Leadership of the Business Technology organization is a 24-7 job. Done well, a leader in this role must understand business, understand and manage technology, manage a team upon which great demands are placed, juggle resources, and manage delivery of value from what is often perceived as a cost center. The goal: Increase value to the company while running it, not unlike replacing a bridge without disrupting traffic.

Success over the long term requires an IT Leader to advance six areas.

• Developing the technology strategy for your organization will set the course for building value, and measuring will aid the effective leader in managing the journey. (See our Technology Value Acceleration Loop^TM).
• Actual value arises from executing programs chosen consistent with that strategy, and executing them well. The effective leader plans, organizes, and manages to completion, on-target, on-budget, and "on-expectations". And delivery, in a technology world, includes training and integration with the using community.
• "Keeping the lights on" may seem uninteresting and may go unrewarded by the business, but the first big failure will bring this to the forefront of everyone's attention. The effective IT leader assures that operations runs efficiently, effectively, and with an eye towards continuous improvement.
• Culture and relationships are two sides of same coin. The effective IT leader must build strong relationships with the business and must cultivate that style in the culture of the IT organization. The unpleasant antidote for bad relationship and culture management is outsourcing.
• Risk management averts problems - intrusions, disasters and inability to recover, deployment failures, vendor failures, and the like. While not a specific activity, it's a common thread through everything the leader must manage.
• Depending on the client's industry and ownership, compliance with HIPAA and SOX, for example, can be big issues. When it's relevant to the business, effective leadership cultivates awareness and enforcement and promotes reason over bureaucracy.

Whether you want to continue internal management of Business Technology with some outside guidance or you want outside leadership -- perhaps temporarily -- Avatar Strategic Partners can help. Our Lease-A-CIO™, Rent-A-CIO™, and mentoring programs explain how.