Very few CIOs use Twitter. This is not to say that they are against using Twitter. It also does not mean that they are not interested in social networking tools. Three major factors contribute to the slow adoption by CIOs and, ultimately, the companies for whom they manage the deployment of such technology.
1) Lack of business case: While Twitter is “free” today, it may not always be so. Regardless, most CIOs have to support applications and capabilities that they provide to their user base. To enable Twitter to a reasonably sized enterprise, a new set of security tools will have to be established, monitored, tweaked and managed. To be sure, Twitter will be exploited by all kinds of mal-intended spammers and viral marketing will turn into virus attacks, Trojans, worms, etc. Network shaping will also be affected with all the attendant video streams, pod casts, downloads, etc. If the CIO does business with an outsource service provider, there will be the dreaded change control, fee escalation, service level agreement, support issues and vendor management activities. Then there is the political fallout from the CIO’s advocacy of a tool that might well become a “time sink”, leaking productivity while promoting personal marketing activities of the individual employees and the thief of time as they build their individual businesses using company resources. Remember e-Bay and its effect on the internal use of company time and resources for the individual businesses that employees had set-up?
2) Lack of time: CIOs do not have the time to become avid Twitterers. They are typically deluged with e-mails, the aforementioned Blackberrys, backlogged requests, projects, meetings and cost control. Most CIOs struggle with an almost impossible task of having to be the enabler for almost every critical business initiative. They also stand particularly alone with no other senior management understanding of IT and what it takes to keep the lights on.
3) Risk aversion: I think hat the Blackberry issue illustrates this in “spades” as well as the fear of loosening up the firewall. I have heard CEOs say that they would fire the first person they see with a Blackberry, so the message was clear that it was likely a career limiting move to get a “skunk works” going with a pilot group. Couple that with the bad experiences when companies first opened up browser access for employees. Besides the aforementioned eBay and other time sinks, companies got to see the beast embedded in their organizations with people downloading all kinds of ugliness, hate, macabre, demented and detestable material on their office computers. Here, the CIO had to invest in all kinds of tools and capabilities and endure the heartaches of damage caused by viruses, DOS and other malware.
So, it does not surprise me one bit that you will not find too many CIOs on Twitter. When you consider the fragile nature of their job security, a career-oriented tool like LinkedIn appears to be the place where you can find them, for now.
