InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

My Mistake: 10 CIOs Share Do-Over Worthy Moments

By Chris Murphy 06/23/2011 Leading CIOs share the decisions that they'd still like to take back. Check out their lessons learned from mistakes on costs, culture, career path, and more.

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1. Understand The Real Risks

We all flub some decisions. Most of us would rather forget them. What's impressive in InformationWeek's CIO Profiles is how many IT leaders, when asked about the decision they'd like to do over, have the guts and humility to publicly retell a mistake. And these are real mistakes, not candy-coated versions like "trying too hard to deliver business value." They're decisions that these execs took responsibility for and clearly tried to learn from, not forget.

For our CIO Profiles, IT leaders share their insights across a range of questions. For this question, many draw on an experience that happened years ago, but the memories obviously remain vivid. Keeping that in perspective, perhaps it's no coincidence that each of these leaders works at an organization that ranks highly in our 2010 IW 500 list of IT innovators. Consider these cases where the CIO would like a do-over--and the 10 lessons learned.

Mike Altendorf, Do It Best VP of IT: We had a project to connect our independent affiliates to a cloud-based inventory system that would enhance supply chain decisions. In the end, the adoption risk was higher than anticipated and outweighed the benefits. The lesson learned is always to do a solid job of assessing risks.

CIO Profiles: Mike Altendorf Of Do It Best

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