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Top 5 mistakes made by CIOs

By SiliconIndia   |   Thursday, January 5, 2012
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CIOs are supposed to be responsible for the information technology and computer systems that support enterprise goals. They are looked up to as key contributors in formulating strategic goals. Yet Chief Information Officers or CIOs make many mistakes often which chain them to the existing notions that they are puny conversationalists, negative thinkers and nerdy entities.

Though CIOs are evolving with the changing work style and increasing requirements in IT enterprises, they often bump into mistakes which prove fatal in their reputation and even worse, job positions. One occasion, just a moment's carelessness can mess up things and make you feel as if you are not prepared for the task. At a position like that, CIOs can hardly manage to make mistakes which can end up in weakening enterprise security or degrade business relations by wrong designs of IT units. Still, at the end of the day, they end up in same sort of mistakes. Here is a look at 10 common mistakes CIOs make:

Not anticipating growth

IT is an industry which can overflow with changes in a fortnight. Every facet of it is changing and it will be dim-witted to remain morbid and following cliche technologies. Technology should be ahead of business, a CIO should be able to see the future of business and plan technology accordingly

Over rely on your vendors by relabeling them as partners

This is a mistake which if made lands the CIO responsible for enterprise security flaws. They trust their software vendors and outsourcing firms so much that they won't even perform due diligence on their staff to understand whether they have actually received one iota of training.

Technology obsolesce

Always running behind newer technology would be not good. There are a lot of disruptive innovations that are taking place and it's an exciting time for technologies today because there is something new, better and cheaper. But the bad news is that it is not like we can just suddenly get rid of what we have and get something new to replace what we have. So the CIOs need to figure out on how to balance it out so that you can handle technology.

Forcing IT to people without proper training

Assigning untrained people to maintain IT and computer systems and related security and not providing the training or the time to make it possible to do the job is a grave error any CIO can make. In a framework where it is very important to articulate IT value and specify business terms, forcing IT on rookies will be the last thing a CIO should be doing.

Rely on defense in depth instead of questioning your defenses - Technology countermeasures are not a panacea, and periodically a CIO have to step back and take a look at the security portfolio both from a cost and effectiveness perspective. But they probably reply on a defense in depth strategy but end up with multiple, sometimes competing and often ineffective tools at different layers - workstation, servers and network perimeter.

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