Managing Time for Strategic Gain

‘Time is Money.’ For CIOs, this phrase cannot stand more corrected, both literally as well as figuratively, as they toil to scrape time from their swamped up schedule in order to address strategic issues, reports Georgina Swan of PC Advisor.

Gartner executive partner and former South East Water CIO and acting CFO, Marcus Darbyshire quips, “For me, the concept of time management is about how you spend your time, where you spend your time, who you’re spending it with and the topics you’re working on,” he said. “We look at where people are spending the percentage of their time,” Darbyshire said.

As such, it is imperative for the CIO to come up with an ingenious technique so that time could be allocated and distributed proportionately not only among his team, colleagues and his supervisors but also to himself in order to ponder upon strategically about positioning your business and utilize his own intellectual acumen to facilitate and sustain competitive advantage over his competitors.

‘CEO attention barrier’ can be perceived as another compelling excuse for CIOs to master the art of Time Management;  as interactions with senior executives, especially within a restricted framework of time, can be seen as a criterion to ascend the career graph. This problem can be diagnosed with three simple but effective remedies:

1.    Strategic initiatives and technologies should dominate the conversation.
2.    Refrain from talking about Strategic decisions.
3.    The dialogue should include personal performance benchmarks and enterprise performance indicators.

Thus, we can safely conclude that managing time strategically by a CIO serves as remuneration not only to the collective growth of the organization but to the overall maturation of oneself.