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I would guess that being a CIO is 80% about management/people skills and 20% about technology. Hopefully that goes some way to explaining why these people did n

by ivix 14y ago

I would guess that being a CIO is 80% about management/people skills and 20% about technology. Hopefully that goes some way to explaining why these people did not understand your email.

ihsw 14y ago
This is a C-level position at a publicly-funded institution, that ratio is closer to 95% and 5%. I would even go so far as to say that these individuals very likely have a background in law or simply have an MBNA. Engineers aren't in charge, anywhere, other than tech companies.
- awakeasleep 14y ago
  I still can't wrap my head around this. The CFO damn well understands finance. The COO understands operations. Why aren CIOs held to the same standard?
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    CFO understands finance because the people who hire CFOs know their organisation will bleed out if money is not controlled - they understand the consequences of mismanaging IT They understand their organisation will descend into chaos I their Operations are not controlled But they probably always have lived with crap IT - and so so not understand what competitive advantages come from having IT well controlled. Give it thirty or so years
    - PakG1 14y ago
      Highly doubtful. My day job is at big IT company. Possibly the most well-known in history. You can guess. I'm the lead guy on my team for running our quality control. 6-sigma style stuff. The guy in charge of international training for this quality program said, "The fact is, IT is now a commodity." The whole meme started with Nick Carr's infamous Does IT Matter? editorial in the Harvard Business Review. He argued that while IT provided a competitive advantage in the past, it doesn't anymore. It's important for keeping up with the competition, but it will never put you ahead of the competition because it has been commoditized. All of his arguments made perfect sense at the time. And most IT organizations to date still take them to heart. His arguments just assumed one thing incorrectly: they assumed that enterprise IT would never change in terms of the end user functionality it delivered. He assumed there was no more innovation to be had, that everything ever needed to be invented had been invented, and so we had reached the peak of functionality, like how you can't improve much upon the hammer and nail beyond perhaps the screw and electric power screwdriver. Unfortunately, IT is treated like a commodity for most organizations, and commodities never get special attention.
      - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
        I think we are agreeing - it is rare that a senior board member has seen how effective and competent IT embedded through out a organisation can transform that organisations flexibility, responsiveness etc etc. Most CEOs think IT is a commodity like electricity - you cannot buy "better" electricity. But this is crap - way back when you could buy better electricity - the debate ranged from power smoothing to DC/AC - and your smelter or your lights could depend on the Chief Electrical Officer ... oh hell I don't care anymore - anyone dumb enough not to think that an IT literate workforce working on IT-enabled processes cannot out perform an illiterate company (just as we now know a reading and writing literate workforce can) deserves to get Schumpeter-ed
        jeltz 14y ago
        > But this is crap - way back when you could buy better electricity - the debate ranged from power smoothing to DC/AC - and your smelter or your lights could depend on the Chief Electrical Officer And even today when it comes to the price it still matters. And in the developing world you still can buy electricity with different quality and uptime.
      - LambdaDriver 14y ago
        I've read the original article a while back so forgive me if my memory is a bit off. His argument centered around these fortune 500 companies whom purchased big ERP systems and had custom development done for various parts of their businesses as a strategic investment (and a trade secret). It turned out that almost all of these companies built similar modules, since all of these companies on average hired smart managers that understood where inefficiencies could be eliminated via technology. His correct conclusion was that these bits of tech were not strategic but rather simply the cost of doing business and thusly were open to commoditization. Now here's where folks take a leap of faith and say that /all/ IT doesn't matter. The way I look at it, all innovation can be strategic depending upon your business and its priorities. For most companies power and ping are commodities, but for Google it is a competitive advantage. Google would never outsource their operations to big blue, but for PWC that would probably be a good move. Even at the micro scale you can see this in github repos where large companies will open source core modules but keep their competitive code proprietary.
- chollida1 14y ago
  > I would even go so far as to say that these individuals very likely have a background in law or simply have an MBNA IS MBNA a typo for MBA or is this a specialized certification I've never heard of?
  - ihsw 14y ago
    Oh, yes I meant MBA. Sorry for the confusion.
- rayiner 14y ago
  30% of MBA's are engineers, and the most common degree for CEO's is engineering. 1/3 of S&P 500 CEO's have an engineering degree, even though only a small fraction of the S&P 500 is tech companies.
  - mustpax 14y ago
    A lot of people get engineering degrees as a signalling mechanism to prove they can do hard work, not because they have any interest in becoming engineers. Formal training in a subject combined with a lack of intrinsic curiosity about the subject makes the worst engineering managers you will ever meet.
    - donall 14y ago
      I think this is probably true. Empirically speaking, a lot of the guys who graduated with their B.Sc. in computer science with me saw their career paths as joining a big consulting company, working on the front lines for a couple of years and then getting into management and leaving the code behind for good. In my PhD program, most guys in the lab saw the actual engineering side of things as a stepping stone to higher-paid positions in acadaemia. Clearly a significant number of people with engineering degrees are engineers only by title.
      - rayiner 14y ago
        The claim was that "engineers are never the one in charge." If your argument is that engineers cease to be engineers once they get into management, then it's tautological that "engineers are never in charge."
        lindenr 14y ago
        The point as I read it was that people who aspire to management aren't really engineers in the truest sense, but engineers "only by title". That is, people working on actual engineering aren't really "engineers" if they have their eyes set on something else, like a higher position in acadaemia.
mikeash 14y ago
"People skills" includes understanding your areas of competence and getting assistance from your underlings where needed. Sending back a nastygram because you don't understand what's going on is as much a failure of people skills as it is technology skills.
rwg 14y ago
I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but if they don't understand the technology, then they should have an underling who does monitoring the abuse@ mailbox...
lambda 14y ago
The person answering emails for abuse@... shouldn't be the CIO or other management type. It should be a tech support person who has a modicum of clue, and knows who to forward the email to who can deal with and respond to it appropriately.

by ivix 14y ago

I would guess that being a CIO is 80% about management/people skills and 20% about technology. Hopefully that goes some way to explaining why these people did not understand your email.

ihsw 14y ago

This is a C-level position at a publicly-funded institution, that ratio is closer to 95% and 5%. I would even go so far as to say that these individuals very likely have a background in law or simply have an MBNA. Engineers aren't in charge, anywhere, other than tech companies.

awakeasleep 14y ago
I still can't wrap my head around this. The CFO damn well understands finance. The COO understands operations. Why aren CIOs held to the same standard?
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  CFO understands finance because the people who hire CFOs know their organisation will bleed out if money is not controlled - they understand the consequences of mismanaging IT They understand their organisation will descend into chaos I their Operations are not controlled But they probably always have lived with crap IT - and so so not understand what competitive advantages come from having IT well controlled. Give it thirty or so years
  - PakG1 14y ago
    Highly doubtful. My day job is at big IT company. Possibly the most well-known in history. You can guess. I'm the lead guy on my team for running our quality control. 6-sigma style stuff. The guy in charge of international training for this quality program said, "The fact is, IT is now a commodity." The whole meme started with Nick Carr's infamous Does IT Matter? editorial in the Harvard Business Review. He argued that while IT provided a competitive advantage in the past, it doesn't anymore. It's important for keeping up with the competition, but it will never put you ahead of the competition because it has been commoditized. All of his arguments made perfect sense at the time. And most IT organizations to date still take them to heart. His arguments just assumed one thing incorrectly: they assumed that enterprise IT would never change in terms of the end user functionality it delivered. He assumed there was no more innovation to be had, that everything ever needed to be invented had been invented, and so we had reached the peak of functionality, like how you can't improve much upon the hammer and nail beyond perhaps the screw and electric power screwdriver. Unfortunately, IT is treated like a commodity for most organizations, and commodities never get special attention.
    - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
      I think we are agreeing - it is rare that a senior board member has seen how effective and competent IT embedded through out a organisation can transform that organisations flexibility, responsiveness etc etc. Most CEOs think IT is a commodity like electricity - you cannot buy "better" electricity. But this is crap - way back when you could buy better electricity - the debate ranged from power smoothing to DC/AC - and your smelter or your lights could depend on the Chief Electrical Officer ... oh hell I don't care anymore - anyone dumb enough not to think that an IT literate workforce working on IT-enabled processes cannot out perform an illiterate company (just as we now know a reading and writing literate workforce can) deserves to get Schumpeter-ed
      - jeltz 14y ago
        > But this is crap - way back when you could buy better electricity - the debate ranged from power smoothing to DC/AC - and your smelter or your lights could depend on the Chief Electrical Officer And even today when it comes to the price it still matters. And in the developing world you still can buy electricity with different quality and uptime.
    - LambdaDriver 14y ago
      I've read the original article a while back so forgive me if my memory is a bit off. His argument centered around these fortune 500 companies whom purchased big ERP systems and had custom development done for various parts of their businesses as a strategic investment (and a trade secret). It turned out that almost all of these companies built similar modules, since all of these companies on average hired smart managers that understood where inefficiencies could be eliminated via technology. His correct conclusion was that these bits of tech were not strategic but rather simply the cost of doing business and thusly were open to commoditization. Now here's where folks take a leap of faith and say that /all/ IT doesn't matter. The way I look at it, all innovation can be strategic depending upon your business and its priorities. For most companies power and ping are commodities, but for Google it is a competitive advantage. Google would never outsource their operations to big blue, but for PWC that would probably be a good move. Even at the micro scale you can see this in github repos where large companies will open source core modules but keep their competitive code proprietary.
chollida1 14y ago
> I would even go so far as to say that these individuals very likely have a background in law or simply have an MBNA IS MBNA a typo for MBA or is this a specialized certification I've never heard of?
- ihsw 14y ago
  Oh, yes I meant MBA. Sorry for the confusion.
rayiner 14y ago
30% of MBA's are engineers, and the most common degree for CEO's is engineering. 1/3 of S&P 500 CEO's have an engineering degree, even though only a small fraction of the S&P 500 is tech companies.
- mustpax 14y ago
  A lot of people get engineering degrees as a signalling mechanism to prove they can do hard work, not because they have any interest in becoming engineers. Formal training in a subject combined with a lack of intrinsic curiosity about the subject makes the worst engineering managers you will ever meet.
  - donall 14y ago
    I think this is probably true. Empirically speaking, a lot of the guys who graduated with their B.Sc. in computer science with me saw their career paths as joining a big consulting company, working on the front lines for a couple of years and then getting into management and leaving the code behind for good. In my PhD program, most guys in the lab saw the actual engineering side of things as a stepping stone to higher-paid positions in acadaemia. Clearly a significant number of people with engineering degrees are engineers only by title.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      The claim was that "engineers are never the one in charge." If your argument is that engineers cease to be engineers once they get into management, then it's tautological that "engineers are never in charge."
      - lindenr 14y ago
        The point as I read it was that people who aspire to management aren't really engineers in the truest sense, but engineers "only by title". That is, people working on actual engineering aren't really "engineers" if they have their eyes set on something else, like a higher position in acadaemia.

mikeash 14y ago

"People skills" includes understanding your areas of competence and getting assistance from your underlings where needed. Sending back a nastygram because you don't understand what's going on is as much a failure of people skills as it is technology skills.

rwg 14y ago

I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but if they don't understand the technology, then they should have an underling who does monitoring the abuse@ mailbox...

lambda 14y ago

The person answering emails for abuse@... shouldn't be the CIO or other management type. It should be a tech support person who has a modicum of clue, and knows who to forward the email to who can deal with and respond to it appropriately.