The IT Chauffeur drives to CIO Canada

In the June issue of Canadian CIO, editor Shane Schick interviews me about The IT Chauffeur.  I enjoyed having a chance to talk about what inspired me to write the book: the disconnect between CxOs and IT.

Here's the interview in the June issue of Canadian CIO: IT strategy, he wrote

Canadian CIO June 2013

What do you think the CEO should know about IT?

Have you ever wondered why there is a disconnect between IT and business in many organizations? Does it start at the top?  

Regardless of your position in any organization, can you explain how IT decisions get made?

Some business articles allude to a poor relationship between IT and other departments being a function of poor management.  Would this gap disappear if the C-suite had a better understanding of Information Technology?

What do you think the CEO or anyone at the C-suite should know about IT?  Here are my top items: 

• Clear understanding of how IT decisions should get made
• IT Governance
• How to integrate business and IT
• How to use the business case in IT and other divisions
• How project management methodologies for all divisions can make an organization more effective
• How data integrity is critical to the operation of the organization
• How to make the IT department's services efficient
• How to protect the organization from natural and man-made disasters 
• Why it's important to protect data
• Fundamental understanding of the cloud
• Basic understanding of big data and business intelligence
• Know that IT can be socially conscientious with green IT, and finally,
• How to undertake the development of an IT strategy

Recognizing that CxOs often don't understand IT as a starting point, I wanted to explore what the CxO should know about IT using a non-technical, easy-to-understand, conversational story. So have a read of the book The IT Chauffeur (Available at Amazon.com or at CreateSpace).

Ontario can't recover emails deleted by senior staff - Really?

In an article in this week's Globe and Mail, Ontario's Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, reported that senior staff members in the offices of both the Ontario energy minister and former premier Dalton McGuinty intentionally deleted emails about the cancellation of gas generating plants in Oakville and Mississauga. The Privacy Commissioner's report throws more gasoline on the fire of the political fallout from the gas generating plant cancellations.

The opposition, and for that matter many taxpayers, are up in arms over the deletion (read "cover-up") of senior staff emails regarding the cancellation of the gas generating plants.  Ann Cavoukian determined that senior Liberal staff in McGuinty's office broke the law by deleting all emails sent and received on this issue.

What concerns me more than the alleged cover-up is the idea that no one can recover the emails.  What happened to good old basic IT practices?  Most organizations that have email perform regular backups daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and then send the back-up off site for secure storage.  

Can no-one at the Government of Ontario request recovery of emails from a backup?  Any organization that has an important need for transparency and security must go beyond basic data backup for emails. These organizations have email archival systems.  Email archival captures and stores email separately from the normal day-to-day email.  This ensures that the organization's email is always available: users can't delete archived emails. It is always there, searchable for e-discovery purposes.

Is IT governance absent from the Ontario government? What about all their other mission critical systems?

If the Ontario Government can't recover the deleted email of its senior staff, I think Ontario has bigger problems than its gas plant cancellations or even its burgeoning debt!