An indispensable guide showing IT leaders the way to balance the needs of innovation and exploration with exploitation and operational reliability Many books on modern IT leadership focus solely on supporting innovation and disruption. In practice these must be balanced with the need to support waste reduction in existing processes and capabilities while keeping the foundation operational, secure, compliant with regulations, and cost effective. In The Accidental CIO, veteran software developer-turned-executive Scott Millett delivers an essential playbook to becoming an impactful, strategic leader at any stage of your IT leadership journey from your earliest aspirations to long time incumbents in director and C-suite roles. You’ll find a wealth of hands-on advice for tackling the many challenges and paradoxes that face technology leaders, from creating an aligned IT strategy, defining a target architecture, designing a balanced operating model, and leading teams and executing strategy. After the foreword from Simon Wardley, The Accidental CIO will help you: Understand problem contexts you will face using the Cynefin decision making framework, and how the philosophies of agile, lean and design thinking can help manage them. Design an adaptive and strategically aligned operating model by applying the appropriate ways of working and governance approaches depending on each unique problem context. Organize a department using a blend of holacratic and hierarchical principles, and leveraging modern approaches such as Team Topology and Socio-technical patterns. Develop and deploy an effective and aligned IT Strategy using Wardley mapping based on a deep knowledge of your business architecture. With this knowledge you’ll be ready to create an empowered IT organization focused on solving customer problems and generating enterprise value. You’ll understand the science behind what motivates teams and changes behavior. And you’ll show your skills as a business leader thinking beyond IT outputs to impactful business outcomes.

IT Leaders that understand the power of modern technology approaches can not only deliver capabilities that contribute to business success, they can also help to shape the overall strategy of a business. Digital businesses need IT to be more than a support function, they need IT leaders that proactively identify opportunities for technology to remove constraints and enable business growth and evolution. However becoming an effective leader of a strategic part of a business is tough when you are new. There are the challenges with working with business peers, developing a strategy and having it signed off by the board even before you build and lead a team to deliver it. From your first 30 days, to presenting a vision to the board, the building of a team through to implementing your plan, this book supports your new c-level role with practical advice and frameworks for the various challenges that lay ahead of you. This book is ideal if you are moving from a technical role up into a leadership role, or if you are an existing IT leader that wants to apply the techniques of lean and agile development.

As our economy shifts from recession to recovery, our current economic climate is ripe for transformation. CIOs are in a unique position to leverage technology in order to drive innovation and boost business growth. The CIO Playbook is the handy desk reference for CIOs, CEOs, CFOs, and up and coming leaders, revealing a dynamic seven-step framework (Partner – Organize – Innovate – Deliver – Support – Protect – Grow) that will guide you in making essential changes to your organization. The proven strategies, tools, and techniques in The CIO Playbook make it the ultimate "how-to" resource for creating a high-performance IT organization that delivers value-added products and services to employees, customers, and shareholders. Author Nicholas Colisto provides solutions to the issues that concern business leaders and IT practitioners, including: How to truly partner with business peers Delivering high-quality products and services that are embraced by your user community How to ensure your team is focused on the right innovations Measuring performance and running your department like a business Ways to attract, motivate, and retain a talented team working toward a common vision Managing risks to operate effectively and protect corporate reputation Featuring online templates for each of the seven steps described in the book, The CIO Playbook can help you transform your IT department from a mere order taker to a high-performance organization that delivers extraordinary business outcomes, despite this era of turbulent economic challenges.

Explore the insights of a world-leading CIO as he expounds on the challenges faced by technology executives and how to overcome them As the pace of change in business continues to rapidly accelerate, Chief Information Officers and Chief Technology Officers are often left with accountability for future-proofing their organizations. Renowned professor, executive, and author Alex Siow shows you how you can meet that challenge while managing the information overload that often accompanies these positions. In Leading with IT: Lessons from Singapore’s First CIO, the author uses his expansive and impressive experience in academia and industry to lead you down a path to achieving success as a CIO or CTO. Filled with practical tips, case studies, and personal insights, the book discusses: The management of legacy information and telecommunications technology The information overload often suffered by technology executives How to motivate and mentor a workforce How to manage change effectively The fostering of innovation The future of money, work, and artificial intelligence Perfect for CIOs, CTOs, and the executives, managers, and employees who work with and for them, Leading with IT delivers an engaging and insightful exploration of what it takes to achieve astounding results at the intersection of technology and business.

The Accidental Analyst: Show Your Data Who's Boss Are you drowning in a sea of data? Would you like to take control of your data and analysis to quickly answer your business questions and make critical decisions? Do you want to confidently present results and solutions to your managers, colleagues and clients? If so, The Accidental Analyst is for you! Although you didn't plan for a career as a data analyst, you're now in a position where you have to analyze data to be successful. Whether you've been working with data for a few years or are just getting started, you can learn how to analyze your data to find answers to real-world questions. Using illustrated examples, we'll walk you through a clear, step-by-step framework that we call The Seven C's of Data Analysis. Read this book for inspiration, ideas and confidence to begin tackling the problems you face at work. Keep it by your desk as a reference on how to organize, analyze and display your data. Don't worry, you can continue to use your favorite spreadsheet or data analysis software—this information is not tied to any particular application. Throughout the book, we also include expert tips, tricks, and shortcuts that took years of analyzing data to discover and understand! Please visit us at www.AccidentalAnalyst.com for articles, our free newsletter and upcoming training events. Quotes This is a wonderful book, filled with practical advice. Business people who are struggling to make sense of their data will find it accessible and directly applicable to their work— a great resource for building analytical prowess. Stephen Few, best-selling author of "Show Me the Numbers" and "Now You See It" Finally, a book that clearly explains the fundamentals of business analytics! I wish that I had this book at the start of my career as a data analyst. Tim Latendress, Financial Analyst This book is an amazing resource for regular business people who want to make sense of their data and take charge of their business! It provides simple yet comprehensive coverage of business analytics. Diego Saenz, President, Petplace and former CIO of Pepsi Latin America Authors Eileen McDaniel, PhD, is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Freakalytics, LLC, specializing in analytical training and short-term projects that empower people to get the most out of their data and take decisive action to solve problems in their daily work. She is co-author of Rapid Graphs with Tableau Software 7 and the Rapid Dashboards Reference Card, also available as a mobile app, and leads the development of course training materials. Working in both scientific research and business, Eileen realized that business analysts needed a formal, step-by-step method similar to the one scientists use to collect and analyze their data. This inspired her to develop the seven-step framework for data analysis found in The Accidental Analyst. Stephen McDaniel is passionate about helping people understand, present and take action with their data. He is co-author of multiple books and courses including SAS® for Dummies and Rapid Graphs with Tableau Software 7. Stephen has been on the Faculty of The American Marketing Association and The Data Warehouse Institute and is currently Director of Analytic Product Management at Tableau Software and Principal Analyst at Freakalytics, LLC.

Great CIOs consistently exceed key stakeholders' expectations and maximize the business value delivered through their company's technology. What's their secret? Sure, IT professionals need technological smarts, plus an understanding of their company's goals and the competitive landscape. But the best of them possess a far more potent ability: they forge good working relationships with everyone involved in an IT-enabled project, whether it's introducing new hardware or implementing a major business transformation. In The CIO Edge, the authors draw on Korn/Ferry International's extensive empirical data on leadership competencies as well as Gartner's research on IT trends and the CIO role. They prove that, for IT leaders, mastering seven essential skills yields big results. This new book lays out the people-to-people leadership competencies that the highest-performing CIOs have in common—including the ability to inspire others, connect with a diverse array of stakeholders, value others' ideas, and manifest caring in their relationships. The authors then explain how to cultivate each defining competency. Learn these skills, and you'll get more work done through others' enabling you to successfully execute more IT projects, generate better results for your company, and concentrate your efforts where they'll exert the most impact. The payoff? As the authors show, you'll work smarter, not harder—and get promoted far faster than your peers.