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10 September 2014

If you are the CIO, or one of our multiple equivalents, do you send your people on professional development courses? Do you indulge in anything of that kind yourself or do you believe in Continuous Professional Development (CPD)? Assuming your responses are affirmative, then the next set of questions has to be about how committed you are, what types of training do you spend the budget on and who decides? How much of it actually happens for your team?

Another factor is the corporate climate: some organisations pay lip service to CPD, others make it a serious and even disciplinary matter. Some just tick vaguely appropriate lists, others go into some depth with both line managers and candidates to explore what might be the most valuable. Some enlightened organisations even consider personal skills development at least as potentially rewarding to both the employee and the employer as the more common specific and specialist technical courses.

Lights-on priorities
Is this important in ICT or is it just another example of idealistic or academic HR thinking — fancy notions getting in the way of the ‘lights on’ priorities? ‘Getting on with the real job’ is the oldest, most used excuse in the world for putting off things that could be perceived as inessential or for the future. In part, of course, that is because it is so often valid. Many if not most IT chiefs would say the perennial condition of the IT department is understaffed and under-resourced. In that context, training courses for anything other than mandatory certification are about as useful as a bout of flu in the office. In fact a goodly proportion of senior IT people are dismissive of vendor certification as another box ticking and revenue producing exercise. ‘My guys already know more about this stuff and have more experience than most of the trainers’ is a not uncommon utterance.

“We quite rightly debate the role of the CIO because what exactly the job and its responsibilities involve is not settled internationally, depends totally on the industry and the culture of the specific organisation, and is dynamically changing and developing”

As always, the trick is balance between imperatives. Which is, arguably, what a CIO is always trying to and expected to do. In training and development, let us park for a moment any statutory, HR policy, best practice or vendor-obligated stuff (accepting that is easy for this column to say). What are you aiming to achieve from this for the success of your department?

Like IT itself, all too often — and as you undoubtedly say yourself — staff development can be regarded either as an unfortunately essential overhead or as the basis for change, innovation and positive contribution to better mission performance. Could you be one of those CIOs pushing ICT for transformation at the C-suite yet begrudging your deputy or juniors time off for a conference or brainstorming seminar with peers?

Constant debate
We constantly debate the changing role of the CIO, in business and specialist media, at conferences and trade shows and — in most depth — in the pub. Quite rightly, because what exactly the job and its responsibilities involve is not settled internationally, depends totally on the industry and the culture of the specific organisation, and is dynamically changing and developing. So there is constant debate, with the only consistent themes being that it is no longer about just keeping the systems lights on and that it has to be involved in change and innovation in the organisation.

Which is fodder for all that public discussion about the CIO. But it often seems more than slightly out of synch with ‘the role of the IT department’, as if change and innovation is only required or happening at the top. Indeed one sometimes hyped vision of the CIO has her or him as a sort of commodity service broker, with no in-house team beyond perhaps a personalcabinet, although facilities management may well inherit some screwdriver-wielding technicians. There would, of course, be an NSA-level control system of multiple screens and performance monitoring tools to manage all those services and their providers. Add automation, in-line analytics and artificial intelligence when it grows up and no doubt we will soon be talking about doing it all on a smart watch.

Where there used to be an IT department, skilled up for the systems the organisation has invested heavily in, there would be a comprehensive set of outsourced service providers. They would come with SLAs far tighter than any employment contract — and considerably easier to dispense with in the event of under-par performance.

Which is a legitimate vision for the CIO and the organisation of the future, but thoroughly unrealistic. One of the favourite words of marketing guys and media gurus is ‘legacy’, with its implicit notions of someone who died and left some stuff, possibly useful but essentially outdated if not yet antique. Legacy, in this context, is more than a little patronising, even dismissive. But of course what we are really talking about is significant ICT estate, carefully and expensively invested in over some years and, by and large, carefully, even lovingly, maintained by people who know its ins and outs very well. Almost always, to invoke that wise old saying, ‘if it ain’t broke…’

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