Take a step back – it’s summer time. You may not be able to slow down, but you should have more opportunities to do things outside of the normal day to day and monthly grind. If you do, consider the following options –
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- Unplug – My advice for CIO on taking summer vacations includes unplugging from email, learning something new, and setting priorities on your time. Consider using the time to catch up some reading. Later this summer, my book Driving Digital: The Leader’s Guide to Business Transformation Through Technology will be available and there is also CIO Insight’s list of summer books.
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- Develop a new business relationship – CIO leading transformation efforts need partners and collaborators to lead programs. Summer is good time to select someone new in the organization and develop a meaningful relationship. For example, if you haven’t done this already, here are my tips on starting a killer relationship with the CMO.
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- Have fun with your team – Transformation programs require a lot of hard stressful work and summer is a good point to bring fun back into the IT culture. My favorite department activity is to host a summer pot-luck picnic or barbecue.
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- Schedule fall events – Before your Q4 calendar gets overfilled with meetings and tasks, consider scheduling some time out of the office to attend a conference. Here’s my dashboard of upcoming events for CIO, CTO, Chief Digital Officers, and Chief Data Officers.
- Get hands on – If you have the time, nothing beats rolling up the sleeves to learn a new technology. At minimum, you’ll get some insights on how the technology functions and what you can accomplish with limited time and training. You’ll certainly get a better appreciation for your staff who often have to figure things out on their own. For example, here are some of my DevOps and cloud lessons after setting up a personal AWS environment.
Happy Summer!
Here is a follow up post on 5 Things Digital Transformation Leaders Should do this Summer