Читать книгу Fostering Innovation. How to Build an Amazing IT Team онлайн

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Compared to our executive peers, our profession is still in its infancy and only recently gaining respectability. Two of the first people to have the CIO title were Al Zipf of Bank of America, and Max Hopper of Bank of America and American Airlines. “Management's Newest Star: Meet the Chief Information Officer,” declared Business Week magazine in a headline in 1986². Just 17 years later, The Harvard Business Review declared the profession dead, in the article “IT Doesn't Matter.”³

Showing our worth has been a tough sell. We don't bring in revenue, mistakes can be extremely harmful, and what we do seems to take forever. Have you ever taken an introductory programming class, and the goal at the end is to get the words “Hello World” to pop up on the screen? The amount of effort necessary to make this happen is incomprehensible to our non-technical peers. One of the biggest challenges is that what we do is esoteric and more challenging than it looks.

Imagine the case where a company is doing well, so it adds hundreds of people to its staff. The company's growth has created two problems: it needs a more robust people-management solution, and it needs additional parking. The decision is made to build a parking garage and implement new cloud-based human resources (HR) software. Both projects coincidentally cost around $3 million to complete.