Mostly harmless, conspicuously useful
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Becoming a Chief Information Officer
A Chief Information Officer owns the enterprise IT estate — services, operating model, spend, and vendors — so the rest of the business runs on technology it can rely on, which sounds like a promotion and is in fact a job description of a meeting that produces no tickets and all of the outages. The CIO decides which services to offer, which to retire, which vendors to keep, and which budgets to defend to a board whose members last touched a help desk during a different presidential administration. The work spans service management, portfolio, vendor contracts, asset tracking, and change, and the principal product is an IT estate the business can run on and a series of choices that remain defensible after the vendor presentation ends. This guide travels from reading a service definition to governing IT strategy across an organization, with practical stops at budgeting, vendors, change, and the recurring discovery that the service no one defined is the one the business is currently depending on.
Level 1 · Novice
Read the service before agreeing it exists
Novice CIOs observe IT services rather than defining them, learning how a service is documented, owned, and retired so the service no one defined stops being the one the business depends on.
At the first stop you have read-only access to service catalogs, portfolio reviews, and incident reports, the way a tourist reads a museum label before being allowed to touch anything. IT service management is the practice of running IT as a set of defined services with owners, levels, and lifecycles rather than tickets; service portfolio is the practice of deciding which IT services to offer, invest in, consolidate, or retire. You sit with a senior leader, read the services that shaped the estate, and learn to distinguish a service that is defined from a service that is named and laminated.
Suppose you shadow a meeting where a team reports that a "service" is healthy. You observe the CIO ask who owns it, what its level is, when it was last reviewed, and what would happen if it were retired. The team had prepared a dashboard and not these answers, and the service is reclassified from "managed" to "named until someone looks." You record the question, the gap, and the eventual definition; one brisk shadow is an anecdote with good posture, not a portfolio, but it prevents the assumption that a dashboard is a service.
Words from the spaceship manual, translated
- Service catalog
- A documented list of IT services with owners, levels, lifecycles, and consumers. A catalog without owners is a list of things the business depends on and no one is accountable for.
- Service level
- A documented expectation for availability, performance, support, and recovery of a service. A level without measurement is a level that has not been met, however confident the dashboard.
- Service portfolio
- The set of IT services the organization offers, invests in, consolidates, or retires. A portfolio without review is an inheritance, and an inheritance is rarely what the business currently needs.