The CIO’s Reputation Is Cemented In The First 100 Days
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
08-27-2013
We have one chance to make a first impression. This axiom applies best in the professional arena where one’s reputation can be cemented within a few short weeks of joining a company.
The Chief Information Officer was once a rather transient position. For years, it was among the “c-level” executive with the shortest or near shortest average tenure. The reasons for this were manifold including the fact that the average c-level executive (almost all of whom outranked the CIO) did not clearly understand technology, and it was easy to choose the CIO as a scapegoat if things were amiss within the company generally or within IT more specifically. Given the fact that so much that is managed by the IT leader can be esoteric in the minds of other business executives within the company, it is essential to push hard in one’s first 100 days to build relationships, to communicate a plan, and to track progress against that plan.
This is the first article in a series titled, “The CIO’s First 100 Days.” The first interview in the series is with Randy Krotowski, the CIO of Caterpillar, which can be found here. Other IT executives who will be profiled hail from companies like Time Warner, Intel, J.Crew, AmerisourceBergen, Cox Communications, Viacom, Amtrak, and the American Cancer Society. Each of these executives went through their first 100 days recently enough that their insights are fresh, but enough time has passed that it can be deciphered that their first 100 days did, in fact, lay the groundwork for a successful tenure. (To receive updates on this series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
There are a number of different lessons that will be highlighted, some of them common, and others unique. Some of the common ones include, though are not limited to:
Assess the Current State of IT, Beginning with People
A leader is only as good as his or her team. It is important to get an understanding early on of how strong one’s team is. It is important not only to assess one’s reports, but also the reports of the reports. It is at that second level where we often see issues, and this is the level where a lot of work gets done or does not.
It is also key to assess the organization structure to understand whether it is set up for maximum productivity, and to ensure that it reflects the corporation appropriately. A growing number of CIOs are aligning their organizations to business processes as opposed to the old structures of applications development, support, maintenance, and the like. Others are instituting business information officers (BIOs) who have dual reporting to the CIOs and to the heads of various business units.
Ultimately understanding the strengths, weaknesses, and maturity levels of the department is of the utmost importance. This was a big part of the message of my book World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. The idea is to evaluate the five principle of World Class IT:
As aforementioned, it must begin with people, but should include an assessment of the incumbent infrastructure and architecture, the governance processes and methods (project and portfolio management, for instance), the relationship between IT and the rest of the organization (or ROTO), as well as the health and efficacy of the relationship with vendor partners. Without knowing where one starts the journey, it will be difficult to determine how to prioritize.
It is also important to evaluate this early because in the early stages of one’s tenure, one can call upon the issues that one found and the corrective action to take. If a new CIO does not identify these issues from the get go, then when they are identified past the 100 day mark, they may well be considered issues that arose under the new CIO’s watch.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
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