CEO and CIO: Eye to Eye

As Senior Advisor to the CEO, Dave focuses on key projects important to PMI’s mission and community. Prior to that, as Chief Strategy & Growth Officer for PMI, Dave collaboratively defined and drove the execution of the Institute's strategy to create exponential growth in relevance and impact. Working globally, across the organization to define, test, and deliver "new products that matter," which will deliver dramatic increases in value to our customers.

  Governance  

Gartner Vice President Robert Handler is VERY familiar with how decisions are made and how executives work together in creating mission-critical systems.  He heads up Enterprise Planning and Architecture Strategies for the world’s largest technology research firm and has recently co-written IT Portfolio Management—Step by Step: Unlocking the Business Value of Technology.  Here’s his take on CEO/CIO relationships:

gantthead: In your book, you talk about the CIO, “…providing a venture capitalist approach in taking calculated risks based on potential IT solutions that could  increase productivity, drive revenue growth, and decrease costs.”  That implies a very cut-throat approach to things, a very high expected return on each transaction, many failures coupled with huge successes, and a generally short-term perspective on potential returns.  Should projects that a CIO considers absolutely produce a very quick and high return on investment?

Robert Handler: Not at all. If anything, organizations are too short term in their thought process and planning horizon. Venture capitalist is just one of the many hats a CIO must wear, helping to facilitate decisions that have high risk and correspondingly high reward. CIOs should have a reasonable balance of investments that support the vision, strategy and …

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