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Making Time for Strategy (Continued)
For Paul Padilla, VP of IT at New Mexico Student Loans, damage control has a way of highjacking his time. "It's a major problem for us," he says. "When production problems or service disruptions occur, I find myself getting more involved than I'd like, explaining what happened and what prevention measures will be implemented."
IT executives such as Padilla find themselves pulled in different directions. Trying to orient his IT staff in basic service management principles and practices devours a lot of his time, while management expects high-level thinking. "Our CEO has been emphasizing the need for the top leadership team to become more strategic," he says.
Yet finding that time is elusive. Padilla says that there are numerous areas to which he would like to devote more strategic time, such as IT Infrastructure Library service management, service-oriented architecture for technology development, research practices for emerging technologies and infrastructure management, as well as project portfolio management and strategic-plan execution.
Brian Gould, the CIO at Classic Homes, is in the same boat. Every now and then, Gould will suggest that the Colorado Springs, Colo., company invest in some technology that promises a strategic advantage. And usually the executive response is that the money could be better spent on something else.
"We're looking at a limited capital pool," he says. "For $200,000 they say, 'We could buy a piece of property.' What has a better ROI? Our executives are getting better at understanding IT, but we have a ways to go. At this point, the company views technology as technology."
One way Gould deals with that is by delegating as much work as he can to his staff of five.
"The more things I can hand off frees up time for me to spend on analysis," he says. "There are very few things that can't be delegated. You want to give people stretch projects without burying them, projects that will help their career growth as well."
But with 300 users in two different business units, Gould still finds that there are too few hours in the day. "What suffers is time to think about what technology means to the company and where we're going to be in five years," he says. "The ERP fixes come first. I try to set aside some time every day -- an hour or two -- and think about where are we going and how we are helping to contribute to the growth."
Often that means multitasking by reading tech material and industry trades while working out on a stationary bike at the gym. "A lot of it happens on the weekend," he adds.
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