Transcription
Hey, how you doing? My name is Emilio. I love tech. Tech is amazing. And hopefully, if you're checking this video out, you love tech as well. And you want to know about the CIO, the chief information officer, the head honcho. What do they actually do?
So, I'm going to give you my experience, what I do as a CIO every single day. It is a hectic, hectic role. Really exciting, also very challenging. And then maybe give you some ideas if you are in tech. If you're an IT manager, you want to move yourself up. It's achievable for all of you if you really work hard at it.
Hey, before we do get into this, you need to be able to know your network, map your network, understand all the bits and pieces. And sometimes it's really hard just to sort of get a good high-level overview of what is what. This is why I love a product called Fathom.
You know, sometimes when you need to install monitoring apps and scanning apps on computers, you need to go and install an agent on every single device. And that can be really, really frustrating. Fathom is completely agentless application discovery and dependency mapping. It is great. Essentially, it just scans your entire network and builds a nice map of your entire network so you know exactly what is what. A full discovery of your hybrid IT infrastructure. Mapping all of your servers, your hypervisor, your hyperscalers, understanding your network. Fathom will give you a view of your clustered service by business applications so that I can see exactly what is installed and where and how they all connect together. You'll be able to see what is what so you can manage that change even better. Understand where the root cause of some problems may be, assist with migrations, assist with your disaster recovery and your business continuity plans, compliance, cyber security and more.
Now, being a big AI advocate, I love what's happening in AI. Future versions will also come equipped with AI, and I'm really, really looking forward to that. Now, here's the best thing: it's really, really fairly priced, and they even offer a free forever plan down below in this video description. I've got a link to it, so go and pick it up right now. You want to become a better CIS admin? Give Fathom a shot.
And also, one more thing: if you love tech, why don't you do us a favor? Click on that subscription button, click on the bell. This way, I know that you enjoy the content that we are releasing. And if you click on that notification bell, you'll also get notified when new stuff is being released. So remember to click on that bell, and let's get into it right now.
Now, the way that I start my day. Firstly, I wake up. I'm tired. So what do I need? I need a little bit of a pep. I need the most essential thing every single day to make sure that I'm as productive as possible. And what is that? Coffee. Coffee is like the nectar that fuels the energy. Coffee is a super important part, at least in my day.
Now, if you're thinking, what does a CIO actually do all day? Are they just in meetings every single day? Meetings, meetings, meetings. There's a lot of meetings. Especially for anybody who's in IT management, you're going to find that the more your team grows, the more responsibility you've got and be engaged with lots of people in an organization. So that you're going to have to be engaging, liaising, building trust, building relationships with people across organizations, with maybe your customers, with your suppliers. You're going out and actually seeing people in person, doing lunches, doing lots of meetings. It's a busy role.
But what I will do is generally on the commute into work, depending on how I'm commuting into the office, sometimes I will do the public transport, sometimes I will drive, I will use my AI machine to give me a summary of the stuff that I may have missed overnight. Especially if you're working in a company that is global or in lots of states and you got texts all over the place, you want to know whether things have gone pear-shaped while you were sleeping. You need to be on top of servers that have gone down, cloud systems that are no longer operational, a major malware outbreak at a particular site. I need to know what's going on. So, hey AI, give me a little bit of a summary around what I've missed overnight. And we'll go ahead and do that. And sometimes I just will open up my email, my inbox, and actually get a snapshot summary of what's going on before I even get into the office so that when I get into the office, I know exactly what is happening.
I find it extremely helpful to put as much detail into my calendar so that I can focus on key tasks. If I know I have this thing that I need to do, I have this paper that I need to write, I have this strategy or I have this meeting, put it into your calendar because otherwise you can get distracted. You may have your 10 things that you want to do in that day; you get into the office and you're not always going to be able to do all of them because there's going to be distractions. There's things that are going to be happening. But if I put it into my calendar as a 30-minute block, it's blocked out. Other people who are going to try to schedule meetings with me will see that I've blocked out that 30 minutes, and then they're fine.
Now, here's something that I have found to be really, really helpful in my tech career: I've purposefully tried to stay as technical as I can. Sometimes, it's unfortunate. It happens. People who move into management positions lose that spark around why they started in that profession. So, I got into tech because I enjoyed computers. I would open up my computers. I'd see what's going on in there, and I'd tink it around and I overclocked my CPU and I added a whole bunch of water cooling and all of these things to make my PC pimping. And then you get into management, and you just—you're now dealing with people. You're dealing with issues. You're dealing with fires. A lot of your job is just putting fires out; a lot of your job is meetings and strategy and all of these other things. Great. And that's all part of the job, and we'll talk a little bit about that in a second. But also stay technical because you know what I found very, very helpful. So I manage—I manage a team of people, and to be able to speak with them and still sort of know what's cutting edge, what's emerging, what is happening is really, really helpful. So if I need to get into the code, if I need to understand how the server is configured, I want to understand these cloud technologies; I sort of know what I'm talking about because I purposefully am trying to stay up to date as much as I can.
But the reality is you're not going to be as hands-on. And this is something that I learned when I had to move away from 100% tech to being in management. I couldn't do the hands-on anymore. Not as much anyway. Okay, I still like to get my hands dirty, but the reality is you're now focused on the big picture stuff. You're focusing on the strategy. Ultimately, the direction of the IT technical department will focus on you. It's your direction. You are the leader. You're the person in charge.
So, I have to make sure ultimately the strategy, the technology strategy for the entire business rests on my expertise, my knowledge. I need to be able to talk with my tech team. I then need to go and speak to other key leaders in other departments across the organization and then form the IT strategy that is in full alignment with what the business is trying to do because this is one thing that I find and I've—and look—and I've experienced this as well myself: sometimes there's just really cool tech out there, and you just want to go and put it into place, and you just put it into place in a business, and then it doesn't work as you expected, or the business doesn't adapt to it; you know, they don't like it.
If you are regularly engaging, and this is what I try to do as much as I can, I regularly engage with the other stakeholders, the other people, the internal, the external people, the other key leaders, the departments to make sure that whatever I'm putting out there, whatever new system process that I'm trying to implement is in full alignment with what they need. Right? I am ultimately—I am providing a service to the business. Right? I want to make sure that whatever I put in place will serve the business, will make the business more successful, profitable, make the business go in the right direction. If I'm going to be a hindrance, don't even put it in. If this new piece of tech looks really cool and really, really shiny, but it's not going to really add any value to what the business is trying to do, don't put it in. It's actually a waste of time, a waste of money, and it's not going to make you look very, very good.
I want to make sure that the tickets that are coming through are being responded to in a timely manner, that the level of support is done well, and that the requests are reasonable. Because sometimes staff will just request stuff, or the staff will request, "I need this really, really fast laptop." The problem sometimes is the tech will say, "Yeah, okay," and they'll just go and buy it. Or the IT manager will say, "Sure, I'll just go and buy…" The role of a CIO, or of a good CIO, is to be able to tactfully—tactfully say no. Somebody in the team needs—somebody in the business needs something doesn't mean that it maybe fits right with where the overall IT strategy is heading. Remember what I said before: the decision and the direction of a—of a business strategy, a technology business strategy, is in full alignment with what the business is trying to do. So, if you've got little Joe blows, little cowboys around the place requesting stuff that don't fit into the bigger picture, there's no point. I try to say no, maybe that's not a good idea, but at least also give them some context around why we don't want to go that direction. We are going this direction. We're not going to give you this laptop because we've agreed that this is the stack of laptop, the brand, the model, the make, what have you, that we're using in the business.
At the same time, I think it's very, very important to be very transparent—to at least with uh the people that I work with at the same level of me, say in the executive group, and I'm dealing with different people in different departments, operation leaders, marketing leaders, etc.—is making sure that they know what is coming up. So, I tee up regular catchups with them. I'll go out with them for a coffee, for lunch, swap ideas. I put into their calendar a one-hour block every month where I say, "Hey, marketing director, tell me about what's happening in your world. What's working well? What's not working well? How can technology help you to be a better team, a better marketing team, and letting people know what is the technology team actually doing?" Because often most people don't really even know what an IT team even does. They just think they just log a ticket, somebody fixes your computer, and that's it. That's all the tech team do. They just fix computers, right? They just tell me to turn it off and on again, and that's it. Services is one thing, but then you've got all the infrastructure; who's looking after all of your network, all of your servers, all of your cyber security, who are building the apps and supporting all of your apps and your—your websites? Who's doing all of the cool AI stuff behind the scenes? Who's doing all of this? IT people, right? So sometimes it's really nice to be transparent with people. Give them an—an overview around what is happening in tech and what is every single person working on. What are the different departments in the technology team working on to achieve the business goal—ultimately, not every single company is going to have a CIO—ultimately, right? Some companies will, some companies won't; depends on the size of the company, and often a smaller business probably doesn't have a CIO. They will probably have an IT manager, maybe a couple of different sorts of IT managers like a services manager and maybe an infrastructure manager. As the business grows, as the business expands, then there may be a development manager. There may be somebody who's responsible for cyber security. Sometimes you've got a CTO, a chief technology officer, different roles—a little bit. You may have a CISO, a chief information security officer. So the bigger the business, the more I guess IT leaders there will be in a business. So not every company will have a CIO.
Small, medium, large company, you're either going to have an IT manager, an IT director, a head of IT, uh, or a CIO or CTO, right? Ultimately, this person is going to be responsible for setting the strategy, as we talked about, what is happening in tech and what are the right things that we need to put in place for the business to succeed, right? So thinking about all of the day-to-day operations of IT, making sure that all of that stuff is done well, that the foundational bits that are needed to function in a—in a technology department are there, that the service desk is strong, that the back-end infrastructure, the on-premise, the cloud, the hybrid, whatever the tech stack is, is strong, cyber security is paramount, right? That all of that is all done well. If they are developing stuff, if they're making apps, if they're making websites, that they've got the right development framework, they've got the right structure, processes to make sure that there's a proper process around code. They may be running in a DevOps environment where you've got development and operations or a DevSecOps, or you've got security in there as well to make sure that the whole thing flows well. So, this is all the foundational stuff to make sure that things are continuing to tick along.
Now, data is like so, so important, and so many companies unfortunately suck at data. They've got data everywhere, systems everywhere. Nothing's interconnected. Like there's no like system A, system B; they've got data, but they're not talking to each other. So the data is not consistent. Ideally, get your data in order. Get something like a data warehouse, a data lake, somewhere where you can stick all the data. It's all nicely managed, right? If you're using things like PowerBI. So, we use a lot of PowerBI where I work at the moment to create really, really nice dashboards and reports for the business. So, getting your data in order, right? Making sure that it's structured right, you've got a good naming convention, you've got a proper data retention policy, super important. Then you've got all the policy stuff, all the governance, a proper disaster recovery plan, an information security policy, uh, maybe an AI policy. You know, if you haven't drafted an AI policy, draft one right now.
But then the important part to make sure that a business is successful is the innovation piece. The R&D, the research and development, the innovation. What is the next thing? And a good CIO is going to be on top of that. The BAU super essential, the data super essential. The governance, the policies super essential. But then what's coming up? What is that next thing in the next 6 months? Developing a good road map. The next 1, 2, 3, 5 years. What is coming up in tech? If you don't know what the future holds, if you don't have a plan for where you want to be, you're not going to be a very good CIO. And making sure that you—because you're going to remain technical—you stay up to date with what's happening in tech. And right now, of course, AI is like the thing. Making sure that I've got proper guard rails in place. Really, really important.
Now, throughout my day, I'm going to be having more coffee. Look, ultimately, the responsibility all comes back to me. I've been putting out fires. Technology fires everywhere. All of my team are coming to me for stuff, for support. "Ah, Emilio, ah, I need this done. This person's asking for this, they want this, they want this. I'm getting this person yelling at me." And I'm having to deal with all of this stuff all the time. And it's stressful. It can get really, really full on. How to learn how to diffuse a, you know, a fiery situation; the responsibility of ultimately anything that goes wrong. If there's malware that's spreading throughout the systems, if there's a major outage, this thing that was deployed screwed something up, I'm responsible. It's not my tech; I can't throw my techs under the bus.
You want to become one of these people? You want to become a CIO? Well, firstly, know it's hard work. Know that you have to be prepared to get yelled at, to be prepared to be told your tech team is not doing a good job. Suck it up, buttercup. You'll be fine. Learn how to have a bit of a thick skin. Very, very important. Remain technical. Learn more about leadership. Take on some additional responsibilities in your company right now. Ask your manager whether they can give you some more stuff. And then when that time is right, give it a shot. You know, you're going to fail. You're going to fail a lot, but it's okay. You're going to get knocked down. But then what do you do when you get knocked down? That's right. You get back up again.
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