The drive for efficiency has never been more important in todays challenging business environment.   That drive will often lead to a review of the business processes to identify and take out inefficiencies. These reviews have, in many cases, grown into major projects which can become expensive and difficult to handle successfully, often ending up failing or achieving a compromise which doesn’t meet the original goal.

The day of the virtual worker for some industries continues to move forward due to technology advances and social changes.

The other day I was feeling fatigued with the amount of data I was filtering and was thinking there must be more to life? Was it just my age or was I experiencing social media fatigue. I have read recently that people have been leaving some well-known social media sites and then there has been the negative headlines regarding anti-social activities fuelled by social media, so obviously I am not alone.

The CIO as the superhero - P Man

The succession plan is something that is encouraged by HR Directors as a part of normal management planning and should be seen as such and not as a threat.  I am sure some CIO’s have worried about whether it would make them more vulnerable if an able number 2 was waiting in the wings. Even more so if the number 2 is slightly more adept at socialising and communicating with executives in the business.

So apart from any paranoia the question for debate is should the successor come from inside or outside?

Greece is currently in the news a lot and not always for the right things but it has a great history and is famous for its philosophers so putting recent events to one side and looking back, what can we take from the ancient Greeks in today’s IT world. Let’s remember that in those days they were extremely successful. Here are a few thoughts from the past that are still relevant today:-

Knowledge

The original saying is you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone but with IT applications they don’t go and the list just keeps growing.

Let’s face it we often have more important things, things that are new, exciting, change driving so why worry about the applications portfolio.

One of the biggest challenges for business today is how to differentiate yourself from the competition and keep ahead of the pack. The CIO needs to be in the forefront of this challenge.  

We can beat competitors on quality or price but these are proven techniques that use buying power or process efficiencies - and with some effort we could all go down those routes.

One thing that is important if you want to have project success is having a consistent methodology across the whole organisation. 

The alternative of allowing different methodologies or no methodology is often inefficiencies, higher costs, longer schedules and of course higher risk. Consistency means having a standard way of managing all projects. It ensures that all aspects of the project are considered, evaluated and documented.

The world of social media provides IT and Business Management with lots of up to the minute information much faster than ever before when previously you waited for the monthly magazine or weekly newspaper.  Now with such tools as ‘Twitter’, event information is nearly in real time.