Good Ways to Get Fired

Much is written about the best practices, critical success factors, and winning behaviors that are necessary in order to succeed in business. Yet as with sports, having a complete game means having both a good offense and a good defense.

In business, offensive and defensive skills are not simply mirror images of one another any more than they are in baseball. Hitting and fielding are distinctly different skills. Likewise, the actions and characteristics that will get you fired are entirely different and distinct from those that will get you promoted.

When you were selected for your CIO position, it probably had something to do with your vision for moving the business forward in terms of IT. You understood where the CEO was trying to go. You grasped how business processes needed to change, and what new capabilities would be required. You articulated how IT would support these changes. Understanding these things and delivering them will get you promoted.

But what does it take for a CIO to get fired? One of the best ways to seal your fate is to neglect the operations side of the IT business-the "back room" of server racks, disk farms, router banks, telecom lines, and esoteric systems software. This is nerd territory. Talk about it with your CEO, COO, or other line business executives and their eyelids begin drooping. They would much rather hear about a new software project that will decrease time to market. That is, they would rather hear about the new project until something goes wrong in the "back room," and the plants don't run, the orders don't ship, the trucks don't roll, or the customer records are corrupted. Then the dialog changes in a hurry. "The operations center is your turf. We depended on you. What happened?"

Another good way for a CIO to sink his own ship is to have a major breakdown in security or control. Disclose your customers' credit card numbers. Miscalculate material costs and overstate earnings for the quarter. Get front-page attention in the Wall Street Journal. Never mind the fact that hackers get more clever every day or that the complexity of your hardware and software infrastructure defies human comprehension. Never mind that the business demands for openness, accessibility, integration, and information sharing are squarely contradictory to the requirements for security and control. "You're the CIO. What happened?"

Of course you can always get defeated by a good old-fashioned budget overrun. With the CIO controlling 2 to 3 percent of company costs (and often more), opportunities abound! To get the response time on your new customer support system down from the minute-plus range, you need to double your server capacity. Or your toughly negotiated, tightly written contract to outsource telecommunications turns out to have a loophole on every one of its 1,000 pages. Or perhaps you find out that the new company-wide ERP installation will take twice as long and cost three times as much as your consultants estimated. "It happened on your watch. How?"

More often than not, it is the operational issues that defeat the CIO. Your defensive game plan needs to focus on running the "back room" well-on delivering IT services reliably and economically. That means developing a staff of highly competent IT professionals. Even if you outsource big chunks of your service delivery, you still need knowledgeable people on your staff to oversee the work. Defense alone may not win games, but it can keep you in them.

Jerry Peterson is the director of the Information Systems Executive Forum at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, a consultant with the Cutter Consortium, and the retired director of information technology services with Ford Motor Company.