An indispensable guide showing IT leaders the way to balance the needs of innovation and exploration with exploitation and operational reliability Many books on modern IT leadership focus solely on supporting innovation and disruption. In practice these must be balanced with the need to support waste reduction in existing processes and capabilities while keeping the foundation operational, secure, compliant with regulations, and cost effective. In The Accidental CIO, veteran software developer-turned-executive Scott Millett delivers an essential playbook to becoming an impactful, strategic leader at any stage of your IT leadership journey from your earliest aspirations to long time incumbents in director and C-suite roles. You'll find a wealth of hands-on advice for tackling the many challenges and paradoxes that face technology leaders, from creating an aligned IT strategy, defining a target architecture, designing a balanced operating model, and leading teams and executing strategy. After the foreword from Simon Wardley, The Accidental CIO will help you: Understand problem contexts you will face using the Cynefin decision making framework, and how the philosophies of agile, lean and design thinking can help manage them. Design an adaptive and strategically aligned operating model by applying the appropriate ways of working and governance approaches depending on each unique problem context. Organize a department using a blend of holacratic and hierarchical principles, and leveraging modern approaches such as Team Topology and Socio-technical patterns. Develop and deploy an effective and aligned IT Strategy using Wardley mapping based on a deep knowledge of your business architecture. With this knowledge you'll be ready to create an empowered IT organization focused on solving customer problems and generating enterprise value. You'll understand the science behind what motivates teams and changes behavior. And you'll show your skills as a business leader thinking beyond IT outputs to impactful business outcomes.