The Practical CIO: A Common Sense Guide for Successful IT Leadership

AFTERWORD

Jim Giustini

Director, Resources Global Professionals

"We just experienced a complete outage at our datacenter which lasted over three hours. I have ten days to figure out what went wrong and determine how we can prevent this from happening again. Is this something you can help us with?"

The unexpected call I received from José Eiras that Saturday afternoon led to one of the most interesting consulting projects of my career and, more importantly, the opportunity to develop a relationship with one of the most intriguing executives I've ever met.

If I had to pinpoint what is unique about José, I would have to say it is his global perspective. Not global just in the geographical or multicultural sense of the word (although he is a Harvard-educated Brazilian who speaks five languages, and has lived and worked around the world). I mean a perspective that is comprehensive or complete.

For me, one of the key messages of this book is the importance of expanding one's viewpoint. In the case of our collaboration in the root cause analysis of the datacenter outage mentioned above, for instance, the global or holistic perspective required was to think beyond technology infrastructure to also examine related process and organizational factors.

This theme is repeated throughout the book: The importance of looking outside of IT, getting comfortable with numbers, being a collaborator with business rather than acting as an order taker. It is through an expanded perspective that CIOs become strategists, ...