How to Fail as a CIO

The awful truth about being a CIO is that there are a lot more ways to fail than to succeed:

1. You can fail to deliver key projects.
2. You can be ambushed by deficiencies in your infrastructure (e.g., customer credit card information leaks out).
3. You can be overwhelmed by thousands of small things that add up (e.g., massive support problems due to poor control over PC's).
4. You can waste millions of dollars on tools and infrastructure because unreasonable user demands force you to support too many conflicting platforms.
5. You can focus your organization’s efforts on the wrong things (usually discovered when your company’s competition comes out with something that you could have done).
6. You can even do everything else right but fail because you don't hit it off with the other executives.

But let’s be clear about all of these failures. They all come down to the statement I made earlier in this article: If the company expects “X” and you deliver “Y” then you fail. Sure it’s important for you to be able to deliver, but in my experience ninety percent or more of CIO failures come from not managing the expectations of your business executives. Make sure that if “Y” is going to be delivered, then “Y” is what’s expected. Managing expectations is the way to avoid CIO failure.

Continue reading The MakingITclear® Newsletter, March, 2007: article

Google for info on CIO Qualifications

World's No. 1 guru is an Indian: C K Prahalad

MUMBAI: India gave the world the word “guru”. And now, an Indian has been declared the world’s foremost management guru. C K Prahalad, professor at the University of Michigan’s Stephen M Ross School of Business, has been crowned the greatest management thinker alive by Thinkers 50, an annual ranking of the top 50 management thought leaders in the world. .. continue reading full news story

Same page: There are three other Indians in the top 50: CEO coach Ram Charan at No. 22 (up from No. 24 last year), innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan of the Tuck Business School at No. 23 (No. 31 last year); and Harvard’s Rakesh Khurana at No. 45 (No. 33 last year).

see also: Untapped $5 trillion market

John’s Eight Laws of Library Technology

Greetings. I have worked in the information technology industry for over a decade, mostly as a web developer for IBM. One day I was in my local library, looking at the library OPAC, thinking, ‘Why isn’t this more like Amazon?’ That thought took me to library school. It turns out librarians were thinking the same thing, and they are busy reinventing the OPAC. To my surprise, what I learned at library school was that I was less interested in library technology than librarianship. I have recently launched a new blog, slowreading.net, where I intend to focus more on reading research and practices in libraries and in culture. But I have a number of thoughts on information technology that I have not unpacked. I wanted to do small justice to them by summing them up in a single post. I hope they are useful to somebody in the library field. [The 8 Laws of Library Technology are]:

1. It all comes down to data and rules... 2. Organized information is handier than disorganized information... 3. The rate at which data is being recorded is accelerating faster than our ability to manage it... 4. Librarians should not build their own software systems... 5. These days there is only one way to acquire a system: buy a package, and two, custom build it... 6. RSS and XML are cooler than you think... 7. Print is the next evolution in information technology... 8. Library technology is less interesting than librarianship... Continue reading

Filed under: librarianship, libraries, library2.0, print, software, technology

[NB. info courtesy: Sukhdev's World: Library Technology ]

See also:

Librarians and Techies – A NEXUS

Mining The Library Catalog: Emerging Trends, A Literature Survey

Alternative Cataloging / Information Visualization

How can i practice gratitude

[PDF] The Saint, the Surfer and the CEO

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Search by topic By faith By name

and much more @ Inspiration -- Beliefnet.com

Robin Sharma on Leadership, Management, and Personality Development

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Robin Sharma on: 8 Things Successful People Do @ You Tube

Robin Sharma - Expert on leadership and personality development

Robin Sharma named #6 in worldwide ranking of leadership gurus - after Jack Welch

Get inside Robin's head: blog @ http://www.robinsharma.com

Announcing Academic / Research Librarian of the Year DEADLINE

Do you know the next
ACADEMIC / RESEARCH LIBRARIAN OF THE YEAR?

The deadline is quckly approaching. Please get your nominations in by December 7, 2007

This award recognizes an outstanding member of the library profession who has made a significant national or international contribution to academic or research librarianship and library development. This award recognizes and honors achievement in such areas as:

• Service to the organized profession through ACRL and related organizations
• Significant and influential research on academic or research library service
• Publication of a body of scholarly and/or theoretical writing contributing to academic or research library development
• Planning and implementing a library program of such exemplary quality that it has served as a model for others

Award: Plaque and cash award sponsored by YBP Library Services

Send nominations to:
Academic / Research Librarian of the Year Award
ACRL, 50 E. Huron Street , Chicago , IL 60611

See details in the Awards Section of the ACRL Web site: http://www.ala.org/acrl

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ACRL announces forthcoming title: “Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester"

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