6 Ways to start thinking like a CIO and now it can help you get there

These types of questions can help provide you a number of insights, including the following:

• An understanding of how your manager and other senior IT executives view IT success can help you maximize your personal job performance.
• Ongoing observations of how the office politics a level above you work will help you navigate those politics when you are promoted to those professional levels.
• An understanding of the relationship between IT and the business community they serve can help you maximize the client service you provide and gain insights as to how IT is viewed within the company. These insights can not only help you better understand senior IT management decisions, but they can also help you decide if your current employer is somewhere you would like to be long term.

In turn, the above insights, and dozens like them, will in time broaden your perspective of the business of IT well beyond the tasks you currently perform. This widened perspective will allow you to see your department’s role within IT and IT’s role within the company. Senior IT executives have this wider perspective because they live it every day. It’s a key component of the decisions they make. It relates to how they are treated on a day-to-day basis by their peers and senior business executives. In short, it’s this widened perspective that helped propel them into the IT management roles they possess and a key factor in their ongoing survival and success within the role. For you, this widened perspective will help you succeed in your current role and assist in you in moving vertically through your organization toward the role of CIO.

If you have any questions about your career in IT, please email me at
eric@ManagerMechanics.com or find me on Twitter at @EricPBloom.

Until next time, work hard, work smart, and continue to grow.

Read more of Eric Bloom's Your IT Career blog and follow the latest IT news at ITworld. Follow Eric on Twitter at @EricPBloom. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-tos, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.