Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
in such an environment means that the CIO must fulfill multiple roles that can be at odds with
one another.
Resource Allocations are Made Based on Ineffective Metrics
Unlike their private-sector counterparts, CIOs in the public sector are often not
rewarded for saving their organizations money. Rather, they are in a sense punished by
budget cuts in the next fiscal year, if they managed a surplus in the previous year.
Consequently, the system encourages waste, as evidenced in the following quote:
If you run a surplus this year, next years budget will be cut by that amount. So
at year-end, what's the easiest way to avoid that? Invest in hardware!
Further complicating matters:
In the public sector, the people who spend the money on you may not be the
people who get the return on their investment.
The exploratory in-depth interviews provide a rich data set for better understanding the
problems and challenges confronting CIOs in the public sector in particular, but insight can
be gained into the CIOs position regardless of sector. The approach taken here of taking those
problems and making inferences regarding the requisite CIO competencies is a logical first
step toward conceptualizing competence in the role. A logical next step it seems is to explicate
the specific competencies that underlie each of the six identified dimensions.
As such, a second round of interviews was conducted. The nature of those semistructured
interviews and the results are discussed next.
Semistructured Interviews
The semistructured interviews represented the second lesson for research on public
management from Allison's 1980 work that was followed here:
2.
It is possible to learn from experience the skills, attributes, and practices that competent
managers exhibit and those that less successful managers lack.
Five NYS government agency CIOs participated in semistructured face-to-face inter-
views consisting of open- and closed-ended questions. Each interview lasted approximately
one and one-half hours in duration. The interviews consisted of a
two-step exercise
that
focused on each of the six dimensions, one at a time. The intent was to define the six
dimensions of the conceptual framework by identifying the attributes (i.e., factors and
activities) that the interviewees most commonly associate with each dimension.
Step 1:
The interviewees were presented with a quotation from the literature. Select words
or phrases within the quotation were highlighted that related directly to the dimension
in question. Respondents were asked to list five factors (given a knowledge-based
dimension) or five activities (given an activity-based dimension) that they deemed to
be critical in relation to the highlighted text.
Step 2:
The interviewees were presented with a preliminary set of factors or activities drawn
from the literature and the exploratory in-depth interviews. The participants were then
asked to indicate which of the factors or activities from each set was critical in relation
