The IT Leader’s Hero Quest

Think you could be CIO? Jim Barton is a savvy manager but an IT newbie when he's promoted into the hot seat as chief information officer in The Adventures of an IT Leader, a novel by HBS professors Robert D. Austinand Richard L. Nolan and coauthor Shannon O'Donnell. Can Barton navigate his strange new world quickly enough? Q&A with the authors, and book excerpt. Key concepts include:

• The role of CIO is one of the most volatile, high-turnover jobs in business. Why? The driving cause is more than rapid change in IT. Rather, IT is at the crossroads of major organizational change.
• Barton soon realizes that IT-specific knowledge is not a key to success. Instead, he must take care to collaborate equally with the senior management team and his own staff.
• Like Barton, today's senior executives are continuously confronted with situations with multiple uncertainties, needing collaboration and input from experts who may know more than they d
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Question And Answers:

Q: What makes a CIO job the most volatile, high-turnover job in business? How important is CIO leadership for the future success of companies?

A: Early in our careers at the Harvard Business School, we discovered that the turnover of CIOs ran at around 30 to 40 percent per year. As a result of our research, we described the driving cause as the rapid change of IT through the operation of Moore's Law (IT cost halving every 18 months or so), which we thought would be short-lived. But when we looked at the turnover rates again a few years later, we discovered the rate was about the same, but the driving cause was more than just the rapid change in IT: It was also because IT was the nexus of major organizational change, the key enabler of business process redesign.

Over the years, the CIO job has remained a hot seat in business and has, in turn, become a key management position in executing a company's competitive cost structure and strategy. It has become a key senior management position that can enable companies to transform their twentieth-century industrial organization structures to twenty-first-century information-based organization structures.

Q: Barton seems to accept and perhaps appreciate the different personalities and work styles in his group. How much of effective CIO leadership has to do with the people side of managing?

A: We think there are work styles unique to certain tasks in IT organizations. Chapter 3 explores one difference: the need to sometimes include input from specialists when making key management decisions, given that managers often can't keep up with the high-speed technological advances their employees master, and that so much of the work is difficult to observe.