Transform Your IT Staff Into Business Contributors

Today, it's not enough to oversee a department of strong tech performers. CIOs must learn how to transform their IT people into indispensable business contributors. The book, The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership (Bibliomotion/available now), focuses on many inconsistencies that CIOs must address. Among them: Why is technology getting better, but the job is getting harder? Why do so many CIOs' successes go unnoticed, while their mistakes are so highly visible? One section focuses strictly on the paradox of hiring people as tech talents and then asking them to develop into business-minded contributors. "We don't say 'sales and the business' or even 'HR and the business,'" writes author Martha Heller. "Why is it that IT alone is treated like an outsider?" By adopting the following eight best practices from the book, your department could shed this outsider stigma. Heller is president of Heller Search Associates, a firm that specializes in recruiting CIOs and other IT executives.