Report: CIOs, Stop Squandering Your Time

To add more value to their work, CIOs should stop defining services in technical rather than business terms and should spend less time policing budget priorities, business research firm Gartner advised in a report released April 5.

Most CIOs surveyed for the report said they were often stretched too thin between delivering on new enterprise requirements and other increasing demands on their time. In the report, Gartner identified six time-consuming and value-reducing tasks that CIOs get bogged down with. If IT leaders and CIOs stopping doing these things, according to the report, they’d free up time to improve their performance.

The need to choose the work items that will deliver the most benefit to CIOs and their enterprises is a common thread running through Gartner’s six points of advice. Failing to do so will damage the value of an IT leader’s role and diminish his or her career potential, the report said.

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The report tells CIOs in no uncertain terms to stop being the budget-priority police for their organizations. CIOs are spending too much time rationalizing the requests of individual business units for tools and services, especially personal productivity tools, according to Gartner, headquartered in Stamford, Conn.

“Although it may save some money to standardize procurement and vendors, you need to question how much control is necessary and for what value,” wrote report author Ellen Kitzis. “Standardization saves time, but it’s important to understand the trade-offs between vendor standardization and the reality of the consumer revolution. In essence, CIOs lose credibility by putting constraints on the wrong things.”

The report’s second piece of advice to time-strapped CIOs is to stop using enterprise architecture as a “command and control.”

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