The CIO Who Admitted Too Much - Essay Example

In the article ‘The CIO Who Admitted Too Much’, Evan Schuman addresses the issue of Shawn Schwegman’s prediction of a possible failure in creating effective databases to meet the administrative demands of Oversstock.com as its CIO and his writing a letter admitting his failure to the company’s stakeholders. In the opinion of Strassmann (as cited in Gray), information management is the responsibility of the CEO while information technology is the duty of the CIO. Thus, it becomes evident that Schwegman, the CIO, went wrong by communicating directly to the stakeholders, especially a prediction that can hamper the growth of the company.

The most interesting thing about the article is the honesty exhibited by Schwegman by taking all the blame onto himself and by being honest about future possibilities. He even describes the job as ‘horrible’ and predicts that there will be even worse problems with updating the inadequate Oracle system that is ‘terribly architected’.

Shuman points out that the CIO was totally displeased by the fact that the letter had leaked and feared the simplification of the matter in his letter would mislead people. In addition, he admits that the letter would possibly create irreparable damage to the relationship between Overstock.com and its stakeholders. However, he also feels that it was a strong sense of ethics that compelled him to be honest and truthful about the situation and explain as he felt about it at that point in time. However, Schwegman had to admit that terrible things did not happen as he expected about the Oracle updating, thus weakening his position. Thus, it becomes evident that it was not so wise for Shwegman to be so brutally honest at that point in time, especially when it became clear that communication management was not his arena.

However, a look into the roles and responsibilities of CIOs in a company will help understand the rationality of Schwegman’s communication. Schuman points out that in large companies, CIOs presently have very limited direct power and hence, are forced to push the IT/business agenda by persuasion and by maintaining good relations with other stakeholders. It was possibly an understanding of this situation that made Schwegman write the letter. In addition, one can see an effort on his part to justify his position as he says “At the end of the day, all of these problems boil down to Overstock’s failure (read, my failure) to architect a system that can handle real-time updates properly.” However, by the time his letter leaked, the worst fears went unrealized as the updating was a ‘huge success’. Here, one should go back and listen to what Strassmann says about the infatuation CIOs feel toward public relations. According to him, (as cited by Goldsmith ), CIOs are seduced by the public relations hyperbole and point out that the role of the CIO is to manage a strategic resource, not to re-engineer the departments of corporate peers. However, Strassmann, in ‘Check: How to verify if you are important’, points out that the duties of a CIO should include the authority to stop projects and enforce compliance with the department’s architecture.

This incident clearly indicates the ambiguity that still remains surrounding the role of the CIO. In addition, it clearly reveals the communication problems that exist between the technical people and non-technical management, thus making the work of the CIO ‘terrible’. Shwegman admits that he had to simplify the issues as he was writing to a ‘bunch of non-technical people’.

There are more points to support the pessimism as exhibited by Schwegman. To illustrate, it is pointed out by Schuman that technology veterans are supposed to be pessimistic. In addition, it is argued that CIOs should work like law enforcement agents who are supposed to be creative so that they could correctly anticipate the way terrorists would strike. Based on this justification, it seems that what Schwegman predicted about future problems is only a part of the responsibility he was supposed to fulfill.

However, the way Schwegman presented the raw information raises eyebrows. The negative aspect of Schwegman’s letter is that it pointed out the bad things that happened in the past and predicted that worse things are in the pipeline. However, the letter is devoid of any suggestions to the stakeholders that they could adopt to solve the issue and protect themselves. As Schuman rightly points out, it is good if CIOs are honest to a fault and predict possible problems. However, when communicating externally, it is necessary to control that tendency as, according to Schuman, non-technical people want to hear that responsible adults are taking care of the matter and all will be fine.

Thus, it becomes evident that Schwegman went wrong in communicating his projections to the outside stakeholders and partners, especially when they were hypothetical and eventually went wrong. His action only helped create unnecessary panic in stakeholders, thus damaging the image of the company. So, it seems that a better solution at that stage was to communicate the projections to the concerned officials above his position. Thereafter, he could use his technical terminologies to explain things to the management; not to the external stakeholders. Though the CIO is supposed to be pessimistic in analysis and projections, he is not supposed to be so in communication.