Essential knowledge for technologists leading an IT department

Technology

Essential knowledge for technologists leading an IT department

October 30, 2024

What technologists need to know to lead an IT department

Sharon Mandell’s full-time role is chief information officer at Juniper Networks. But she says the hardest job she’s ever had is her side hustle: teaching.

For the past three years, Mandell has taught a graduate class in information systems at the University of San Francisco, for people who work as individual contributors in IT departments but aspire to management roles, including CIO.

“They’re used to building things and solving problems,” says Mandell. “Well, that’s one part of running this function.”

To be sure, managing the day-to-day operations of an IT department and staying on top of new technology innovations, like generative artificial intelligence, are some of the core responsibilities of any tech leader.

But Mandell teaches students that successful tech leaders must also think strategically. Key questions they need to ask themselves and navigate include: How can an IT leader work with business partners to develop technology? What’s needed from a budgeting perspective? What kind of projects get approved? And once approved, in what order should the various elements of the work be done?

“You don’t create projects on your own in IT,” explains Mandell. “They’re always in service of some business outcome.”

Mandell applies that same thinking to her leadership role at Juniper Networks, which makes networking devices like switches and routers. She regularly explains to Juniper’s engineers that their work isn’t just going down a checklist of technology problems that need solving, but rather to make things smoother for their colleagues and customers.

The CIO is a “very contextual role,” says Mandell, varying greatly at each company depending on its size, the industry, whether public or private, and its growth targets. A big reason Mandell joined Juniper Networks in 2020 was because she wanted to work at a larger public company than her prior employer, private-equity backed Tibco Software.

Throughout her career, Mandell has served as CIO or chief technology officer at several companies, including enterprise software maker Tibco, telecommunications company Harmonic, and newspaper publisher Tribune. “I really love technology,” she says. “But the reality is, I spent most of my time trying to understand what our business is trying to accomplish and translating that down to my leaders so we ask the technologists to do the right things.”

Juniper Networks was also alluring because of its 2019 acquisition of Mist Systems for around $400 million. Now known as Mist AI, the platform uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science techniques to optimize user and operator experiences, as well as improve both the network’s reliability and security.

That bet on AI helped make Juniper attractive to Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which in January agreed to buy it for $14 billion in an all-cash deal that is expected to close by early 2025, pending regulatory approvals. Buying Juniper would double HPE’s networking revenue though some investors questioned the lack of overlap between the companies’ product offerings and the risks of an increased debt load to HPE.

While Mandell has been telling her students that C-suite technology roles require more than just a clear understanding of rapidly advancing technologies, paradoxically, she admits to spending more time in recent years explaining generative AI to Juniper’s leadership and clients.

What technologists are still sorting out, she says, are the sometimes mistaken or incomplete outputs of generative AI and a flurried pace of change that’s unlike any other technology advancement.

“Nobody wants to be the one who’s left behind,” says Mandell. “It’s a challenging problem for all of us. And it’s not really a technology problem; it’s a human problem.”

John Kell

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NEWS PACKETS

Delta sues CrowdStrike over $500 million in losses. The airline, which canceled thousands of flights after an IT outage involving CrowdStrike’s security software, has sued the vendor for breach of contract and negligence. Delta claims the incident, which involved a flawed software update affecting computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system, led to reduced revenue by $380 million and created $170 million in extra costs. CrowdStrike has said it has tried to resolve the dispute and back in August, estimated that the company’s liability to Delta was less than $10 million.

UnitedHealth: More than 100 million affected by data breach. More than 100 million individuals had their private health information stolen during February’s ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, a unit of the U.S. health insurance provider. It’s the first time UnitedHealth has put a number on how many individuals were affected. The attack was among the largest known digital thefts of U.S. medical records, including personal information like date of birth and Social Security numbers to health data including diagnoses, medications, and test results. Efforts by the U.S. government to catch the hackers who have claimed responsibility have failed.

U.K. probes Alphabet’s investment in Anthropic. United Kingdom antitrust officials are probing whether an investment by Google’s parent company in AI startup Anthropic threatens to competition. Google had raised its investment in Anthropic to up to $2 billion last year as the search giant sought to strengthen its position in AI against rivals including Microsoft, OpenAI, and Amazon. Earlier this year, British antitrust enforcers had given the green light to Amazon’s bigger investment in Anthropic and also cleared Microsoft’s hiring of former employees from Inflection AI as part of a partnership with the startup.

Amazon AI executive moves to PwC. Matt Wood, Amazon’s former VP of AI, is joining accounting firm PwC as commercial technology and innovation officer to oversee the firm’s work with clients that would include his former employer, as well as Microsoft, Salesforce, and Google. PwC has already made a large commitment to AI, promising publicly to invest $1 billion in the technology for its U.S. operations over three years. Because many companies lack in-house expertise to get started on with AI, firms like PwC hope to financially benefit by partnering with large tech vendors and offering their services to enterprises.

ADOPTION CURVE

81% of security leaders expect to face a cyberattack in the next year. A survey conducted by IT consulting company HCLTech found that eight of 10 security leaders believe there’s a “moderate to high” chance their organization will face a cyberattack in the next year. AI-generated attacks were the top concern for chief information security officers, followed closely by risks of phishing, a malicious insider, and API vulnerabilities, which involve the rules that let software applications share data but could also result in harmful exposure.

By sector, financial services, life sciences, and health care face the highest likelihood of cyberattacks, according to over 1,500 cybersecurity leaders across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. And across all geographies and industries, HCLTech says only about one-third of companies feel equipped to prevent and respond to cyberattacks. In response, organizations on average say they expect to increase their cybersecurity budgets by 11% in 2025.