Ever since I was introduced to CIO magazine several years ago I was immediately drawn to the similarities faced by both CIOs and chief communicators. Perhaps it’s just me, but I read CIO magazine not necessarily for the IT information (which I also enjoy), but with every article I substitute CIO with CCO or CMO. Go ahead and try it. Here’s one that recently caught my eye: From the CEO: 5 Questions CIOs Need to Answer.
I’ve taken those five items and listed them here, but with viewpoint of someone in communications:
1. Do we understand what we broke, and what is our plan to fix it?
If you have the perfect communications team than you can skip this point. If not, keep reading. Most discussions with CEOs revolve around helping the business and with communications that’s no different. CEOs always challenge us to improve, to be better than the competition and to find solutions to win customers. This also can apply to your company’s reputation. How do your customers view you positively and where can you improve? These are issues CEOs look to us to fix.
2. How do we get full potential from discretionary spending?
How often do you review your budget and make changes? Are you maximizing that discretionary spending? And where can you improve your budget in order to help the organization achieve its business goals. In today’s economy in particular, CEOs want to ensure every department across the enterprise is getting the best return on investment. Are you?
3. How will we drive unnecessary complexity out of IT?
This point obviously speaks to complexities of software and hardware, but this still applies to communicators. Where is complexity in your department? Are you sharing metrics? Are you maximizing events? Is social media a cross-department effort? We all have complexities that we can tear out of our marketing and communication systems, but finding them and fixing them takes time and effort.
4. How will we take better advantage of “good enough” solutions?
Yes, your news release is good enough — you saw the stories. Your web site too since people are visiting. And I’m sure your advertising is good enough as well. But you’re competitive, right? What will you do to take the risks to really make your brand stand out? We all have a lot of “standard” communication tools available to us, and no where is this more evident than with social media. We all have these “free” tools but where are you excelling?
5. How do we make outsourcing more strategic?
That new agency you hired — are you tapping into their best resources? Do you go with size and depth of the big agency or lean and nimble from the small agency? These are key decisions we all need to make as the playing field becomes more competitive for us. If your agency isn’t constantly challenging you to do the right/best thing, actively reviewing your activities and asking you tough questions than maybe it’s time you need a more strategic partner.
I am a huge supporter of working as close as possible with your IT team (my earlier post on working with InfoSec) and I encourage you to work more closely with them as well. I think you will be surprised at the number of similarities. There’s an entire list of email newsletters available at CIO and I would encourage you to sign up and read CIO Leader and CIO Insider, but read them from a communicators perspective. I think you’ll find yourself thinking differently and developing some new ideas for implementing your strategy.
Let us know your thoughts. And if you happen to pass your CIO in the hall offer to take him/her to lunch. They can probably learn a lot from you as well.
