I have had the privilege of working with and for a number of superb technologists, many of whom were Chief Information Officers (CIO) or equivalent.
I am going to pick just one: Ron Reed.
I first met Ron when I was a vice president, internal audit, for a large financial services company. He was the senior vice president for IT (i.e., CIO) for the insurance subsidiary.
Although it was polite and professional, our first contact (a data center audit of that organization) had friction. He didn’t believe the facts behind our finding; but, we worked together to understand and then appreciate the reality and he then moved quickly to implement appropriate corrective actions.
A year or so later, he moved to the primary business unit as senior vice president responsible for all IT functions apart from application development and maintenance, where I got to work with him closely. (I ended up working for him.)
Now Ron’s background is deep in technology. He probably knew more about the operating system and related products than our systems programmers. But he was able to rise to leadership within the company because he also made sure he had a deep understanding of the business.
Ron spent time with the business leaders, getting to know them, the operation, and how it was run.
By understanding the business and knowing…
