In this video Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst explains why CIOs may have more success getting projects funded if they spend time cultivating relationships with line of business owners instead of simply turning to the CEO.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
"Before you can be valuable to the CEO, you need to be valuable to your peers running the line of business, so deep relationships with those line-of-business owners are important. Be a thought partner. Be able to meet their needs and to ensure that they see IT as a valuable part of the organization. Just focusing on the CEO, which is something that I hear all the time, the CIO saying should I report to the CEO? How do I have time with this CEO? If you haven't built the other relationships, your time with the CEO is going to be spent being vented all of the frustrations that the rest of the business have.
To have a real seat at the table, you need to make sure your day-to-day is working well. From there, you can branch out into a much more strategic dialogue with the line-of-business owners and with the CEO, but it really starts with making sure those line-of-business owners clearly see the value, get the value, feel good about the relationship with IT.
And, frankly, CEOs don't have big budgets. The big budgets are held by the line-of-business owners. That's where the dollars to actually get things done really reside. And whether that's for the end functionality the line of business needs or it's for the significant infrastructure that needs to be invested to build the flexible platforms, it's up to the CIO to convince the line-of-business owners of the importance to do that because the line-of-business owners need to be partners going to the CEO ultimately when final decisions are made."
