Technology Themes

In my career of technology consulting, projects over the years have been driven by some high level themes regardless of:

• the technology (i.e., network design, management, security, etc.),
• the domain (i.e., local, wide-area, data center, etc.),
• or the customer (i.e., retail, healthcare, banking, etc.)

To summarize roughly by decade:

Decade	Theme
1980s	Technology Evangelism
1990s	Technology Deployment
2000s	Technology Evaluation
2010s	Technology Justification

I haven't been in information technology for that long,

IT Leadership

A CEO has a decision - who to lead IT now that the current CIO is leaving due to many failed projects and a general perception that the company's use of technology is falling behind.

The background: the company has business and department leaders housed in mahogany offices on the top floor of it's fancy headquarters. They've identified that collaboration is the issue - too many decisions are being made in a bubble without the appropriate input from across the business. This is why the last few technology projects have failed and they cannot afford another failure. Current collaboration technology includes Lotus Notes email, no instant messaging, an old analogue phone system and no video conferencing.

The CEO has three choices to fill the role:

1. The technology wizard - vast experience with the company's IT systems and all relevent vendor / industry certifications.
   
2. The MBA graduate - business undergrad with an MBA focusing on Information Systems management, hired two years ago as a director and being groomed for the executive fast-track.
   
3. The outside technology consultant with business acumen - loads of hands-on technical experience, but no systems or management experience with this particular company.
   

What should the CEO do?