For the CEO / CFO / CPO losing patience with IT

If you are reading this, you have probably said one of these things in the last month: 

• "Our IT is slower than the competition."
• "We hired an expensive developer last month and nothing changed."
• "Our Roadmap is permanently behind."
• "They said two months - they are never on time."

You may have started wondering whether the answer is to replace the CIO, reorganise IT, hire a Big-4 consultant, or just keep paying more for less. None of those are usually the right move - but you have no neutral way to find out which of them, if any, will actually fix it. That is the problem this page is here to solve. 

Hiring more usually makes it worse - more people in a broken delivery system means more cost without more output. The hire that didn't move anything is a symptom, not the disease. 

Even when the CIO is not the right CIO for the next stage, replacing them rarely solves the underlying problem. A new CIO walking into the same structure produces the same outcome 18 months later - and you have lost a year. 

A Roadmap that is a wish-list instead of a plan; informal Change Management and SLAs; a hiring and bonus system that does not reward the right outcomes; an IT-Business alignment that has degraded into a quarterly argument. One of these is dominant in your company. 

A paid, neutral, written read on your IT - not from your CIO (so it is not defensive), not from a Big-4 (so it is not 80 slides nobody acts on), not from a consultancy that wants to sell you 18 months of staff augmentation. 

• A clear, written answer to "is the IT problem people, process, or alignment?"
• The three changes that will move the most, with sequencing and effort
• A neutral read on whether you have the right CIO for the next stage
• The right questions to ask your CIO every quarter from here forward

If you want to walk into your next 1:1 with your CIO with three sharper questions than the ones you have been asking, take the 12-question self-assessment. Built for executives - no IT jargon. It will tell you whether your IT problem is people, process, or alignment, and give you three specific questions for your CIO this week. 

                                                                   - Radu