The travel doesn’t seem to quit as I hit London this week and will be back next week too.  Here are some of the great CIO and IT leadership tweets of the week that I’ve been able to collect while in the Admirals Club.

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1.  I haven’t heard much from the 1-to-1 marketing guru Don Peppers lately but stumbled on this post.  I like it because it’s not coming from an IT leader, but from someone who advises business leaders and appreciates the strategic role of IT.  One thing that’s wishful thinking for some is that the CIO is a fixture in the boardroom.  I’ve discussed the role of the CIO and IT in innovation with a few clients lately and I think it’s the crux of the challenge.

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2.  IT shops are woefully behind in career development.  Yes, most have some training courses available, but I have not seen one decent example of a career path model that links roles, skills and training.  This is a big opportunity that impacts everything – quality, delivery, staff retention, succession planning, etc.

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3.  This is a great example of the problem with SLAs driven by IT.  Yes, it’s important to have agreements between technology providers and consumers.  So, 5-9s is useful to a small set of enterprise computing staff and vendors.  However, the primary opportunity in making SLAs impactful is in putting service levels in business terms.  “14 minutes down” is a start, but we need to move to SLAs like “100,000 bills per week” and “4,000 customer service calls resolved per month.”

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4.  Jason makes a great point regarding the breadth of roles and responsibilities of the IT function.  I think that the HR function is on par with IT across all of these dimensions, as they have to deal with every employee as their customers, a slew of 3rd party vendors, lawyers and procurement galore and a lot of emotions.

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5.  Russ always makes good, practical points.  Here he argues that stringent requirements for business cases for every project can cause critical projects to be delayed or killed.  I think that some of the challenge here is in the definition of a business case.  All projects are not created equal and won’t yield the same kinds of benefits.  Some are solid ROI projects, some are more experimental and some are costs of doing business.  Each type requires a different kind of business case.  Furthermore, smaller projects need less rigor than do larger, more strategic ones.  I think we need to understand the business impact of ALL projects, but vary the required justification, governance and documentation.

By Chris Curran and Rajesh Balaraman

Many senior IT leaders in the US believe that they are beyond the first level of business engagement.  They have established IT’s value in general and have regular ways to interact with other parts of the organization, both to establish strategic plans and for specific project design and requirements.  Unfortunately, other parts of the world are not this far along.

We recently spent some time with over 100 of the top CIOs in India at the 10th Annual CTO Forum.  While a wide spectrum of topics we discussed, social media was one that created a lot of discussion, but in which there is skepticism.  However, even in India, where IT still has a way to go in becoming a true cog in the business engine, there are some great examples of how social media is adding real rupees to the bottom line.  During a panel discussion, Atul Luthra, who leads IT for the PVR theater chain, explained how they developed custom Facebook apps to link friends, movie schedules, ticket purchases and status/Wall updates.  On an enterprise level, Sumit Chowdhury, Reliance Communications CIO, described his organization’s extensive corporate use of blogs and other social media channels internally and Saraswati Sankar, the DGM – IT from Bank of India, described a simple but powerful use of shared support bulletin boards used during her core banking platform roll-out.

There is a real need to find something to get the India business leaders excited about the strategic prospects of IT (it’s clear that they get the operational value of it).  We’re not saying it’s a silver bullet, but maybe there is something in the social media space that could be used to take the business discussion up a few notches – a Trojan Horse of sorts.  Here are some ideas for positioning the social media discussion not as a LinkedIn or blogging discussion, but one based on problem solving.

Business leaders are not the only ones making the business-technology discussion difficult.  In our discussions with the India CIOs, we also heard these concerns:

1. security concerns
2. damage to brand equity by individual opinions being expressed and viewed as corporate opinion
3. productivity loss due to time spent at work on social media

Certainly, these discussion themes are not India-specific and could be used as conversation starters anywhere.  Let us know what you think.

I’m posting this weeks Top 5 list from Beijing as I get ready for the CTO Forum Conference.  Sorry if my writing seems a bit jet-lagged and for the low volume (read: none) of Tweets.  China still seems a bit put off by Twitter.

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1-2. The first post set of a series of conversations about the differences between a list of IT thought leaders on Twitter and a list of CIOs on Twitter and a follow-up message from Jason Hiner, TechRepublic’s Editor in Chief.  Participation in Twitter and other social media will favor those CxOs whose businesses depend on it rather than large, Fortune 500 type CIOs.  Still, in my perfect world, CIOs would see the value in participating AND some would be seen as IT thought-leaders.

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3.  A post made in jest, but one that set of two actions.  First, several people angrily asked if he really thought that EA was dead.  I think EA effectiveness is a good topic and I will put that on the list for a future post.  Second, as Gene reports, spambots pummeled him with Tweets pertaining to the “xxx” part of his message.

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4.  I’m a big believer in using several different methods to get your point across.  As many of us are visual thinkers and learners, drawing and diagramming is a great skill to develop.  This is true for a business analyst and the CIO.

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5.  Another interesting topic is social CRM – the mashup of traditional CRM and Social Media.  Michael posed that massive ad hoc communities form on-line in unexpected ways and were difficult to plan for.  After some back and forth, Michael provided the “United Breaks Guitars” video on YouTube as an example of something United could never have predicted or planned for but needs to accept and even embrace.

This week’s #CIO tweets were overshadowed by John C. Dvorak’s assertion that our nation’s CIO, Vivek Kundra, is a fraud – at least his resume might be. You will need to make up you own mind on that one.

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1.  I have been a PC Magazine reader for years, but never got into reading John C. Dvorak’s rants.  Never could really understand half of what he was saying.  His Tweet Wednesday grabbed my attention though.  Apparently it grabbed others’ attention too as it was tweeted and re-tweeted hundreds of times. (I love when people post “BREAKING” news tweets more than a day after the initial message…oh well.)

I wrote Wednesday afternoon on this subject and on protecting and proving on-line identity in a professional context.  I think this is important for CIOs as they are increasingly being looked to regarding social media policy within their enterprises.  Furthermore, Twitter, LinkedIn and others are increasingly being used to networtk, source job candidates and other more mainstream functions – buyer beware.

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2.  Peter and Chris are two of my favorite CIO/IT leadership people I’ve met on Twitter.  I’m looking forward to meeting Chris in the UK in the next couple of weeks.  The CIO-CTO question is one that baffles many organizations and varies by industry (in the US anyway.  I know titles vary greatly in the UK and beyond).  For example, several insurance carriers and financial services firms call their top IT leader the “CTO” and call the business unit aligned IT leaders CIO.

As far as CTO goes, I’ve seen several cases.  The most popular I think is to call the person responsible for the enterprise architecture (the overall strategy AND its implementation throughout the business) the CTO.  I’ve also seen cases in which the CTO owns everything IT not about application development, projects and maintenance, even including IT strategy and planning.  Finally, the CTO is also used in high tech companies to mean something entirely different.

Bottom line is that I agree with Chris AND Peter – you have to be clear and it does vary by industry.

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3.  Seen this one many times.  It’s sickening, really.  Who do the vendors think will end up on their team if the end up convincing the “higher up” to lean their way/buy their stuff/approve their proposal?

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4.  The article offers some good perspective on thinking about an IT strategy.  One thing, maybe the most important thing, missing is to drive the strategy based on the business capabilities needed to drive the organization to its destination.  The article mentions basing the strategy on the market, but it’s not enough to just look outside for technology ideas.  An IT strategy must be based first and foremost on your own organization’s business ideas and direction.

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5.  A pointer from Abbie Lundberg to an great blog post by Susan Cramm, a former CFO and CIO.  Any reporting for someone who doesn’t care much is a waste of time.  I cover some executive reporting challenges in my CIO Dashboard series.

Peter Steiner published his infamous “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” cartoon in 1993.  This mental image for me was just a joke – until recently.  For the most part, you know the people who email you, link up with on Facebook or LinkedIn.  Those you don’t recognize, you just write off as spam or a mistake.

Today, Twitter is buzzing with an expose penned by John C. Dvorak, of PC Mag editorial rant fame, in which he questions the background and credentials of the new US CIO, Vivek Kundra.  In it, he raises serious questions about Kundra’s education, work experience, technical expertise and even criminal record.  Wow.

There have been many public examples of fraudulent resumes over the years – from corporate execs to college football coaches. Unfortunately, this is nothing new.  What is newer, is the layers of anonymity that the Internet and social media provides would-be dogs.

Social Media Identity

Earlier this year, I started the CIO Twitter Dashboard to track Chief Information Officers using Twitter.  Since there wasn’t a single list of CIOs or any role out there, I used many of the great 3rd party apps and mashups to seek out new people for the list (see Twellow, WeFollow and Mr. Tweet).  Along the way, I’ve learned a lot (see more here) about how people describe themselves in the short Twitter bios and longer LinkedIn and corporate resumes.  Some observations:

• Almost all Internet lists allow people to self-identify.  In other words, if you say you are a CIO, then you are.
• Many people are very liberal in using the term “CIO” to describe their role.  In several cases, upon further digging, individuals were really consultants to a CIO or consider them CIO-level consultants without any stated job references.
• Some describe their role in a 1-5 person startup as the “CIO,” when they may just be the guy/gal buying a few servers.  There is very little in the way of company description linked into any of the social lists out there with the exception of LinkedIn and a few others.
• When trying to figure out who someone is, it’s best to triangulate using multiple sources.  For example, when I add someone to the CIO Twitter Dashboard, I may start with Twellow but also check LinkedIn, corporate web sites and popular CIO media sites.

All of this has been somewhat academic as I continue to build this list.  However, because of the interest in the list and the CIO Dashboard blog, I was asked to participate in the formation of an industry group of CIOs.  This group was the brainchild of an enterprising guy who used Twitter and other social media channels to identify people he thought would have something to contribute to a discussion about CIO leadership and gaps in the industry (conferences, education, forums, etc.).  Because he used on-line channels to identify possible participants, the group was diverse and global.  Because of politics and other factors beyond my understanding, the group imploded.  Best I can understand, it was because the organizers could not get comfortable that they had a group of real CIOs and IT leadership practitioners versus a bunch of pretenders.

Two questions I ask myself as a result:

• How far should you go in vetting your professional relationships made on-line?  For example, is it appropriate to call someone’s workplace and ask for them without prior agreement?
• What does it mean when you can’t find many/any on-line references to an individual?  What if this individual is in the IT profession?

Independent Professional Identity Verification

In the wake of the “ghost Tweeting” controversy of a few months ago and its opponents, Twitter added the ability to have your name verified so that people would know that @TheRealShaq is really THE Shaq we know and love.  Several other start-ups are also dancing around this need and provide social media username checking and social media identity theft.

What is needed, however, is an independent service that provides identity verification that can be used across all on-line sites and services.  Sort of like an “Intel Inside” – a recognizable and trustworthy independent brand.  Sounds like a great opportunity for LinkedIn, RSA, Norton, or PayPal (or many others).

Let’s remove these concerns so we can focus on learning and building better, more productive business relationships.

Instead of cranking out #followfriday all day last Friday, I thought I would try something new by listing some of my favorite #CIO tweets from the week. Hope you like them and find some new follows as a result. Let me know what you think.

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Diamond has a few clients who are using Agile techniques in Web-centric projects with some good success. I was looking for some adoption data and found a Forrester survey that said 80% of the respondents were using some form of Scrum. Brian’s tweet was in response to me asking for others’ experience.

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Prolific CIO.com writer C.G. Lynch offers some very practical tips for setting up an employee Twitter policy, including updating employee policy, and identifying and communicating company and individual Twitter users.

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Bob is a friend and also an Aggie. He is starting at The Hartford at a time where there are many leadership changes, so it will be a great opportunity for him to establish his leadership style.

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Patrick makes a seemingly simple statement, that unfortunately is lost on many of us as we get caught in the details of the day. I’m reminded of Steven Covey’s advice for focus on important things in your circle of influence.

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This stat really surprises me as it seems pretty high. I guess the real question is “how many are measuring the right things?”

Saying “No” to social media is a big mistake, especially if the decision was driven by the CIO.  Over the last few weeks, I have spoken to two CIOs, one in financial services and one in the public sector, who say their organizations have a “no social media” policy.

I agree that there are many reasons to limit what your employees post on Facebook or LinkedIn.  That said, shutting off the spigot entirely misses out on some incredible opportunities to learn and experiment and, if you get lucky, create some real value for your organization.

For discussion’s sake, I would propose that we use the following capabilities (along with some examples) when we talk about social media:

Communication

• Blogs – WordPress, Blogger
• Microblogs – Twitter (public); Yammer (private)
• Social Networks – Facebook, LinkedIn
• Social Multimedia – Flickr, YouTube

Collaboration

• Wikis – Wikipedia (public), MediaWiki (private)
• Social Bookmarks – StumbleUpon, Delicious
• Social News – Reddit, Digg
• Prediction Markets – Hollywood Stock Exchange

Other categories, such as massively parallel games and product reviews, are sometimes included, but I’ve left them out for simplicity.

A CIO Social Media Framework

I think the primary driver of the “No Social Media” strategy is that there are a dizzying number of sites and services and it’s hard to find a place to start.  Enter the trusty 2×2 matrix to help us sort it out.  There are two questions I hear a lot and so these frame the matrix axes:

1. Community: Internal or External?
2. CIO Focus: Personal or Organizational?

Some of you may think that a CIO’s personal perspective doesn’t belong in this discussion.  Based on my own experience, I think that the personal and corporate goals go hand-in-hand when it comes to social media.  The personal relationships that you develop reflect directly back to your organization – exactly the reason so many fear social media in the first place.

With these two questions, we can discuss 4 types of social media every CIO should be interested in prioritizing and exploring.  In each quadrant, I’ve noted some of the objectives that could be met with each type of investment.

CIO Social Media Framework

I won’t bore you be draining each quadrant, but instead offer some ideas and experiments for each that you could customize to fit your situations.  Once you learn more about each, including the inherent risks and issues, you can establish a more formal strategy and set of priorities.

Internal – Personal

1. Start an internal CIO blog (or podcast, as one CTO I know did), not just for the IT organization, but focused on integrating what IT is working on into the business context and discussing technology innovations you are seeing that could benefit your firm
2. Establish a set of bookmarks using Delicious and share them with your management team so they know what you are reading and thinking about.

Internal – Organizational

1. Launch an internal wiki to define industry and firm-specific terms, concepts, competitors, suppliers, etc.
2. Try one of the microblogging platforms intended for enterprises, Yammer or Identi.ca. (this would mostly benefit larger and mult-site organizations)
3. Try a prediction market to gather employee insights into the projected success/failure of your top 10 projects.

External – Personal

1. Develop a public blog that helps to explain your perspectives on industry, standards and/or IT leadership issues.  See Stephen Gillett’s blog as an example – he’s Starbucks’ CIO.
2. Establish a presence on Twitter.  See Are There Any Real CIOs in the Twitterverse and 3 Reasons a CIO Should Care About Twitter for more.

External – Organizational

1. Work with your sales and marketing functions to conduct a customer service experiment using Twitter or GetSatisfaction.  Some publicized examples are Comcast and FedEx.  Check out #brainstormtech for some interesting tweets on the subject.  Also, Twitter will soon launch an overhauled site to make it more accessible, including to businesses.  Here is some of the early release.
2. Experiment with the Twitter API to see what you can learn about what others are saying about your company, competition, products and industry.  This can also be an eye-opener to the power of opening up your own systems and publishing an API.
3. Use LinkedIn as a primary source when you do a job search for your next senior IT manager/VP.

By blending personal and organizational objectives, a CIO can develop real, hands-on experience in social media and become equipped to deal with issues and opportunities head-on, instead of reactively from the sidelines.

That’s the question I set out to answer. I’ll tell you about the frustrating journey, which might be useful for anyone trying to find a particular interest group.  And I’ll tell you what I found (and am sharing in detail at my CIO Twitter Dashboard).

Is There Anybody Out There?

I have sorted through literally hundreds of Twitter-related sites and applications looking for the best place or places to find professional groups.  Hundreds of sites exist, by the way, because of Twitter’s open interfaces and the vast numbers of creative developers out there. In fact, last week at the All Things Digital conference, Biz Stone said that over two-thirds of Twitter’s traffic come through their API.  (There is an important lesson in here about openness.)

There are some professional lists and communities that have cropped up (journalists, industry analysts), but they seem to be mostly media-related, which is to be expected for early adopters.

So, for the most part, we are stuck using the general tools to find other CIOs out there.  While this isn’t exhaustive, here are the most successful approaches I’ve found.

Search Twitter Profiles for “CIO”

This is the most obvious place to look.  Unfortunately, I have not found many great search interfaces that focus on the bios.  There are two options.

• Use an advanced Google search string like this: intext:”bio * CIO” site:twitter.com.  You could just bookmark this and visit it periodically.  Or, you could take it one step further and create a Google Alert that will update you whenever it changes. (Thanks to Mr. Google Alerts for this idea)
• Use TweepSearch, the only purpose-built Twitter bio search I have found.  A search for CIO yields over 500 hits.  On the first page of 20, however, about 5 of the entries appear to be CIOs – the rest are consultants, writers, etc.

While a bio search is a good start, you still have to manually wade through the results and weed out the foreign language results (“cio, baby”), chief investment officers, and people who want you to “check it out” (CIO – get it?).

Browse Twitter Directories

There are at least 20 Twitter directories out there.  I’ve explored them all and Twellow (710 in the CIO category) has the most extensive CIO-tagged list.  WeFollow (70 in CIO category) comes in a distant second.  These directories have the same filtering problem if you are looking for fellow CIOs.  Don’t get me wrong, the others on the list are great IT leadership thinkers, writers, consultants, etc., but I’m just looking for current CIOs.

I thought that LinkedIn might be a good source for professionals with a Twitter presence.  The first problem is that LinkedIn does not have a specific profile field for your Twitter ID.  You can add a custom link in your profile but it isn’t visible in your public profile (maybe that’s a good thing).  Anyway, in a search with keywords CIO and Twitter, I got fewer than 5 relevant hits in the first 100 results.  Not so good, but an opportunity for LinkedIn to tie into other social media channels?

The CIO Twitter Dashboard

I provide my experiences digging around so that you can do the same while bypassing the dead-ends.  If you don’t want to bother, but are interested in which CIOs are out there, you can just visit my CIO Twitter Dashboard to see the CIO list I have compiled.  I will keep this up to date, so you can revisit anytime to see the updated list.  Feel free to leave a comment on that page if you have any suggestions.  I have not intentionally left any CIOs off of the list unless they fall into the following categories:

• unverifiable through Google or LinkedIn search
• former CIOs (not currently a CIO)
• a one-person show calling himself/herself a CIO (really a consultant, not CIO)
• other non-CIOs with “CIO” keywords in their bio

I hope you find the CIO Twitter Dashboard and the notes above useful as you seek out IT leaders to network with and learn from.  Please let me know what you think.  Maybe someday there will be a great Twitter CIO community (or other microblogging platform), but it’s not out there yet.

The larger question is if a platform like Twitter is even of value to a CIO.  There are some good reasons to experiment, largely centered on networking and real-time learning.  For now, I hope to learn from the early adopters.

The MIT Industrial Liaison Program holds an annual conference for its sponsors focused on technology and telecommunications.  This year’s event had excellent breadth, featuring Esther Dyson, the CTO of Blue State Digital (developers of Obama’s online social media platform), the director of MIT’s game development lab in Singapore and several others.  The one presentation that really got me thinking was by the IT Energy Coordinator for MIT’s own infrastructure, Laxmi Rao.

Her presentation centered on the consumption of electricity by computing infrastructures and what some organizations are doing to improve power efficiency.  There were two things I took away from her talk.

Power Usage Efficiency is Under-Appreciated

The average data center is very inefficient in its ability to effectively move electricity from the power grid to the computers that need it.  One measure of power efficiency is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) which measures the ratio of total power coming into a data center to the power that actually reaches the computing devices (there is a lot of great PUE info here).  Laxmi said that the typical data center has a PUE of 2.0, or about 50% efficiency.  Some say the average is worse.  So what?  Inefficient power usage wastes money and power.

Cloud Infrastructure Providers Are Doing Something Right

While the typical data center is inefficient, the massive data centers built recently by Google, Amazon and Microsoft, represent not only a new trend in cloud-based computing but also a view into the next generation data centers.  Specifically, each of these vendors are emphasizing power and cooling strategies and have lowered their PUEs into the 1.2 – 1.3 range, according to Laxmi and other published reports. They are achieving this through large scale application of water and air cooling techniques, hardware configurations and data center designs.

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After all of the “easy” techniques have been applied, like virtualization and server consolidation, we will all be faced with a capacity issue that will require more strategic thought to solve.  For some, maybe adding on to an existing data center will make sense.  For others, like one of our consumer products clients in the southeast, there was no more power available from the utilities in their region.

All IT leaders should take it upon themselves to get smarter about how much power we are using  and if there are lower cost and lower impact ways to consume it.  I believe that the cloud infrastructure providers’ efforts provide at least a model for us to follow to improve our private infrastructures if not a service to seriously consider.

by Chris Curran, with research by Michael Mariani

I am very passionate about coaching team sports and have been a basketball player most of my life. So, I read with great interest a recent MIT Sloan Management Review article, What Can Managers Learn From College Basketball?

There are three very interesting points:

1.  That the majority of new jobs are sourced through “weak ties,” not close relationships. (I never heard this before, but it makes sense.  Interestingly, I heard the same thing at a presentation last week by Andy McAfee on Enterprise 2.0.  The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon in action?)

2.  Between 2001 and 2007 more than 280 coaching changes were made across 341 colleges in the study.  See any parallels here to the CIO tenure situation?

3.  Many of the coaches are part of one of eight “family trees” – The John Calipari Tree or The Rick Pitino Tree, for example.  Furthermore, being part of one of these trees improves your chances of landing good jobs.

This got me thinking:  Are there family trees for the Chief Information Officer profession?

To begin exploring this question, we started with the CIO 100 and supplemented it with LinkedIn and biographical data available on the web.  For anyone who has tried to develop an easily understandable network map of customers, contacts, etc. you will know that it is a difficult task to identify links and make any sense out of them.  That said, we think there are some indications that CIO trees do exist.

After spending a few days digging through the data, a few trees seemed to emerge.  One example was around John McKinley, the CIO at GE Capital, Merrill Lynch, President/CTO at AOL and now a partner with a digital business incubator, LaunchBox.  Here is an example of some of the IT leaders who were in John’s organizations and their current firm:

Since I don’t know anyone on this chart, it only represents leaders who were working in the IT organizations during John McKinley’s tenure and went on to CIO positions later in their careers.  Given all of the IT organization variants, it’s also unclear what kind of reporting relationships existed in each organization and how much influence or opportunity for mentoring there was.  But this data can at least fuel an interesting discussion.  The idea of a CIO leadership tree seems a even a little more plausible at GE, given Jack Welch’s history of developing future corporate leaders.

The other interesting question explored in Daniel Halgen’s original study, “All in the Family: Network Ties as Determinants of Reputation and Identity in NCAA Basketball”, is if members of strong coaching trees are more resilient in the job market.  His research found this to be true and that the jobs were more prestigious for those affiliated with the trees.

I wonder if by more prominently highlighting our leadership lineage, we can land more desirable jobs?  Food for thought.