COMM 435 - CIO Strategies

An effective Chief Information Officer (CIO) or senior IT manager faces a lot of challenges - from coping with daily support and crisis to long term relationships with vendors, IT specialists, and business managers. A good IT manager must be a strong business leader with the willingness to learn, at least at a high-level understanding, the various information technologies (both their strengths and weaknesses). This course presents those issues and provides students with the opportunity to discuss and analyze them. The knowledge and analysis skills you gain in the course are useful for you to navigate your own career (especially as a senior IT or business manager) with greater confidence.

Main topics to be covered (from the senior management perspective) are:

• business-IT alignment
• IT governance
• IT talent management
• cost and value of IT
• project management
• vendor management
• infrastructure management
• scanning for and analyzing emergent technologies

Learning objectives

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• show how the IT function supports and enables organizational objectives
• establish joint accountability for issues that cannot be decided by IT alone
• involve non-IT senior managers in visioning, strategy making, promoting, and understanding of future technology-based possibilities
• communicate, employ, nurture, and retain IT talent (because of profound disparities in specialized knowledge)
• cope with IT problems you can and cannot anticipate
• manage IT vendors (achieving accountability and alignment with your business)
• oversee IT infrastructure (especially its investment and protection from malicious attacks, and crisis management)
• identify emerging IT threats and opportunities

Prerequisite: COMM 205.