I remember working at a company when a new CIO started. He had great ideas and was very scholarly. He had just come from one of those Gartner type companies that had a wonderful theoretical grasp of IT. After about nine months, he was shuttled out and replaced by a new CIO. His only claim to fame was that he created a document called the “ten guiding principles of IT”. The organization was the same dysfunctional IT that he inherited when he started.
Strategy is critical to helping show an organization where “true north” is so you can align the team around the goal. But after nine months, if all you have to show for yourself is a document, a theme, or something other than tangible, measurable IT metrics, your vision is nothing more than a wish. As in “I wish they would follow me.”
