1: How to become a Rockstar CIO with Martha Heller

Would you love to know exactly what skills you needed to succeed as a top CIO?

Todays guest Martha Heller has placed 100’s of CIOs into some of the worlds largest organisations. She is a power influencer in the industry with reaching an exceptionally high 9.3 per cent of CIOs as reported by Apollo Research.

Her new book ‘Be the Business: CIOs in the new era of IT’ she defines the top skills that are needed to succeed in the new world of technology.

Grab the book here: http://www.hellersearch.com/be-the-business

About Martha Heller

Martha Heller is the founder and President of Heller Search Associates, a recruiting firm specializing in CIO and IT leadership roles across all industries.

Transcript

Duncan: Thank you very much for joining us today on CIO Tank. You’ve got a very impressive background, so five years at CIO Magazine where you lead a number of initiatives, including the CIO executive council. And in the last six years, you’ve been working at Heller Associates. You were named as an influencer with the highest reach in IT human resources by Polar Research. You’ve keynoted at the CIO Summit. You’ve been featured by IBM, Forbes, HBR. It just keeps going on. And you’re pretty big on Twitter as well in terms of fan…I think you’re over 200 lists there. So that’s a pretty good start.

Martha: Thank you. We’re just getting going.

Duncan: Just getting going. So before we get into the content here, what drove you to write a second book on CIOs?

Martha: You know, I spend every day all day talking to CIOs from all different size companies, and one of the questions I like to ask regularly is “How has your role changed over the last five years?” So I started asking this question last year, so since from 2010 on. And what they all said is “We’re moving from the back office to the front office. And we are much more involved in revenue-producing activities. As software moved into our products and services, we as IT leaders have become much more important to the revenue stream of the company.”

So I said, “Wow, that’s great. How has your operating model changed in order to support this new role that IT is playing?” And the answer I heard, more often than not, was “Good question.” You know, “We haven’t done much. We’re working on it.”

But then I talked to some CIOs who were really being very successful in integrating IT into the rest of the business, and they had better answers. They were creating multifunctional teams that bridged the line between IT and the business. They were creating partnerships external to the company to leverage into new capabilities. They were developing professionals in the IT organization that had a nice blend between IT and a business. And I thought, “Wow. The CIOs who have moved from the back office to the front office who are at least trying need to hear these stories so that they have a vision and a model to change their own IT organizations.” And I heard enough of that that it seemed like it was the right time to write a book on the subject.

Duncan: And you’re in a kind of fairly unique position where you get to…I mean even more so than I would say than a consultancy, like one of the kind of the big three, four consultancies, in terms of being able to see a large number of CIOs and get a very quick understanding of what they’re doing, their background. Where to do you think the market is in terms of the shift between this kind of blended, ideal situation versus the back office?

Martha: You know, when it comes to the up and comers, the people who are, you know, the directors and VPs today who are gonna be tomorrow’s CIOs, I think there is a huge gap between what companies need in terms of blended executives and