Self-Deception is a common phenomenon for the CIOs – Business alignment is done through fooling themselves so that information security and on-time delivery can be acquired.

The common lies CIOs make to themselves are mainly resolve the management of issues in an easier and comfortable manner.

A Chief Information Officer (CIO) has different responsibilities to manage and he is involved in every business operation decision that is supposed to be made for effective and efficient management operations. Some of the common situations where CIOs are found lying to themselves are the following:

Business Alignment with Evolving IT Trends

Aligning IT with business goals is one of the most important and difficult jobs of CIOs. It is usually done to satisfy political players of an organization or for establishing a chargeback system. The chargeback system negatively affects the business goals and its alignment with IT because IT alignment is directly linked with the budget and it has numerous benefits to the business.

Upgradation of Software’s for Value Addition

Upgradation of Software’s for value addition is one of the most useful lies the CIO uses. In reality, CIOs make this statement when they are focused on evolving IT trends and business needs to be aligned. The CIOs use this statement as an excuse when they don’t want to give the impression of using the organizational budget on technology. Another excuse that is made is that the IT budget can be reduced if the system is upgraded and that the organization will not need additional resources to manage things as it is done currently. The assumptions that are made are linked with the fact that upgrading will reduce costs in the long run. CIOs use these statements to shift the blame and use this phenomenon as a decoy to counter inefficiencies.  In some cases, software upgrades are for preemptive maintenance and the expense of software upgrades is higher if not done timely.

Timely Delivery in the Future

Falling behind on schedule of critical projects will be overcome in the next phase and from the future, the project completion will be timely. Projects are executed in phases that are usually a small process when referring to businesses. In this process, CIOs are equipped to convince that their assumptions are reasonable and accomplishable. In the requirements phase, it is clearly understood that, if the project is bigger it has higher risk and comes with more lies and exponential complications for the next phase. It is the longest phase but if done thoroughly, it shortens the next upcoming phases. For a software project planning is essential. The yellow marking on a stage indicates the project being behind the schedule with no chance of recovery and acts as an alert signal before the deadline. Two actions taken by project managers in the yellow stage are:

• Shrink the time of software testing and
• Avoid unnecessary gold plating and aesthetics.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is in Progress

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a framework, which lists the components in which IT is good and components that need to be improved or are in progress are highlighted. ITIL doesn’t define the process of IT component improvement. CIOs explain ITIL as running a service desk for help or Change Advisory Board (CAB) by using the term called “Doing ITIL.”

Performing Agile

Many organizations have moved from the Waterfall Model to Agile. If not, they are in the process of a paradigm shift. The organizations which follow Agile must have faced the situation called “Agile Fall”. Agile fall happens when the team follows the Scrum’s formalism but completely neglects the main theme of transformation. There is a difference in just checking the boxes and properly completing the tasks of the checkbox. Those who claim of not facing an Agile Fall is because they must have deviated from the main direction and objective of Agile.

We are doing DevOps

IT operations are not the ones developers usually collaborate with. In DevOps, the development teams include IT operations for continuous delivery and timely completion. They don’t want to wait for CAB for deploying software changes. DevOps and Agile Scrums are not compatible instead it is recommended to use Kanban when facing these issues. 

Having a Customer Service Culture

In reality, it is not the customer service culture, it is the “Service culture” instead. The service culture of CIOs and personnel at the service desk is the term commonly misused by CIOs.

Information Security is Strict

Information security can never be enough. CIOs are always concerned about the loopholes that are present in their security system which needs to be addressed timely but still claims to have a strict Information security system.

IT Governance Processes Ensure High Business Value Projects

The role of IT governance is to ensure that funds are allocated to high-value projects. In reality, there can be some biases in deciding the high-value projects. Commonly projects with cost reduction benefits will be preferred over high revenue projects.