IT management

Qualities of a great leader from Jim Collins

We’ve written a lot lately about what leads to IT project failures and what causes CIOs to get fired. Today I heard about business failure — and its flip side, how companies go from good to great. Yes, this was a talk by Jim Collins, author of the book by that name. And though he’s probably given this talk hundreds of times, his speech during the CIO lunch at Gartner’s Symposium ITxpo was a rousing testimonial to leadership — from what makes a great leader to what distinguishes him or her from a mediocre one, and the causes (almost all self-inflicted) of business failure.

The talk was full of useful insights, especially for all of us looking ahead to 2010 and trying to figure out what to do and what’s going to happen (beyond Gartner’s prediction of 3.3% IT spending growth).

Some of it was even CIO-specific. But more on that in a moment.

First, some things he said about who leaders of “great” organizations are:

And here are some of the things they do:

As for CIOs, Collins talked to a dozen or so of them before his speech, and reported having a lively conversation on what makes a “great” CIO. (His use of great generally refers to consistency of strong results.) The outcome: “They agreed that the truly great CIOs have the leadership capacity that they could be CEOs.” In order words, all of the characteristics above apply.

Are you a “great” CIO or “great” IT leader? Do you want to be? Try Collins’ free diagnostic tool for going from good to great.

p.s. For those interested in the business failure side of his talk, another attendee blogged on Collins’ stages of decline.

Sidekick data and ‘balloon boy’

I was on vacation when the news hit that customers of T-Mobile’s cloud-serviced Sidekick phones had likely lost their data due to a failure of the storage service provided by a company recently acquired by Microsoft, ironically named Danger. So, rather than following the story in real time, I found myself reading the historical account of the incident on Thursday. My reading of this was interrupted by another calamitous story, also related to clouds– a small boy whisked up 10,000 feet in the air by a helium balloon and carried in horrifying swoops across the Colorado skies. When the balloon landed gently some two hours later, the boy was not there and feared lost. Both stories, as it turns out, were much less horrifying than originally imagined.

“Balloon boy” was hiding in his family’s attic. The Sidekick data was not lost either; it was hiding somewhere as well. Yesterday Microsoft announced that it had recovered most, if not all, of the customer data.

Despite the good news, we’re seeing evidence now of storm clouds when it comes to cloud storage. The Sidekick data failure was attributed to a storage area network (SAN) upgrade gone awry. In this case, there appears to have been a difference of opinion about whether a backup was necessary in order to go forward with the SAN upgrade. According to sources of blogger Daniel Eran Dilger, instead of doing a backup that would have taken six days, Microsoft management is said to have decided to curtail the process two days into it. What then ensued is not yet clear, but the implication is that an Oracle system responded to some abnormality in the SAN upgrade that caused the data’s “disappearance.”

Whatever the cause, this scenario highlights the enormous complexity of cloud storage and the inherent risks involved with such a new data-handling approach. Indeed, another recent cloud mishap, in which a hacker was sending spam through an Amazon email server, elicited another calamitous response: Amazon EC2 subscribers had their email put on a spam blacklist by Spamhaus because of this one bad apple.

It’s not surprising these technology glitches are happening, given the newness and complexity of cloud computing. But I think what all three cases show — from the overblown police and media reaction to the image of an airborne balloon, to the software response to a SAN upgrade gone wrong, to Spamhaus’ Draconian solution to deal with a single hacker, is that we’re inexperienced. We don’t yet have enough understanding to deal with these unusual events in a calibrated — not exaggerated — way. The heart of the matter is that, in each case, there may have been an overreaction to an unexpected, but as it turned out not particularly serious, problem.

With all new things, there is a learning curve. Single hackers will be dealt with in a different way in the future. Microsoft will never do an upgrade without backing up first. As for “balloon boy,” it’s likely some adults will look in the attic before calling out the National Guard. And if the balloon incident was staged, a family conspiracy? Well, there are those who believe the Sidekick data wipeout was insider sabotage.