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.

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.

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?”