I’ve heard, in different moments in time, different definitions of how an IT Manager, a CIO, should look like. Which are the most important skills, the background she has to have.

At the beginning, it was all about technology:

IT was too far from human beings

and IT was available only in big corporations. The IT Manager was the guy with the white coat: an expert of her matter. An IT guy.

Than IT became more commodity and it was the time of business:

IT was too far from the business

and IT decided it was time to talk the language of the business. So the IT dept moved under the CFO or the COO, and the IT Manager became a ‘business man’. Technical skills were no more important for her: there was the outsourcing and the SLAs to cope with the ‘technical stuff’.

Then the internet came, and Google, and Facebook, and Twitter … and all of the sudden

IT, inside corporations, is too far from real life

and people inside the company use to have such a bad IT experience that he would never accept at home … even for free.

To manage all of this we need a new race of IT Managers: they must have deep understanding of both parties. They must know a lot about IT and a lot about making business. But today it’s no more enough. Nowadays IT tech skills and management skills can be an obstacle, sooner or later, if they are not enriched with good design skills.

In the innovation and design era, to move IT at the right speed (maybe 10xFaster) and at the right level of innovation, IT +  management + design have to be carefully used, melted, weighed out.

PierG

p.s. Thanks to my friend Nico Bigi for the inspiration of this post