CIO Mark Settle on what makes a winning IT battle plan

What are some of the areas where digital leaders can take a page from Grant’s book when it comes to persistence?

As a CIO, you’re always being asked to do more with less in terms of budget and staffing. So you have to be persistently resourceful. A great example are cloud costs. Nobody ever says, ‘Oh, yeah, Mark showed up, put in the solution, we’re all good now. We’re very satisfied and happy with what we’re spending on the cloud.’ No, it’s an ongoing saga. And in all those cases you have to be persistent.

In terms of staffing, you have to persistently manage performance, and people will respect you for that. You might think IT is in a walled-off fort, not visible to other people in the company. Nothing could be further from the truth. A large cross-section of your IT team is living in a glass house, and whatever dysfunctionality is occurring within your organization is far more obvious to people outside of IT than you can imagine. Even if your IT group is in a warehouse away from every other corporate facility, there are just too many interactions that go on with your business partners, and if you’re not persistently managing that performance, it will come back to bite you, and undermine the proactive things you want to do in the future in terms of budget and staffing.