The CIO Assistant's Blog

I am happy to announce that the CIO Assistant’s Blog now officially becomes Tao of IT. This is an attempt to merge the blog (with a specific target audience of CIO’s) and the website (with the larger theme of balanced living – Tao of Living) into a single entity. This change is part of the evolution of my journey on the Web, from a rather exclusive and personal blog to a more inclusive public source of inspiration and assistance.

Within the new Tao of IT, you will see a brand new Services section and an enhanced Resources section. As for the Blog itself, it will be expanded to cover a wider range of topics delving in a more balanced view of life (i.e. beyond the professional interests of IT Leadership and Management).

There will also be more participation from other guests. The first guest post (The Evolution of One by Faith Fuqua-Jarvis) has received the second highest number of views, attesting to the quality of the post and the popularity of the concept. A second guest post will appear soon and will become a regular feature of the site.

Thank you for your continued readership. Any suggestions to make this Tao of IT site your enjoyable source of reference and entertainment are greatly appreciated. Please come to the new website and leave a comment there or write to us directly.

Readers of this CIO Assistant’s Blog have seen a steady string of small improvements applied to the Blog lately. This time, it’s the introduction of a regular Guest Post feature. Once a month, I will invite a new guest to share his/her thoughts with you. The objective is to enlarge and enrich the view of the CIO Assistant to give you, dear readers, more choices on the subjects that are of interest to you. 

Tomorrow, I will have the pleasure to introduce to you one of my online friends, Faith Fuqua-Purvis. She is the President and Chief Solutions Architect of Synergetic Solutions LLC. We first come to know each other through discussions at a LinkedIn forum, the Organizational Change Practitioners. Faith is an active participant, frequently providing insightful comments that usually get to the crux of the matter very quickly. She also has the knack of turning someone else’s point of view into a recipe with a grain or two of humour and making it easier to grasp in the process.

Faith is a strategic thinker. She builds models and frameworks for Strategic Change, the type of transformational change that has a long-lasting impact on the business. As you will see in her guest post, her perspective is different from and yet complements well my darwinian view of organizational evolution. While my focus is pretty much on IT and its leadership, hers is more inclusive to embrace everyone who has an interest in leveraging the human capital at work. I hope that you will enjoy her post. Let me know your thought after reading.

“Three levels of executives – CEO, CIO/CTO, and CEA [Chief Enterprise Architect].
Three bridges – inside/outside the organization, business/technology sides of the organization, and business process/information flows/technologies within.
Three delivery mechanisms to stakeholders – one vision and organizational strategy, one technical strategy and execution, one architecture plan to deliver through technology.”

I got to love this passage extracted from the post Executives, One Foot In and One Foot Out by Andrew Blumenthal. Andy is the Chief Technology Officer at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Previously, he served as the Chief, Office of Enterprise Architecture and IT Governance at the U.S. Coast Guard and prior to that as Chief Enterprise Architect at the U.S. Secret Service. Despite the obviously tough jobs at those tough agencies, Andy seems to possess the wisdom of an eastern sage.

I encourage you to go over his blog The Total CIO to read the full article and find for yourself his pearls of wisdom. I just like to share with you here a few (actually 3):

1. Just like Yin/Yang are 2 aspects of the same thing (like 2 sides of the same coin), we need to look at both sides (Inside/Outside) of the business to have a complete picture. 
2. The job of linking both sides could be performed by 1 person (CEO) or 2 (CIO/CTO) depends on the situation. I could argue that we may need only 1 techno-savvy CIO or info-savvy CTO to do the job of linking business with technologies, but that’s another story for another day. 
3. To fully execute the strategy, you need People (3 levels of executives) – Process (3 delivery mechanisms to stakeholders) – Technology (3 bridges).

 For a lover of the Rule-of-3, there is nothing more poetic that this quote from the Total CIO himself.