Inspiration at the CIO Level

Although Microsoft is clearly my technology partner and platform of choice, I take inspiration where I can find it. Thursday night’s Boston SIM meeting featured a guest speaker: Mark Sunday, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Oracle Corporation. His topic was “Leading in Times of Transition,” and it was an educational and inspiring talk.

The key themes that really resonated with me were (paraphrased, based on my notes):

“It’s easier to recover from a bad decision than from indecision.” Many times, we fall into the trap of deferring a decision because we don’t have enough information or we just put off things that we know will be unpleasant. Moving confidently in the direction you’re convinced is right is important.

“If you’re not breaking some stuff, you’re not moving fast enough.” It was clear that Mark’s boss, Larry Ellison, values speed in everything: yachts, jets, cars, his business, etc. Mark related some instances where he expected to be dragged into an exec’s office to explain or ask forgiveness for something IT had done. THIS WAS NOT ALWAYS PERCEIVED TO BE A BAD THING. Sometimes, in the exuberant rush to make things happen and move the business forward, some unintended consequences arose. Of course, the better the alignment between the business and IT, the less acute the problems and the more easily healed the scar.

“Efficiency and agility are not mutually exclusive.” Many leaders (IT and otherwise) consider efficiency via standardized processes to be the enemy of the kind of agility that allows for customer intimacy. At an enterprise the size of Oracle, Mark contended that agility would be impossible without efficiency to enable it. It’s not an “OR” equation, it’s an “AND.”

Originally published at https://mikegil.typepad.com.This article was originally posted on April 19, 2010.