Chief information officers named having good employees as their top concern in the Association for Federal Information Resources Management (AFFIRM) 2007 CIO Challenges Survey.
Hiring and retaining skilled professionals. Since the survey started in 1998, workforce issues have been one of the top five challenges of CIOs.
Aligning information technology with organizational mission goals. Good alignment is another challenge that usually makes it into the top five.
Obtaining adequate funding for IT programs and projects. This perennial top-five challenge is tied with another concern — using IT to improve service — that showed the single largest year-to-year jump in the rankings.
Building effective relationships with agency senior executives. This concern has hit the top five twice in the past three surveys, which shows its increasing importance to CIOs.
The biggest single drop, from No. 2 in 2002 and 2001 to No. 20 in 2007 on CIOs’ list of concerns, was making business and cultural changes necessary for e-government transformation. That’s probably because e-government is no longer seen as a special initiative but as part of IT infrastructure, AFFIRM said.
— Brian Robinson
If you threw a stone into a room of chief information officers, you would more than likely hit a happy CIO, or at least that’s what they would say.
“Most people would say they are happy with being a CIO, because for many, it’s the pinnacle of their careers in government,” said Richard Westfield, CIO at the National Labor Relations Board and co-chairman of the Small Agency CIO Council.
But that is not to say you’ll never hear a CIO grousing about the job or wanting to go to the next level in a career that has a ceiling in many organizations.
“Plain and simple, it’s a tough job,” Westfield said. “They are tasked with reinventing government [and] using fast-changing technologies in a federal environment that was never designed for speed and agility.”
Many public CIOs would like to lead transformational changes, but they are finding that harder to accomplish than CIOs who work in the private sector. Procurement and workforce are two of the biggest problem areas for public CIOs, Westfield said. It’s hard to hire the best people and harder to get rid of poor performers. And even in the best of circumstances, procurement regulations are complicated.
“When you are truly trying to transform government, it can be very frustrating at times to make things happen,” Westfield said.
How many times have you heard that CIOs haven’t earned full recognition as strategic decision-makers? Although the current crop of federal CIOs has more responsibilities than its predecessors enjoyed, they are still mostly operational rather than strategic decision-makers, organizational experts say.
As leaders, CIOs are focused on immediate concerns, such as funding and project management, rather than on preparing the agency to meet strategic challenges.
Some observers outside government say major institutional changes would have to occur before federal CIOs can have the influence that many of them aspire to. However, others say the CIOs who develop their leadership skills can overcome those institutional barriers and achieve the job satisfaction they are seeking.
“Project management, enterprise architecture and the like are important, and [they] may be building a foundation for the future, but [they’re] all lower-level kind of stuff,” said Frank McDonough, former deputy associate administrator of the General Services Administration’s Office of Information Technology Policy.
IT has become a routine part of government, McDonough said, but it hasn’t transformed government the way people thought it would. He said one reason is that Congress doesn’t want that to happen.
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