IT leadership: Transforming the CIO
Thornton May has been said to be to CIOs what Jane Goodall was to the great apes -- part scientist, part advocate, and always a friend. Indeed, if there's a bloodline father to the coinage of the term chief information officer, Thornton might come pretty close. He managed the research team in 1987 that first predicted the rise of the CIO to the executive ranks. He's a regular columnist for Computerworld and, among a vast array of other corporate consulting and academic pursuits, today Thornton is responsible for sculpting the technology curriculum for executive education at the IT Leadership Academy in Jacksonville, Florida.
Bruce Taylor spoke with Thornton May about the state of IT leadership today. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation. You may also listen to the original interview here.
Bruce Taylor: So, the IT Leadership Academy -- is that just another excuse to be in Florida in the winter?
Thornton May: Well, actually no. Well, it actually is part of the rebranding of the State of Florida, which if you ask people for the sound bite of Florida, it's where people come to end their lives, if you will, where actually Jeb Bush and his gang are trying to say there is a vibrant economy here and it is a vibrant place to start careers and perpetuate careers and to actually have your second or third career. So it's not just a cheap way of being in Florida.
But the IT Leadership Academy, as you mentioned in your introduction, Bruce, what it is is I am a groupie for CIOs. I mean, I'm out there in the field with them, I follow them around. And one of the pieces of data that immediately showed up is that not all CIOs are the same. And as we looked at the data set, we found that 16 percent of the CIOs are world-class, just out there doing amazing stuff, all right? 23 percent are good. They're moving the ball forward, you know. It's a non-toxic situation. The rest, so 61 percent are arrayed over a spectrum of averageness, actually we rendered that sympathetically because a very significant proportion just aren't that good. And so what we said was, what were the differences between the great ones, the great CIOs, and the not so great? And one of the big differences we found, I mean, actually a driver of whether you were getting full value from your information technology investments was the question of whether the CIO was involved and aware of what was going on with their first, second and third-level reports. So the whole question of leadership became critically important.
Taylor: Thornton, give me titles.
May: So a title would be a VP of architecture would be a first-level report. Second report would be a director of applications development. And a third level would be a manager, all right? So you've got that. Now, one of the things -- we went to that gang -- and this is actually about
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