COO is the Logical Next Step for the CIO says Duane Anderson of Marquette Group/ USMotivation
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
04-08-2013
After getting an MBA, spending time as a consultant for a major consultancy, and serving under multiple legendary CIOs in various corporate positions, Duane Anderson joined Marquette Group/USMotivation in June of 2009. Marquette Group is a directional marketing agency that connects qualified, local customers to national brands by designing integrated media strategies. USMotivation is an incentive management company focusing on incentive strategies and awards, group travel and meetings, creative communications, and analytics. When Anderson joined this combined entity, it was his first role as CIO, but the moves that he made were as sophisticated as a seasoned veteran. He was ahead of the curve on cloud computing and virtualization, moving the vast majority of the companies’ infrastructure into the cloud, rendering what had long been a fixed cost into a much more variabilized cost structure. He also wove IT’s activities and projects more explicitly into the strategies of the rest of the organization. Lastly, he became much more end-customer-centric, spending time on customer calls, while also ingratiating himself to the field employees.
Anderson was so successful that in September of 2011, he was asked to become the chief operating officer of the companies. In that role, he has overseen a merger with another company TMP, effectively doubling the size of the organization. As he sees it, the COO is in many ways the logical next step for the ambitious CIO, for reasons he makes clear in my interview with him below.
(The “Beyond CIO” series kicked off with this article, and the all past interviews in the series can be found here. If you are interested in future articles in the series with executives from companies like HP, Symantec, T.D. Ameritrade, Schneider National, Fifth Third Bancorp, Ameristar Casinos, and Aetna, please visit here.)
Peter High: Duane, your CIO role at Marquette Group / USMotivation was your first in that position. When you took it on did you have any ambition to rise above that position?
Duane Anderson: When I first took on the CIO role here, my only ambitions were to learn the organization and execute on a fairly sizeable list of objectives the ownership team had in place for me across both of our companies. The IT organization had become run-away in terms of costs, open-ended projects and dated infrastructure. Priorities were aligned in the best interest of IT, not the business so it was really a first 18 months focused on getting back to an acceptable baseline. Anyone who’s been a part of those efforts knows the all consuming nature they can take, which doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for ambition. The instinct that comes to mind was more survival!
PH: Walk us through the major steps you undertook during your tenure as CIO.
DA: Beyond the objectives provided to me by our ownership there were four primary tracks I pursued.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
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Katrina Lane of American Express advanced beyond CIO by focusing her career on the intersection of marketing, data, customers, and technology.
04-01-2013
CIOs take heart: You don’t have to be an experimental physicist to win a promotion from the IT department into a line management role, but it can’t hurt, as the case of American Express executive Katrina Lane shows. Lane has been achieving at a high-level for a long time. She has a Ph.D. in Experimental Physics from Cornell, spent seven years as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, and took on marketing executive roles at multiple companies, ending up as the vice president of Channel Marketing at Caesars Entertainment. During her time in marketing, she collaborated with IT departments in developing data-driven marketing strategies, and implementing sophisticated customer relationship marketing (CRM) and business intelligence systems. She was so knowledgeable, in fact, that she was asked to take over IT as Caesars’ senior vice president and chief technology officer, the senior-most information technology role in the company.
Although this path may seem strange, there are a number of CIOs and CTOs whose first role in IT were as the senior-most position in the department. Lane’s scientific background, her time in consulting, and her deep collaboration with IT made this possible. Her responsibilities were broader than the average CIO, as well, as over time her role expanded and she oversaw innovation, gaming, IT application development, infrastructure, security, support for customer facing systems, all company web sites, as well as key initiatives to develop new technical capabilities for the Total Rewards loyalty program.
In May of 2012, after more than eight years at Caesars Entertainment, Lane left to become the Executive Vice President of Consumer Cards & Experiences at American Express. In this role, she manages the consumer card products portfolio and customer experiences. She and her team develop new offerings to enhance the card member experience and oversee customer segmentation, retention and advocacy. This is a logical step up based on her past experiences, as she makes clear below.
This is the first interview in the “Beyond CIO” series. Please check out this link to read the introduction to the series. To read other interviews with executives from companies like T.D. Ameritrade, United Airlines, Schneider National, Fifth Third Bank, and HP, please click here.
Peter High: Katrina, you had an interesting path to head of IT. You have a Ph.D. in physics, you were a consultant, and then a marketing executive before being asked to lead Caesars IT department as its chief technology officer. You are now the EVP of Consumer Card and Experiences at American Express. What is the thread that runs through this journey?
Katrina Lane: I have focused my career on the intersection of marketing, data, customers and technology. This intersection is the place where businesses can best leverage what they know about their customers to create compelling products, services and experiences that are also personalized – if appropriate. The physics degree was good training in overall problem solving. Because I wanted to have broad impact, I intended to find a position in applied science rather than stay in academic, although I do love teaching. But what I learned is that your focus becomes narrower as you work toward a graduate degree, and I started to look for opportunities to continue to do problem solving against a broader set of issues. I moved to a role as a management consultant, where I was able to use analytic skills while expanding my business knowledge. I started to focus on B2C businesses and in particular the areas where data could be leveraged to provide a better experience for the customer (at that point the field of CRM was just emerging). This focus area led to my next role in marketing.
Chris Davis suggests how leaders can extend beyond just writing SMART goals to successfully manage through metrics and drive behavior.
March 2013
This post is the Executive Summary to the five-part series. To read and download the full paper, click here.
Executive Summary: How do we know we are successfully pursuing our strategy?
Without awareness and accountability to metrics, leaders can’t know how successful their strategy is. Developing a cascading metrics-centric accountability framework is a critical first step to driving desired behavior. However, a well thought out design does not necessarily promise an effective implementation of such a framework. Therefore, leaders must consider and actively address the management dimension of metrics to ensure their organization maintains focus, alignment, and accountability for pursuing the company’s strategy.
Let me first address a common question: “what is strategy?” One commonly held definition of “strategy” is: “an integrated set of actions designed to create a sustainable advantage over competitors(1).” Based on this definition, the first natural question is: “Why do we need a strategy?” Having a strategy is critical for any endeavor so that there are no wasted efforts in an “integrated”, focused attempt to accomplish a set of objectives. There is not enough time in the day or money in our pockets to endlessly and carelessly pursue what we hope to accomplish, and a strategy helps us accomplish our objectives efficiently and effectively. The next question then is: “how do we determine if we have succeeded?” The key word to putting any strategy into practice, and enabling measurement, is “action”; actions can take place at varying degrees of breadth, focus, and granularity, and organizations can gauge the degree to which these discrete events change the status quo. Without measurement, the stewards of any strategy will not be held accountable for the quality of the strategy, and the evaluation of accomplishing one’s objectives becomes a vague and subjective exercise.
When developing a “strategy”, organizations regularly discuss various hierarchies of intent, but are not always able to differentiate or align missions, visions, business strategy, functional strategy, operations, and tactical plans (among others). In order to determine the success of any strategy, organizations must clarify the relationship between these conceptual elements, and how one element can drive the other. In order to narrow its focus, this article will treat only four main tiers in a strategic cascade (in order):
“Actions” are best described in verbs, which is why words like “grow”, “improve”, “increase”, “reduce”, and “optimize” are popular choices when articulating a strategy. The power of these simple words lies in that they imply the potential for quantification. With quantification comes the ability to know whether or not your organization is successfully achieving what it desires to, as well as the rationale for either staying course or changing tack. Quantifying, assessing, and acting on business performance metrics improves decision making, leads to greater accountability, and ultimately increases the likelihood of achieving a strategy. One study has shown that data-driven decision making can improve output and productivity by 5-6%(2), a significant return on effort for organizations who face densely competitive industries.
The other key words in the aforementioned definition of strategy- designed, integrated, advantage, and sustainable- offer instruction on several themes that can help organizations better manage through metrics.
There is a frequently cited “best practice” acronym for designing metrics frameworks, called SMART, which encapsulates many of the aforementioned themes and helps organizations outline useful metrics that truly assess the success of strategic pursuits(3). There are several industry interpretations of what the acronym stands for, but one common interpretation is that it stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound (please see Table 1 in the appendix for other industry iterations of this framework)(4). While this commonly held interpretation of the SMART framework is quite useful in developing a strategically-aligned metrics framework, it does not completely address the need to manage an organization through the metrics. Therefore, in order to fully realize the value of a robust metrics framework that assesses success at the Vision, Objectives, Tactics, and Projects level, I propose considering additional management dimensions to the SMART framework:
The above “design” aspects of the SMART acronym should be augmented by the “management” dimensions in order to successfully implement a metrics framework that drives:
To reemphasize the point: it is not enough for managers to simply write objectives or goals, and the following table summarizes how leaders can successfully address the various management dimensions of SMART that are a critical next step to success:
While aligned to the SMART acronym, the management dimension does not necessarily follow a logical order, but does contain several interdependencies and overlap. Organizations that address these management dimensions when designing a strategically-aligned metrics framework will be able to move beyond the ivory-tower exercise of strategy creation to the grounds of value realization. The remainder of this article describes and explains the importance of the management dimension, as well as how your organization’s newly SMART metrics framework should align to your broader strategic framework.
Click here to read and download the full paper.
(1) “Thinking Strategically”. McKinsey Quarterly, June 2000.
(2) Brynjolfsson, Erik et. Al. “Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-Driven Decisionmaking Affect Firm Performance?”. Social Science Research Network, December 12, 2011. <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1819486>
(3) Doran, G. T. “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives”, Management Review, Volume 70, Issue 11(AMA FORUM), pp. 35-36. 1981.
(4) “4 – SMART metrics”, HowTo.ComMetrics. <http://howto.commetrics.com/smart-benchmarking/>, “SMART Criteria”, Wikipedia, accessed September 29, 2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria>
by Peter High, series on Forbes.com
03-25-2013
I recently completed a series in this column referring to the CIO-plus. In it, I interviewed a number of chief information officers who had been asked to take on additional responsibilities, due to the great work done as CIOs and the appreciation that that good work translates well into other functions within the company. The companies were a diverse lot, including ADP, P&G, Marsh & McLennan, Waste Management, McKesson, Merck, Walgreens, Owens Corning, and the San Francisco Giants among others. (To access the entire series, please visit this link.)
I would like to introduce a new series, which I refer to as “Beyond CIO.” There is a growing cadre of former CIOs who have been promoted or hired into positions that continue to take advantage of their technical acumen, but provide them with expanded purviews. Most of the executives that will be profiled will be CEOs or COOs who were former CIOs. Again, this is a diverse lot, including executives from companies like:
Chief operating officer has traditionally been a key role to have to put one’s self as “on-deck” to the top job. Chief financial officers have also hewn their path to the CEO role. Not long ago, it may have seemed absurd to think of the CIO as an important stop on the way to the top role in the company. Yet a group of special technology leaders have spent meaningful time as CIO but then continued the ascent beyond the role.
There are some common denominators among these trailblazers:
Filippo Passerini of Procter & Gamble powers the Global Business Services for an $84 billion company with advanced analytics and diligent strategic planning.
03-18-2013
Filippo Passerini had a circuitous route to the CIO role, both in terms of functional as well as geographic experience. He rose through the ranks from junior to senior-most positions at P&G beginning in his native Italy through his arrival at P&G’s world headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. He started in IT, but also spent time in marketing and operations roles before becoming CIO.
As Passerini notes herein, P&G has a history of hiring CIOs who have traditional business experience in the hopes of having IT run as a typical business function. Passerini continued this tradition, and in 2005, as CIO, he led the integration of Gillette. In 2008, Passerini was also named the president of Global Business Services, and 2011 he was named Group President of Global Business Services. Now with his cross-functional responsibilities, he has developed digital war-room of sorts, assembling an assortment of leading edge analytics capabilities to enable the $84 billion colossus to make better decisions, drawing insights from across geographies, product segments, business functions and the like. As such, his organization has managed the “big data” conundrum as well as any organization in the world.
(This is the fourteenth piece in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior twelve interviews with the CIO-pluses from Waste Management, McKesson, Merck, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Ameristar Casinos, Owens Corning, Marsh & McLennan, ADP, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the San Francisco Giants, Walgreens, and GSX as well as a partner in the CIO/CTO practice for Heidrick and Struggles, please click this link. To receive notice about future interviews in the series with CIO-pluses of P&G and others, please click visit the column’s page. in the weeks to come.)
Peter High: Filippo, you have a non-traditional path to the CIO role. You joined P&G as a junior IT resource in Italy, and then spent time in a variety of business functions within the company before being named CIO. How have such diverse experiences colored your thought process in what makes a successful IT leader or a successful IT employee?
Filippo Passerini: I don’t see myself as a “stereotypical CIO.” I continue a long-tradition at P&G of CIOs who are not entirely technical. At P&G, we have a few hiring practices that set us apart from IT organizations elsewhere. First, we hire people for who they are, not what they know. The technology can be learned, but you cannot teach curiosity. You cannot teach passion for the business. So, much of our recruiting focuses on finding people who have the right raw ingredients—leadership, business acumen, communication skills, passion for technology—that helps ensure that they will be successful almost no matter where they are staffed.
We are also a promote from within company. It is rare at P&G to find a person in a senior role who did not rise through P&G. We invest heavily in our people. This long-term commitment that we make to our leaders of tomorrow means that we have well-rounded colleagues with deep knowledge of our business. This business knowledge is more important than technical knowledge.
We take the view that technology is almost always a commodity. It is what you do with it, what business priority you solve, what business capability you enable, what process you render more efficient. This is true value. The conversation should never begin with technology, and our recruiting and training reflect this fact. Therefore, the ideal employee for us is a business person who is passionate about technology as opposed to the other way around.
To explore other CIO-plus Series articles, please click here.
CIO of Carestream, Bruce Leidal, was asked to cut IT cost relative to revenue in half over five years. He explains how he addressed the challenge.
03-11-2013
Since the beginning of the economic malaise in 2007 and increasingly in 2008, IT department have been asked to slash their budgets, as other departments have been asked to do the same. For many companies where IT is a relative black-box to those outside of the department, these cuts were made with machetes rather than with scalpels all too often, and as a result, fat and muscle were cut away from the department. This has led to a difficulty among these same departments to switch gears toward growth opportunities, as some of the most innovative (and expensive) resources are no longer a part of IT.
I have been pleased to find a growing number of CIOs who are able to balance cost cutting and innovative thinking in their minds, and use reductions in costs as the justifications for increases in funding geared toward innovation.
Bruce Leidal is the CIO of Carestream, a $2.4 billion company that develops , sells and services imaging products and software for the dental, medical and non-destructive testing global marketplace. When Leidal joined the company in 2008, spending on IT was 3.0% of revenues. An external benchmark study suggested targets for each of the functions in the company, for IT this was 1.5% of revenue. To ensure competitiveness in the throes of the downturn, he, like other execs at Carestream was asked to reduce costs to the benchmarks. Bruce was asked to achieve this target within five years. He developed a five year plan to get there, realizing it was quite a short time horizon. Within a year, with some demonstrated progress, the company asked him to shorten the time horizon to accomplish this in four years rather than five. Unfortunately, demand for IT services were not decreasing at that pace. He realized that something had to be done. As he put it, “We had to shift gears and tell the story of IT to our colleagues outside of IT.” He followed a multi-step process in order to accomplish this.
To listen to Bruce Leidal’s Forum on World Class IT podcast interview, please click here.
Preparing for change is necessary with technology, and in Peter High’s Technovation Column, SnapLogic CEO Gaurav Dhillon talks important trends facing CIOs and how these trends can help drive competitive advantage.
03-04-2013
Gaurav Dhillon was an early enterprise data integration success story. In 1993, he co-foundedInformatica at a time when data integration was not nearly the buzz-phrase it is today. He would lead that company for 12 years, and see it to a market capitalization of over $1 billion. (It’ market capitalization is currently nearly $4 billion.)
For an executive who has accomplished so much and seen his vision so fully realized, it is impressive to find that he is back at it again, pursuing a different vision in a related field as though he is an entrepreneur for the first time. Ben Horowitz wrote in his blog that he hates to fund new ideas from already successful entrepreneurs. He wrote, “Ordinarily, we would automatically disqualify an entrepreneur with such a massive financial success from funding, so when he came into pitch us on his new company…I was skeptical… our diligence found him working round the clock, running a hyper-intense environment and looking very much like a 20 year old entrepreneur on a mission from God.”
This new mission is SnapLogic, a commercial software company that provides data and application integration tools for connecting Cloud data sources. I recently interviewed Dhillon as part of the Forum on World Class IT series (access that interview here). As someone who has correctly read and shaped the technological zeitgeist, I was curious what excited him in terms of IT trends. There were three in particular that he focused on. None of them are new, but the nuance that he gave to each was enlightening.
Now that Cloud ROI is Proven, It is Time for the Cloud to Mature
Dhillon has assembled a CIO advisory board at SnapLogic, and posed a question to that group. “Which functional technologies are least likely to migrate to the cloud?” Dhillon says, “It was pretty unanimous: ERP would take a while and supply chain would take a while. Everything else can’t get there fast enough. That has less to do with technology. Companies like Workday, ServiceNow, Salesforce, these companies are doing a great service to the industry, helping people understand that cloud computing is appropriate for a wide array of old functions to the enterprise.”
The pace of change has been aided by the fact that the return on investment on cloud computing is getting easier to prove. In the early stages of its hype, CFOs were not big believers in this new way of doing things necessarily. Today, it is more widely appreciated that by moving an application to the cloud, less people are needed to rack and stack technology, demand for servers decrease, the need for cooling and power generation decreases as well, to take three prominent examples of costs savings. Cloud computing also renders one’s workforce more productive, as data is more easily accessible on multiple devices and can be made available in many settings. Dhillon stresses that the real opportunity is for CIOs and other IT executives is to make the case on this ROI, and then to plug the savings back into innovation.
Dhillon underscores the point by suggesting that CIOs need to be less “information officers” and more “integration officers.” He says that as CIOs, “you are an orchestrator of capabilities… [CIOs] should not be worrying about HR and payroll. You do need to worry about some things that are tailor-made and that are sources of competitive advantage, but anything that is a cost item that can be turned into to the cloud gives you more money to be innovative to do new things.”
Additional Trends Discussed in this Article are:
2. Data Analytics Will Separate the Best IT Executives From the Also Rans 3. “Mobility is a Monster”
To listen to Gaurav Dhillon’s Forum on World Class IT podcast interview, please click here.
Karl Salnoske identified the need for a CIO-plus role at his company before he was even hired, and recommended the creation of the position he would eventually fill.
02-26-2013
Karl Salnoske, the Executive Vice President of Service Delivery and CIO at GXS, a global leader in B2B integration, had a very diverse set of experiences prior to becoming a CIO. He had been a consultant at McKinsey, he had spent time as a general manager in IBM’s Software Solutions, and he had been the president and CEO of a start-up that provided the next generation in decision optimization tools to help customers in the energy and process industries reduce costs and maximize revenues. That company, Adaptive Trade, was acquired by B2eMarkets in 2004, and it was soon thereafter that he began his first ever stint as a CIO at Schering-Plough, where he would remain for over five years.
Salnoske is the first of the CIO-pluses profiled herein who joined his company as a CIO-plus. The job was not initially specified as a CIO-plus role, however. In fact, Salnoske, leveraging his skills as an expert in diagnosing problems to identify that the company needed someone who would oversee a broader variety of divisions of the company to get to the root cause of an issue that had been labeled as an operations problem, as he explains at some length herein.
(This is the thirteenth piece in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior twelve interviews with the CIO-pluses from Waste Management, McKesson, Merck, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Ameristar Casinos, Owens Corning, Marsh & McLennan, ADP, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the San Francisco Giants, and Walgreens, as well as a partner in the CIO/CTO practice for Heidrick and Struggles, please click this link. To receive notice about future interviews in the series with CIO-pluses of P&G and others, please click visit the column’s page. in the weeks to come.)
Peter High: Karl, of all the executives profiled in this series, you are the first to be hired in as the CIO-plus. Can you tell us how it came to pass that you were hired with the full set of responsibilities that you have?
Karl Salnoske: I had an advantage in that I did not grow up in an IT department. I spent time as a consultant at McKinsey, as a general manager of Software Solutions at IBM, and as the President and CEO of a start-up before becoming CIO at Schering-Plough. I held that last role for five years, so I got to know it quite well.
When I started looking for the next opportunity, a recruiter suggested that I check out GXS. There was an opening as an SVP of Operations. As I met more people, I started to put on my consultant hat to diagnose where there were opportunities with this role, and what issues needed to be fixed. On the surface, many people thought that there were operations issues, but I discovered that the problems were larger and more interconnected than that and included engineering, customer support, integration, and IT. Therefore, I told our CEO, Bob Segert that in order to improve the operations issues, he needed an executive whose purview included each of the aforementioned areas, and that short of that, they would not get to the root cause of the problems they hoped to solve. The issue was that there were groups operating in silos who needed to partner together in a better way. Bob appreciated my candid feedback, took my suggestion to the board, and I was offered a role that had responsibility for all of those areas.
To listen to Karl Salnoske’s Forum on World Class IT podcast interview, please click here.
A leader that is never settled: as Chief Information, Innovation, and Improvement Officer, Tim Theriault is constantly seeking new avenues for adding business value.
02-18-2013
Tim Theriault’s title is more than a mouthful, but it befits the many responsibilities he has at Walgreens. He is the Chief Information, Innovation, and Improvement Officer of the $72 billion pharmaceutical retailer. In that role, Theriault is responsible for all of IT, but also “Big I” and “little i” innovations, as he explains herein, centered on revenue enhancement and cost reduction.
It is not a surprise that Theriault would add revenue and costs reduction responsibilities to his role as CIO since he was once the chief technology officer of Northern Trust Bank, but then rose to the role of president of the bank’s corporate and institutional services business. He now finds himself squarely in the middle of a major healthcare transformation that the company is in the throes of, and sees creative use of information and technology as a key component of that transformation.
(This is the twelfth piece in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior eleven interviews with the CIO-pluses from Waste Management, McKesson, Merck, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Ameristar Casinos, Owens Corning, Marsh & McLennan, ADP, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and the San Francisco Giants, as well as a partner in the CIO/CTO practice for Heidrick and Struggles, please click this link. To receive notice about future interviews in the series with CIO-pluses of P&G and others, please click visit the column’s page. in the weeks to come.)
Peter High: Let’s begin with your title. Can you please describe the three aspects of your title as chief information, innovation, and improvement officer?
Tim Theriault: I joined Walgreens as Chief Information Officer in October of 2009. In that role, I have been responsible for IT across the organization regardless of the business unit, making sure IT is aligned with the priorities and strategies of all business units in the company and that we are servicing their needs. I also am responsible for integrating all technology, optimizing that technology, and rendering it as efficient as possible.
More recently, I added the Innovation and Improvement roles. On the Innovation side, I am responsible for a small group that is primarily responsible for disruptive technologies. We encourage innovation at all levels of the company. We engage our colleagues globally to identify innovative ideas to exploit and develop. The innovation team stands apart from the normal way of doing business. They have different ways of doing things, a faster path to develop new ideas, and the like. I want them to feel unconstrained in their thinking except that they must tie those ideas to our business strategies. My goal is that we identify opportunities that will yield benefits over $50 million to $100 million, but eventually opportunities that are over a $1 billion in return to the corporation. Therefore, I’m referring to “Big I” innovation here. We look for the triple play wherever we can, which I define as something that will grow revenue, reduce costs, and enhance the customer experience all at once. We may have innovations that do only one, but truly disruptive ideas can do all three, and technology has a large role to play here.
On the Improvement side, we focus on continuous improvement of our operations. In some ways, this is the “small I” innovation, primarily focused on internal processes and cost efficiencies, and extremely important to operating successfully.
As a Partner in the CIO/CTO practice for the executive placement firm Heidrick & Struggles, Matt Aiello has keen insight into the growing trend of CIO’s adopting “plus” responsibilities.
02-11-2013
Of the CIO-pluses that have been profiled thus far, none were hired into their roles as CIO-pluses. Eight of the ten were CIOs first, and then added additional responsibilities. It made me curious whether there are companies that are starting to think about CIO-pluses as they embark on the hiring process. I reached out to Matt Aiello for the answer. Matt is a partner in the CIO/CTO practice at Heidrick & Struggles. As a CIO/CTO recruiter, he has placed more than seventy IT executives into companies that span most industries. From his perch, he sees a rising appetite for CIOs to be hired with the plus. He explains this in my interview with him herein.
(This is the eleventh piece in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior ten interviews with the CIO-pluses from Waste Management, McKesson, Merck, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Ameristar Casinos, Owens Corning, Marsh & McLennan, ADP, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and the San Francisco Giants, please click this link. To receive notice about future interviews in the series with CIO-pluses of Walgreens, P&G and others, please click visit the column’s page. in the weeks to come.)
Peter High: How long has the notion of the “CIO-plus” role been on your radar?
Matt Aiello: In the eight years I’ve been recruiting top technology officers, in some way shape or form the notion has always been around, but we’ve seen a dramatic increase in these sorts of roles in the past two to three years.
Peter High: What has been the driver of this increase in demand for these roles in the past two to three years?
Matt Aiello: I think it is driven by several factors. First, taking a page from Charlie Feld, the CIO role itself is still immature and still evolving; it has to be the most amorphous/contextual role on any management team. Second, technology is moving so fast and becoming ubiquitous and accessible by organizations outside the CIO’s purview; this requires the CIO to engage rapidly across the enterprise. Third, the best organizations are always transforming, driving cost out and/or revenue up, and any significant transformation requires that the CIO be in the middle of business processes again outside their normal domains.
