Page 23 - FCW, August 30, 2016
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Dan Chenok
Office of Presidential Personnel might also have thoughts on the matter. Offi- cial changes, in other words, could take awhile.
But there are other options. The CIO Council’s IT Solutions Challenge — a 2015 initiative that asked six interagen- cy teams to tackle big-picture federal IT puzzles — was designed to identify next-generation IT leaders and help them develop the skills and relationships they would need in C-level roles.
And Scott said at the FITARA event
that his office is “identifying roles that
new leaders could come into and get the
kind experience that you’d like to see as a precursor to tak- ing on the CIO role.”
Scott had no government experience before becoming U.S. CIO, but he had held a string of IT leadership jobs at Gen- eral Motors, Microsoft, VMware and the Walt Disney Co.
“One of the things in my own develop- ment that I highly value,” he said, “was the experience I got running operations, running development teams, working on strategy, doing a bunch of different parts of the CIO job, and really getting hands-on.”
To provide similar seasoning, the gov- ernment could create “a series of rota- tional assignments over a few years for
our career people so that they get the kind of background and experience that you’d like to have,” he added.
t professional
Unfortunately, it seems to be a capability that is cur- rently lacking because almost half of survey respondents (42 percent) listed analytics as a needed skill set. Information managers must hone their skills in this area by focusing on incorporating taxonomy and metadata, enhancing data quality management
and more efficiently
using predictive
analytics.
3.They must
be security
conscious and
capable. In addi-
tion to managing
information holisti-
cally, next-generation information profes-
sionals must focus on the entirety of information security. That includes protecting infor- mation in both physical and digital formats from unauthor- ized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, perusal, inspection, recording or destruction.
They must also transition to being an overall information risk manager, developing and managing a comprehensive risk framework for all informa- tion types.
The survey clearly high-
vacy (34 percent) are in the greatest demand.
• Risk management (34 per- cent) is most often cited as
an area for improvement. 4. They
must hone their “soft skills”. The information management
challenges of today — and
tomorrow — do not solely fall to the information manager. Instead,
the concerns are making their way up to the top levels
of government, and the information managers of
tomorrow are going to need to learn the fine art of persuasion. However, 15 percent of survey respondents said they were very or extremely weak in fos- tering stakeholder buy-in and delivering C-level and stake- holder communications.
Also, innovative thinking was cited by 39 percent of respondents as the most in- demand soft skill, highlighting a growing requirement to think outside the proverbial storage box.To solicit support — and potentially funding — from the C-suite, developing core soft skills is essential.
As agencies seek to comply with current information man- agement mandates and pre- pare for future requirements, they must prepare, train and arm information management professionals with the skills and tools they will need to succeed. Our recent survey has shed a small amount of light on where agencies can focus their efforts and has exposed the most pressing needs.To tackle growing challenges before they reach a breaking point, agencies must begin to implement changes now.
Tyler Morris is director of product management at Iron Mountain.
lighted this as a focus area, noting that:
• Information security and access control (56 percent) will be in greatest demand.
• Projects related to data pri-
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