“It’s like being a rookie quarterback and listening to Brett Farve give you advice on how to be a quarterback.”

That was the quote from one conference goer who described the value he was got out of CIO Boot Camp, the two day “how to be a CIO” workshop conference for current CIOs and “wanna-be CIO” IT professionals. Everyone in the room was soaking up advice from CIO professionals with 15+ years of experience.

Here’s a summary of some of the top issues addressed at the conference:

• If you want to be a great CIO you need to align the IT department’s interests with the interests of the business.
• Get out of the “engine room” and start rolling with the C-level executives.
• Concern yourself with revenue growth and customer relations.
• If unit costs for IT go down, but demand goes up, then the overall costs of your wide area network will go up even though local area network’s costs have gone down. This is not IT’s fault, it’s the business’ fault, but it may not necessarily be a problem. An increase in utilization may be in line with the business goals.
• It was only about three years ago when there was a shift of the CIO’s responsibilities to be more business focused.
• Even though CIOs must know and understand the business, their first responsibility is to build the data center/IT network. Their second responsibility is to manage the “engine room.” After you’ve accomplished those two tasks you can then begin your role as a business professional.
• Aligning your role with the business means developing tools to create opportunities to act as a catalyst for change.
• If your company is dysfunctional about IT you’re going to have to act as the ambassador of change.

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Tags: CIO, CIO Boot Camp, CIOs, Interop, interop_ny