Our Founder
Jeff Roberts
Jeff Roberts is the founder of Innovation Vista, a boutique IT strategy & leadership firm which brings top-flight IT leaders within reach for small & mid-size organizations. Across 25+ years of IT leadership, Jeff has gained recognition as a 5-time CIO, former finalist for Enterprise CIO of the Year, and as the founder and leader of Innovation Vista since 2019. He has turned around multiple struggling IT departments, led IT in dozens of successful M&A transactions, guided Digital Transformations in several industries, and transformed multiple IT departments into profit centers. Jeff has been interviewed on television, on multiple podcasts and in many magazine & journal articles on the topics of Innovation, IT Consulting, and Digital Transformation.
Jeff's interviews, articles & podcasts
- Enabling SMB to Leverage Top-Flight IT Leaders Affordably
- Broadening Minds about the Business Potential of IT
- Leading IT is about Leading People
- The Roadmap to Digital Transformation
- Innovating in a Pandemic Without Going Broke
- The Power of Mentors in IT Leadership
- Reliable IT Support for SMB
- Tips for Powerful Brainstorming
Jeff on Strategy vs. Culture
They say “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast“, but Jeff dislikes framing it as a choice between the two. A focus on both Culture and Strategy is critical for success in IT and Innovation, just as in business overall.
Jeff believes the “Culture Eats Strategy” quote resonates with so many because Culture is the more challenging of the two, and more frequently missed. He advocates a low-ego high-trust Servant Leadership approach with high-performance expectations while nurturing a supportive, collaborative, coaching culture. Trust isn’t built with plaques on the wall but by everyday leadership and team behaviors. This environment encourages personal growth and engages everyone’s creativity and innovation. Everyone in IT not only succeeds or fails together, they succeed or fail as the entire organization performs; this is why it’s critical for IT leaders to have a business mindset. Optimizing IT involves finding a balance of the myriad cost vs. service-level trade-offs that is ideal for that organization; this is only possible if one analyzes all the options from the CEO perspective.
Strategy is equally important, because a healthy thriving culture absent strategy can morph into a laboratory or country-club kind of environment. A well-communicated Strategy ensures that an organization’s limited resource are utilized to bring about a shared vision. Whereas a healthy Culture ensures that everyone wants to row in the same direction, a clear Strategy ensures that everyone knows in which direction they should row, and that it’s an intelligent route. Jeff sees companies often overlooking IT Systems, Data, and Innovation in their corporate strategies, and he founded Innovation Vista to help more organizations fully engage the technologies that have come to maturity in recent years – not just to “keep the lights on” but to grow companies’ top line results.
Latest !nsights
We have an IT manager; Do we also need a Virtual CIO?
It’s a truth with increasing impact that in today’s fast-paced business environment, technology plays a critical role in driving innovation,
Answers to Common Client Questions
Over the years Innovation Vista has received and answered a lot of inquiries from clients and prospective clients. We thought
The Metaverse Handbook – Book Review
Quharrison Terry and Scott N. Keeney’s recent work “The Metaverse Handbook” may be the most consumer-oriented of the early books