Advice for would-be CIOs

I don’t know if you read CIO magazine. I do because I plan on being a CIO in the next 5 years.

Of course, I realise that reading a magazine won’t make you into a CIO, but it sure does highlight the skills you need to work on. Take last month’s edition for example. In the Generation Tech article, the following advice popped up (p37 June/July edition):

“In part CIOs of the future will achieve alignment by securing explicit support for appropriate separation of concerns, ensuring that disruptive ‘burst through’ between IT and business domains does not occur outside control.”

Concerned that I was reading a different language I copied the text into Google translator, converted to Russian, and then converted that to English. Here’s the result:

“CIOs in part in the future be able to achieve consistency in providing unequivocal support for appropriate division of problems, providing subversive "broke through" between IT and business domains does not occur outside the control of”

I think it may have actually improved the message.

But I digress. My point is, the article highlighted a few things for me to work on, on my journey to CIO-hood: Firstly, I need to be able to understand what that guff means. Then I need to be able to deliver it. However, the real success, and the sign that I’ve made it, will be when I can pump out that kind of tosh in management meetings and keep a straight face.

(Jokes aside, it’s actually a very good publication – but snippets like this are a nice little distraction on a Friday afternoon)