around in everybody's briefcase, purse, and pocket.  But despite the fact that they're using all these new, powerful devices, your employees are still digital-innocents and the hackers are working 24/7 to take advantage of them and your company.   The challenge is to figure out how to run IT securely without becoming the IT-TSA, with long lines, unhappy employees and patrons, and questionable efficacy.

To work through these challenges, we need more leadership, not less, in and out of IT, at every level of the organization. 

Executives need to get personally invested in the IT that fuels their businesses. In a survey I conducted of more than 100 business leaders, I found it rather shocking that more than 75% considered themselves "IT dumb" and admitted they didn't know how to use their systems and made "half-baked requests" from IT. 

We don't really need executives to blog, friend, or tweet, but we do need them to understand how their current IT capabilities stack up against the competition; how IT-enabled changes to business processes and information could enhance the customer experience; and what it means to sponsor a project, drive IT adoption, and realize value from IT-enabled investments.  It's time (actually way past time) for executives to assume personal accountability for understanding and managing IT and to cascade digital accountability and authority down through their organizations by incorporating IT-smarts in job descriptions and hiring criteria.

Frontline employees (who work directly with the customer or support those who do) need to become much more engaged in innovating with IT.  They need to leverage their insight about what works (and what doesn't) and discover how to exploit existing and new technology to benefit the customer.

IT leaders need to provide a different kind of leadership than they have provided in the past.  Since it is impossible for the 5% (or so) employees in IT to satisfy all the technology needs of the other 95%, IT needs to transition from delivering IT to the organization to delivering IT through the organization by enhancing self-sufficiency and innovation.

To promote self-sufficiency, IT needs to help employees help themselves by providing new tools and changing some rules.  For example, instead of trying to control every device, IT should focus on ensuring safe and secure access to company applications and information through bring-your-own-device programs and virtualized desktop software.  Instead of trying to control every purchase, IT should vet and approve IT vendors. Instead of trying to manage every project, IT should certify project-management capabilities.  According to my research, CIOs estimate that 25% of IT's current workload could and should be done by the rest of the organization.

To promote innovation, IT needs to reach outside its own organization to connect with and support the 30% or so innovators within who are wired to figure out a better way.  They need to be connected, respected, and challenged.   Frontline employees need to be connected to customers and to one another.  They need tools that will allow them to resolve issues, communicate common problems, gain insights from others as to possible resolutions, and experiment with changes.  Their efforts need to be recognized and celebrated so that others can learn and jump on the innovation bandwagon.

Don't fall into the trap of believing that IT needs a better leader rather than better leadership.  IT organizations are not broken: they are maturing.  IT is no longer simply an organization; it's now an organizational asset.  Don't take your CIO's place; partner with him to elevate and expand IT leadership by increasing IT-smarts, accountability, and authority across the company.

Originally published at CFO.com.

You hate their behavior, but love their results. You don’t want to fire them; you want to fix them.

Well, don't get your hopes too high. It's impossible to turn an organizational pit bull into a poodle. But you can, with a strong leash and steady hand, mitigate extreme behaviors by: 

1. Stepping back. Determine whether you’re setting up your jerk for success or failure. It’s pretty easy to bring out the inner jerk in anyone by asking for the impossible and then providing little support. Look around your organization: if you find yourself surrounded by jerks, it’s likely you’ve created a dog-eat-dog world. Of course, if your company is in the middle of a turnaround, command-and-control leadership is essential. In that case, it’s the leader’s job to support his jerks by clearly communicating priorities so that the rest of the organization doesn’t confuse the message with the messenger.
   
   
2. Taking off the blinders. Help your jerk understand her strengths and weaknesses by providing true 360-degree feedback. In emotional-intelligence lingo, most jerks have low levels of self-awareness and don’t understand how their behaviors affect others. Ensure that the 360 process concludes with the jerk meeting with you. In the meeting, make sure the jerk does the talking.  By verbally articulating her negative behaviors and explaining how they can be a detriment to her effectiveness and to the overall health of the organization, she will increase her psychological committment to change.
   
   
3. Being direct. Tell your jerk that she needs to change or hit the highway. Don’t hide or disguise the hard truth by wrapping it in a pretty ribbon, such as: “You’re really talented but you need to learn how to get things done in ways that don’t alienate those around you. I know you can change and I’m here to support you.”  Jerks have such a high opinion of themselves (and such a low opinion of others) that they’ll soak up the compliments and reassurances and not even hear the criticisms.
   
   
4. Providing specifics.  Make sure your jerk knows exactly what she has to stop and start doing.  Broad goals, like “improve listening skills,” don’t work. They need to be broken down into detailed behavioral instructions. For example: “Your goal is to get others to articulate issues, opportunities, and actions by facilitating rather than directing discussions. Do so by asking open-ended, clarifying questions, recap understanding, solicit recommendations, and facilitate decision making by analyzing pros and cons.” Many leaders struggle to provide such specific behavioral expectations because they don’t understand, in detail, the jerk’s current behaviors, and haven’t thought sufficiently deeply about what they want stopped or started. 
   
   
5. Persevering. Assess progress on a monthly basis using Marshall Goldsmith’s “Feedforward” process.  Require the jerk to reach out to her stakeholders and obtain input about what she needs to work on in the next 30 days. Sit down and review the stakeholder input and agree on one thing she should be working on over the next 30 days. If after six months the stakeholders’ input doesn’t reflect progress, it’s time to part ways with your jerk. 
   
   

It seems to me that jerkiness is on the rise in many organizations.  This is unfortunate but understandable given the stresses of the current economic and competitive climate.  But talented jerks can create a climate of fear that causes others to go passive-aggressive, defensive, and timid.  Talented jerks expand their impact that the cost of those around them, dividing rather than multiplying, making the organizational whole less than the sum of its parts.  Rather than accepting jerkiness as the "new normal," it's more important than ever for leaders to have the courage to fire what they cannot fix.

Originally published in CFO.com. 

• Trained himself to intimidate others by honing a “trick of using stares and silences to master other people.”
• Denied IPO stock options to a colleague who “joined Apple when it was headquartered in Jobs’ garage.”
• Possessed “an uncanny capacity to know” other individuals’ weak points and make them “feel small.”
• Took credit for ideas that were not his. “When told of a new idea, he will immediately attack it” and, if it is a good one, “he will soon be telling people about it as though it was his own.”

Isaacson came to the conclusion that Jobs “could have controlled himself if he had wanted. When he hurt people, it was not because he was lacking in emotional awareness. Quite the contrary: He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, and know how to relate to them, cajole them, or hurt them at will.”

If that’s true, then Jobs hurt people because he wanted to, because doing so served his ends and gave him some sort of pleasure. And when challenged about his behavior, Jobs is reported to have said, “This is who I am, and you can’t expect me to be someone I’m not.”

Well, actually, we can. We don’t accept this excuse from our children and we certainly shouldn’t accept it from adults. Apparently, he needed help in growing up. Those around Jobs who tolerated his bad behavior did him, themselves, and their various organizations a disservice. There’s no reason his legacy could not have included admirable human as well as technological works.

And what would have happened if Jobs had been held accountable for his behavior, rather than having been enabled by those who let Steve be Steve? Would we still have all our beloved “i” products? Don’t fall into the trap of believing that ends justify means. None of us, not even Steve Jobs, is indispensable. He may have been a genius, but he’s not the only one we’ve had. The fusion of personal technology and humanity would have occurred without Jobs — at some time and in some form — just as electricity and the telephone would exist today even if Franklin and Bell had not.

Great leaders strive to treat others with dignity. They understand that life is short and companies and products come and go. They believe that communities and organizations are accountable for taking care of people and the planet. They have gained the wisdom that today’s kind words echo into future generations. If you’re looking for role models, reread Jim Collins’s book, Good to Great. If you do, you’ll find plenty of leaders who took care of their customers, their companies, and their people by building “enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.”

Among those I spoke with about the Jobs biography, a very smart and compassionate leader made me laugh when he said, “I don’t want my children to grow up to be Steve Jobs.” This man wants his children to be positive role models; he wants them to succeed. And he understands that, organizationally and individually, meanness doesn’t pay off.

Companies that allow abuse reduce their productive capacity as people devote a considerable portion of their creative energies to protecting themselves. The Jobs biography reveals that some of the tactics used by his subordinates in order to survive in the dysfunctional environment he willfully created included lying in order to ensure that the right work got done with appropriate resources. What a waste! It makes one wonder if Apple would be even more strongly positioned today with a founding leader who knew how to play well with others.

Individuals who think they can succeed by being mean are kidding themselves. Companies want people who can get things done in a way that builds relationships rather than subverts them. Jobs’s gifts and a considerable amount of luck allowed him to be spectacularly successful in spite of his pettiness and lack of emotional maturity. We should take care not to mistake his weaknesses for strengths; we shouldn’t try to emulate behaviors that make success — in life and in business — harder to achieve.

As you attempt to glean lessons from Jobs’s leadership, focus on the good and discard the bad. Apple, I believe, succeeded in spite of Jobs’s flaws, not because of them.

Orginally published on CFO.com

Smart people can make stupid decisions. Case in point: business executives who decide they can address their technology needs without involving IT, responding to the IT supply-and-demand crunch that afflicts so many enterprises today.

In my experience, nobody wins in these do-it-yourself projects. The executive who sponsors the project puts his or her reputation on the line by promising outcomes dependent on technologies that he or she is ill-equipped to develop, implement, or manage. The IT executive finds him- or herself powerless, relegated to integration and support tasks without having had adequate resources and time allocated for the project. Meanwhile, the CFO watches dollars flying out the window as the budget for ill-conceived and poorly executed initiatives becomes a moving target.

But although it’s tempting to try to redirect a DIY technology initiative and send it back into the arms of IT, that’s usually the wrong thing to do. Invariably, the IT executive will try, but fail, to address the technology needs of the now very grumpy executive. The very grumpy executive will blame his or her function’s performance issues on the lack of the necessary technology to support the unit’s plans. And the CFO will discover that it costs more to stop a DIY project (while trying to satisfy the requirements of the ever-grumpier executive) than it does to let it go forward subject to agreements with the executive to operate within newly defined guardrails regarding costs, benefits, and timing.

Once begun, DIY projects take on a life of their own and it’s in the best interests of all involved to make the best of a bad situation. IT should heed the advice of one wise CIO and treat the projects as a “great opportunity to partner, change their organization and save everyone’s job” by supporting the initiative and improving the way future project priorities are defined and the speed at which technology is delivered. And CFOs should snatch (at least a little) victory from the jaws of defeat by holding the business executive accountable for delivering performance improvements enabled by the new technology.

The only way to prevent DIY projects from emerging in the first place is to set up a situation in which business leaders would never consider going rogue — by pursuing low-priority initiatives and/or contracting directly with an external IT provider. As CFO, you should partner with your CIO to:

1) Sponsor an IT prioritization process in which business leaders can get to weigh in and have their voices heard. Once decisions are made, however, everyone is expected to buy in.

2) Ensure that IT operates as a “one-stop shop” (by brokering internal as well as external technology solutions and delivery approaches), and stipulate that IT-related procurement decisions require IT approval.

While it’s a given that smart people at times make stupid decisions, they rarely embark on courses of action that run counter to their best interests. DIY projects are a symptom of enterprise incentives and capabilities gone awry. Help your smart people make smarter IT decisions by learning from — not stopping — DIY projects.

Orginally published at CFO.com

A productive CIO-CFO relationship is critical to the successful exploitation of technology. And, in general, CIOs find the relationship difficult and frustrating to navigate.

One of the root causes of the frustration stems from the fact that when it comes to IT, CFOs serve multiple and often conflicting roles: CFO's are IT's business partner, banker, and in some cases, boss. This means that in a given work week, it's not unusual for CFOs to request additional IT support, cut the IT budget, and criticize the CIO's progress in strengthening the company's competitive position.  

As a business partner, CFOs are not - and should not be - the CIO's top priority. And, for the most part, CFOs agree. They understand that front office investments should trump the back office. But CFOs are human. They hear about the promise of real time analytics at conferences and complaints about manual workarounds and multiple versions of the truth in staff meetings, and feel compelled to throw their requests in the demand queue.

In their role as the enterprise's banker, many CFOs are viewed by CIOs as adversaries, not allies. The two parties play an ongoing game of chicken with CIOs asking for more money and CFOs asking for more justification. This leads CIOs to offer up impressive ROIs and CFOs to dismiss the ever-elusive "R" and drill down into the ever-present "I".

As a boss, CFOs are often believed by CIOs to be more a hindrance than a help. Often, CFOs don't have the IT knowledge to serve as a sounding board and don't spend their precious leadership capital to open doors, twist arms, and forge cross-functional alliances to advance the CIO's agenda. This leaves CIOs on their own to exert influence with superiors who expect to be served rather than governed.

CFOs can help improve the CFO-CIO relationship by adopting an enterprise perspective, leveraging their authority, and getting smarter about IT:

• Adopt an enterprise perspective. As a business partner, challenge your people to identify IT-enabled opportunities that deliver benefit beyond the four walls of the finance organization or the company. For example, improving the efficiency of credit processing is good, but doing so while reducing the timeframe to approve and extend credit is even better. There are many good ideas on how to leverage IT, but the truly great ones change the company's products and how the company interacts with and services its customers.

• Leverage your financial authority on behalf of IT. As a banker, help your CIO strengthen the relationship between IT investments and IT returns by holding business sponsors accountable for realizing the benefits outlined in their business cases. To do so, ensure that project justifications outline the operational metrics that serve as leading indicators to projected financial benefits (e.g., improvements in cycle time, quality, accuracy, customer service, etc.) and that project plans incorporate baseline measurement and post-implementation monitoring.

• Increase your IT-smarts. As a boss, you need to lead, follow or get out of the way. If you choose to lead, increase your IT-smarts by reading, studying, attending conferences, participating in research consortiums, and getting hands-on exposure to the technology used in your company and others. If you choose not to get immersed in the IT world, then relinquish your supervisory role and arrange for the CIO to report to the CEO or, at minimum, have the freedom to act as if they do.

Of course, merging your multiple IT personalities won't miraculously heal the relationship if your CIO is in over his head.  But, regardless of the case, doing so will help ensure that you are setting your CIO up for success rather than dragging him down.

Originally published at cfo.com.

Cloud computing is inevitable.  

The end state promises computing resources that deliver against the New Normal's need for speed, collaboration, productivity, and scale.

The transition state, however, delivers nothing but challenges for all involved.

On the vendor side, big names don't necessarily equate to big capabilities.  Every "world class" cloud vendor consists of mere mortal employees who are struggling (given organizational silos, fragmented technology, and dramatic growth) to deliver on their company's service level commitments .  Buyers beware.  Take your reference checks to a new level - and focus not only on vendor capabilities but also the internal capabilities necessary to make sure the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

On the company side, technology and process changes are pretty well understood, security implications less so, but the organizational impacts are the most profound and sure to confound.  

As we transition from managing assets to services, what is the role for our MVP technologists?  With the transition to cloud, they are being asked to transfer their knowledge and manage service levels without direct access to the tools that allow them to do so.  As an technical IT leader said to me recently, "We are now managing relationships and tickets - not technology."

Don't write off these employees as "unnecessary" in the end state and replaceable in the transition.  Companies need to "lift and shift" their MVP technologists from the micro to the macro:  architecting, integrating, innovating, directing, monitoring, resolving, negotiating.

As you move to cloud computing, how are you making sure that your people are moving with you?