Presentations from co-CIOs

Three important things I got out of our two CIO speakers are how to build a career, what are the important factors to have co-CIOs in the organizations, and how insulate yourself from outsourcing by adding value to the organization. They are extremely important as graduation date is approaching and continuing difficult business environment in the World. Learning from the successful CIOs is helping to set a attainable career goal and correct course my me personally.

Joyce's presentation touched me mainly from two fronts, career path and how co-CIO works. The path of Joyce from manger trainee to her current co-CIO demonstrated on different levels how to pursuit career goals and be successful. Her earlier featured a fearless young professional who was brave enough to tackle any challenges in the career path. In the process, she built her own credibility with her boss and gradually moved up. But when personal interests, career, and corp culture didn't match, it was better for her to move on instead of being miserable and stayed. I had the same experience as Joyce that I was so unhappy at one of the previous company that I decided to leave and it didn't matter what kind of monetary reward I would get (recently I was told that my recruiter short changed me on the compensation, but I would make the same decision again). Work/life balance was another big issue for Joyce and she did turn down good opportunities that didn't fit her life style.

Both Joyce and Dan spent fair amount of time talking about co-CIOs. It seemed both were happy to be the positions and had a good working relationship between them. To me, and to a extend, many of us, there were some disbelief that co-CIOs situation worked out so well. My experience in the corp world was that the in fighting for power were always there and it was not uncommon that back stabbing occurred in any corporations. The management theory I learned from leadership also contradicted co-CIOs, that in order to be effective, one needed more power than the other to get things done. But since Joyce and Dan knew each other very well and worked together in the past from a different company, they could work out their agreement and obeyed by it. I give them the benefit of doubts and believe them. There are always exceptions in theories and real world events.

Dan's presentation was useful in how a current CIO views the future trends and opportunities. Dan talked about how globalization impacted the IT, in terms of outsourcing to the east. The trend of outsourcing was irreversible process for IT and other business, like productions. I thought it was very insightful for Dan to point out the way of shielding from this trend for us. Moving up to the higher value chain would mean better values for the company that could not be outsourced. Learning and types of jobs were the two different ways to protect yourself from outsourcing. The more you learned and the more you could offer to the company. If you were in high value type of jobs, then you were better protected because outsourcing could not provide such high value. Dan also mentioned about IT trends and I thought it was very helpful relating high value jobs. Often trends were associated with innovation and cutting edge technologies, therefore they were not targeted to be outsourced by the company until they became mature technologies.