Great post! I think your view of the individual being aligned with both the business and the technology is excellent. I wish our company worked with more CIO’s like yourself. Unfortunately, many of our clients have missed the needed integration in these roles and suffer from an either/or scenario – the functional MBA who has moved “up” into a CIO role from another operational area or a “technical genius” who has been promoted out of his or her “comfort zone”.

Thanks for this enlightening post – I’ll be sure to share it with our clients.

Best Regards,
Scott Priestley
President,
Lionshare Software, Inc.
web: http://www.lionsharesoftware.com
blog: http://www.scottpriestley.com

Curiously, my sense is that relatively few CIOs do this at all, and the ones that do often go overboard. Keeping a balance is difficult yet key.

Seriously, the things they currently use should have been in your radar before you decided to deploy them. The things you are testing now should be the things you will deploy to them as their needs mature.

I like to make sure that I have experienced every tool we currently deploy to our users. I am not qualified to test them all, but I like to have a feel for what is in use and how well it may or may not work.