Wise counsel

Recently I had the good fortune to spend a couple of days in the company of one of Australia’s foremost CIOs. This is a person who has spent over 35 years in IT including a stint working as a management consultant in America. Since the late 1990’s he has been a CIO in three of Australia’s most prestigious organisations. He now runs a department with 900 staff. The reason we were together was that he presented at the recent Coalface events in Sydney and Melbourne on how he had gone about transforming the IT operations in his organisation to enable it to facilitate a major business transformation.

What I really enjoyed about our time together was that I was dealing with someone whose wisdom about IT had come from practical experience. These experiences had given him insights on what was really important for a CIO and where he should focus his energies. He also highlighted tactics he has applied to deal with the challenges that confront a CIO. However, what made my time with this CIO so delightful was the fact that despite all his achievements in his career he was totally unassuming. Right now he is half way through a multi-million dollar project to overhaul his IT architecture. I am sure he had quite a number of pressing matters calling for his attention. Yet he willingly volunteered to take time out to talk to his peers.

The first thing I picked up from him was the importance of developing an effective team around the CIO. In his case, with a staff of over 900, he had 50 direct reports. However, he did not see his role as one of micro-managing them. Instead he believed his task was to hire effective people and to empower them to deliver. Of course he recognised that the buck stopped with him. As such, there was no way he could abdicate responsibility, especially on a project of this magnitude. However, rather than telling people what to do he choose to monitor how they were performing through the regular staff meetings he held with his team.

This reasoning lay behind his decision to eschew comprehensive outsourcing. He had learned from bitter past experience that outsourcing could leave the CIO holding the baby without control of the resources needed to fix a problem. As such, he had determined that whenever external agencies were engaged they must be beholden to the CIO. This meant that while they could oversee an element of an IT operation or service delivery these external personnel had to answer to him.

Another area where he had a strong focus was on understanding the skill sets the IT department needed and then recruiting to ensure these skill sets were at his disposal. He saw that any change management task required people with certain attributes to make that change happen. In his case these included skills like enterprise architecture, major project management or SAP implementation experience. In a competitive hiring market these skills were usually in short supply. As such, he applied KPIs to his recruitment agencies. He ranked them by the calibre of candidates they put forward for positions within his department. Three inappropriate candidates and the recruitment agency was relegated down the list. Those at the top of the list had the first opportunity to fill any vacancy he had.

However, while he didn’t see his job as one of deep technical understanding or knowing the minutiae of any project he very much saw his job as one of effectively communicating with his organisations executive team. He placed particular importance on explaining the complexities of the IT overhaul in layman’s terms. For example, he used the differences between Lego and Duplo as a way of describing the challenges of integrating different systems. He also drew one page diagrams which pictorially showed what needed to be done and the progress the department was making towards these goals. He regularly updated these to show the steps forward that had been made.

He also had an interesting approach to winning the support of key executives. In his case the CEO was the sponsor behind the transformation project. While he reported to the CEO he also appreciated that he was competing for that person’s time. Moreover, when he joined the company in 2006 the CEO had been at the helm for 15 years. He realised that he had to quickly win this person’s trust and support. His approach had been to identify the trusted advisors of the CEO. These people would be easier to reach. Furthermore, if he could win them over they, in turn, would influence the CEO.

In many ways this typified his approach to the role of CIO. If thirty five years in IT has taught him anything it was that the industry is all about people. He didn’t strike me as someone over enamoured with technology. Our discussions weren’t punctuated by excited thoughts about how some new technology or other was a radical breakthrough. If he had an iPad I never saw it. The words cloud computing never came up once in our discussions. However, there was a lot of talk about things like needing to buy the pizzas when his team was working long hours on a new project or taking time out with his department to do team building activities to help generate an esprit de corps.

Every three years the Standish Group publish data about the success rates for IT projects. They make for sobering reading. The latest data was published in 2008 and revealed that only around 35% of IT projects succeed. In Standish’s terms this equates to them being delivered on time, on budget and with all the promised functionality. This means that 65% of the executives who sign off IT projects end up disappointed. In addition, Standish’s studies show that the smaller an IT project is in terms of time, personnel and monies the more likely it is to succeed. This CIO was doing almost the exact opposite. The IT transformation project will take around seven years. It involves hundreds of people and is expected to cost over $500 million. Yet it has been going four years already and the achievements to date are impressive. Certainly, for such a high profile project there has been nothing calamitous to report.

When we were relaxing after the events I commented how appreciative I was that this CIO had given so generously of his time to support The Coalface Community. He told me he had done so because the IT industry had been good to him and he now felt it was time to put something back. The audience certainly felt he did rating his presentations very highly. Moreover, if any of them take away just a portion of the ideas he articulated then I am sure he will certainly have helped improve, at least in Australia, the delivery performance of IT in business.