Monday, April 3, 2006

Executive Education: Now More Than Ever

Continued from Page 2

By Carol Hilderbrand

What's Hot

No matter how CIOs choose to do the learning, there are a number of topics cited by education experts as popular with the IT set this year. In particular, the following ideas have proved relevant for CIOs:

Leadership. Fouts is not alone in his desire for an IT staff that is comfortable with leadership skills. As IT departments are called upon to build technical strategies that exploit corporate strengths and leapfrog the competition to competitive advantage, they need the leadership skills necessary to champion a project and gain buy-in from a wide variety of corporate sponsors.

"The leadership element is key," says Harvard Business School's Breckling, because while the CIO and his or her staff are in charge of implementing IT projects across a corporation, they aren't the ultimate users. Being able to work closely with managers from other departments and get everybody on board as users is critical to the success of any IT project, and that calls for the kinds of leadership skills taught at the advanced management programs run by top universities.

Strategy. In order for a CIO to put together an IT program that matches business targets, he or she has to be able to understand the company at a strategic business level, says Miller. "There was a time when people thought of CIOs as interchangeable, and that they could switch industries pretty easily," he says. "That's no longer true." These days, CIOs need to understand in great detail the various elements that drive a company's profit picture. Which division is making money? Which group is not? What's the general business climate in a given market, and how will it affect a particular industry? These are the things that CIOs need to know. "They need a deep understanding of what really drives the financials of a company," says Robert Mittelstaedt, vice dean of executive education at Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

To get that understanding, technical managers are turning to programs on strategy, such as the Management of Technology Program offered by MIT's Sloan School, or the Sloan Fellows program. Both offer one-year programs that intertwine general management skills and technical issues, explains deputy dean Lessard. Bottom line? "You have to be able to play in both spheres," he says. "If they're going to be successful in corporate management, CIOs need the ability to work successfully in the strategy domain."

Finance. The reality facing CIOs today is that while the value of IT has surged in the past 10 years, budgets have shrunk in response to straitened economic times. The result: CIOs are having more conversations with CFOs, who want convincing, quantifiable reasons to fund projects. According to the Wharton School's McCartney, smart CIOs will institute an ongoing conversation with their CFOs, with frequent check-ins to make sure that IT spending matches business priorities. But to do so, he notes, "You have to be able to speak the CFO's language."

Small wonder that finance remains a popular executive education course, says Mittelstaedt. "We see a lot of technical people in our Finance and Accounting for the Non-Financial Manager course," he notes.

Sales. While most CIOs know a lot about their businesses from an operational perspective, the new reality of managing IT requires them to think in entrepreneurial terms. "They need to be thinking, ‘Where are our opportunities to make money?'" McCartney says. "You want the CIO to begin to think of his group as a profit center." To do so, however, he or she needs to be able to pinpoint good money-making ideas and sell them to senior management. That's why CIO representation is up at such courses as Wharton's program on building and creating businesses within larger corporations. "It helps the CIO think about the fact that he has a profit and loss statement, not just a loss statement," explains Mittelstaedt.

In the end, of course, success boils down to a CIO's ability to grow and change with the business world in which he or she functions. As the old proverb puts it, "May you live in interesting times." There's no doubt that we do, and smart CIOs will embrace the opportunity to craft a new, more strategic position from the chaos of today's world. As McCartney points out, most CIOs are fully aware that their jobs are changing rapidly, and realize that they need to seize the day. "They've just got to learn and think about the questions confronting them," he says. "Otherwise they'll have to perform the corporate equivalent of flying an airplane with no training."

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