journal features

where is the "certification" for CEO

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2012.10.12

There are so many certifications on the market today, but none are for a senior manager in a large IT department. I suppose it's assumed that those roles are filled with MBA's or possibly PhD's or perhaps autodidacts. But I've worked with too few IT departments that were actually doing things "by the book" (and paying for it, sometimes dearly) to wonder if there isn't room for someone to come up with a training regime for CIO's to pull up their socks. In this thread on LinkedIn, I've contributed some posts by which I eventually come to this realization.

For posterity, here's the post on the subject of a certification regime of some substance for senior IT management.

"I look to a certification process to verify the domain capability and to demonstrate currency of knowledge (e.g. the ongoing training and exposure) and ability to perform in the field. It's the opposite of the generalist knowledge and conceptual foundations that come, for instance, from doing a university degree.

I have noticed one area where CIPS could fill a void. There is the broad gulf that in IT management certification, between the specialist role certifications from ISACA, IIBA, PMI, IISC, IIA, etc on the one side and the standard MBA "management degree" on the other. Every MBA prospectus I've seen seems to stay as far away as they can from things like IT service delivery and "CIO as agent of change". An MBA isn't really for people in a career in IT.

CGEIT from ISACA spells out an appealing curriculum:

1. IT governance framework

2. Strategic alignment

3. Value delivery

4. Risk management

5. Resource management

6. Performance management

Uptake of CGEIT has been slow, and I suspect that it's because ISACA ties the contents very tightly with ISACA's various "products" in the governance field and also attempts to cover all of that in a single certification, and with one slim book. I see a lot of senior people in CIPS. Perhaps this is something that CIPS could both a) add value by teaching well and b) stake out as a domain. Perhaps a two-year certification program? Or a series of exam-based courses that add up to a certificate or diploma?"

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton