Moving up in IT is hard to do. When you start off you have to follow many policies along with your regular job. When you receive promotions, the polarity changes, and you become the one implementing policies. Being the owner of a technology company is even more daunting, because you have your worker’s hopes and fears wrapped up in your decisions. If you are in one of these positions, how can you make things better?

To answer this question, I turned to my good friend Robert Minor. Through the years I recall him traveling a lot and having something to do with “computers”, but I never understood the full breadth of his job. From deciding upon which email system to use, to how to keep up the employees’ morale, Robert provides us with an excellent outline for the perfect CIO. For the last five years he has been the deputy and full Chief Information Officer for many cities on the East Coast. Here, in his words, are a few policies he has administered. Hopefully you can use them in your capacity also to make a leaner and more nimble tech company.

1. Open Door Policy: I facilitated an open door policy every Wednesday and Friday afternoon from 3:00pm-4:00pm. During this time all employees are welcome to enter my office and express any concerns or issues they might have regarding their position, department, or the agency in general.

2. CIO Technology Corner: The CIO Technology Corner will be used as a tool to share knowledge regarding our initiatives as well as a forum to inspire thought leadership around the use of technology. By encouraging open and candid communication, we foster an environment where we can learn and grow together.

3. Idle Workstation Notification: All workstations now have a 15 minute lockdown applied. After 15 minutes of inactivity, your monitor will “fall asleep” (screen will become inactive). To activate your workstation, just simply move the mouse or touch a key to bring back the CTRL-ALT-DEL sign-on screen. To begin using your computer, type in your password and click <enter>.

4. Employee of the Month: Each month one employee is selected by members of our senior staff to be Employee of the Month. The winner’s name appears on Employee of the Month plaque and receives a $25.00 gift card.

5. All Hands Meeting Notification: This notification is to rally all employees together to discuss how to move forward after departures and to discuss our up and coming projects as a group.

6. Attendance Standards Policy: This memo was a reminder to all employees of the standard attendance policies and procedures that are in place for permanent and contracted employees.

7. SharePoint Announcement: SharePoint’s multi-purpose design allows for management, scaling, and provisioning of a broad variety of business applications. SharePoint provides several built-in features to assist and promote information sharing, collaboration, and communication among individuals, teams, and departments throughout an agency. These include task lists, event lists, discussion areas, surveys, and alerts.

8. Office 365 vs. 2010 Exchange Talking Points: This memo discussed the downsides to implementing o365 and reflected on the positive aspects of migrating to Exchange 2010 instead. Microsoft’s Cloud Services have suffered multiple periods of downtime, lasting anywhere from minutes to 12+ hours. Per Microsoft’s SLA, we could suffer 5% downtime (1.5 days per month), and still be responsible for 50% of our total bill.

These were just a few policies Minor implemented while serving as deputy and full CIO. Was it fun? No. Was it effective? Yes. I particularly liked the pros and cons about Office 360. Will these points help you in your mission to build a better tech company? I hope so. Please leave any questions or comments so Robert and I can answer or acknowledge them.