Charles Araujo

By Charles Araujo Editor’s note: This is the second installment of an eight-part article series titled “Seven Steps to a Next-Generation IT Organization.” To read the first installment, click here. “You’re supposed to teach and I’m supposed to learn. For four days I’ve been bustin’ my ****, and haven’t learned a thing.” These two lines open […]

By Charles Araujo Before we go any further, I need to admit something. The title of this article is a little misleading. It’s misleading because I’m not going to give you the seven steps to creating a next-generation IT organization in this article. I’m actually going to do it in a series of eight articles, […]

By Charles Araujo Not long ago, my son and I had the privilege of sitting next to Edward James Olmos at a fundraiser for the Variety Boys & Girls Club of East Los Angeles. As you might imagine, it was very glamorous to have dinner with a bona fide movie star and real life celebrity. […]

By Charles Araujo IT is in a time of great change and churn. I think almost all of us can agree on that, but to what degree, and what to do about it, is often the subject of debate. Is this just another blip or is this something altogether different? If you’ve read my book, The […]

By Charles Araujo Over the last month, a single word has repeatedly risen in my consciousness. I started the month delivering the opening keynote at the LEADit conference in Canberra, Australia. I returned home and immediately left for the Pink Elephant Leadership Forum in Scottsdale, Ariz., where I delivered a morning keynote. As I spoke […]

By Charles Araujo It was a fairly routine appeal—a capital budget request to upgrade the organization’s WAN acceleration technology. The cost was estimated to be seven figures. But something about the request struck Michael Keithley, CIO of entertainment industry giant CAA, as wrong; he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but he felt this […]

By Charles Araujo In 1996, I had the opportunity to be a part of something special. Working for a large, regional health-care provider, I was a member of a team that broke new ground in the then-nascent world of telemedicine. Working hand-in-hand with the director responsible for implementing this new approach to health care, we […]

By Charles Araujo I was talking to a man the other day at a corporate event when he uttered the death phrase. “I’m a very strategic person,” he said. I sighed inwardly, immediately tuned him out and politely waited until I could excuse myself. First, if you have to tell someone that you are “very […]

By Charles Araujo In my last two CIO Insight articles, I first called out to all IT professionals to become IT leaders and next described the four roles of the new IT leader.  But what does that word—leader—really mean? Leadership may be both the most written about and most discussed term in the modern business […]

By Charles Araujo I was having lunch the other day with a friend of mine who is a CIO at a large organization in the bio-pharma space. As we discussed what the future of IT might look like, I asked him what he was thinking about these days—i.e., what was keeping him up at night. […]

By Charles Araujo Somewhere along the way, my focus changed. I stopped caring about titles like CIO and senior vice president–and I started caring more about the people behind the titles. I began to focus on what I call the “IT leader” and stopped defining that moniker by a title or role and instead by […]

By Charles Araujo In 1992, General Motors and the United Auto Workers (UAW) set up about three dozen “skill centers” across the country to train auto workers in new skills. These workers were not displaced–at least not yet. The union and GM had negotiated this training because they saw the industry was changing and it […]