Staying the Course as a CIO. Jonathan Mitchell

Discussions between the CIO and the SVP of Sales for example, will all be about meaningful topics, such as how they can work together to improve global Sales and Marketing performance.

The second case, shown in Figure 1.5, is unfortunately much more common in our industry. The major links between the business units and the IT function are established at much lower levels in the hierarchy. In this model, the IT leader can also become completely detached from the main business leadership. This is a much more dangerous operating model. It often results in demands for large-scale tactical engagements which in turn spawn large numbers of small-scale projects. In this example, the leader of the Sales organisation does not interact with his IT counterpart, or anyone else in the IT function for that matter. Most of the exchanges are occurring between the UK Sales department and their own local IT support unit. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that any attempts to implement a sales automation system will almost certainly end up as a tactical, UK-centric system focused on capturing and analysing data at a country level. Nobody is talking about improving overall Sales and Marketing performance across the enterprise.

Figure 1.5 A Poorly Connected IT Organisation

      The relative lack of interaction between the IT leader and his business counterpart is also very dangerous in other ways. It may for example, encourage the IT organisation to take on a more inward-looking emphasis. This might lead to a progressive lack of alignment and an increasing risk of dislocation from the leadership of the organisation.

      To avoid such problems, it is essential that any IT leader achieves good quality interactions with the leaders in the business. He or she should operate an IT division that is well integrated at all levels. Without this, it will not be possible (or at least intensely difficult) to develop any kind of strategic agenda – at least one that will make any large and positive impact on the company. This is bad for IT but even worse for the company. Thoughtfully conceived, well-designed and skilfully executed IT projects enabling process change can automate and change the core business processes themselves to create enormous advantage to the corporation. But you do have to be the right person who is – critically – in the right place in the organisation.

      The View from the Top of the Tree

      IT leaders often fret about how they should support the company's leaders. Many believe these lofty folk are the most vexatious group to satisfy. Clearly, such interactions will be easier if the IT leader is a full and active member of the management team. Nonetheless the needs of the leadership are often very different to the rest of the user community and the wise IT leader should tread very carefully.

      In terms of company leadership candidates, organisations are usually only interested in promoting those with experience, ability and a track record. It therefore takes quite a while for the ambitious Young Turks to climb to the top of the tree. This means that many company leaders today are Old Turks and have a degree of computer literacy that would probably cause a bunch of 16-year-olds to guffaw in disbelief into their social media networks. This is not the time to make ageist comments about baby boomers, but many of your leaders will be handicapped as far as modern technology is concerned. Most grew their careers in times when Information Technology played a much more peripheral role in industry than it does today. Many will favour traditional paper-based methods of communication control, often leaving email and other electronic wonders to their much younger assistants. I recall the first email I received from a CEO I worked for some years back. It simply said (in capital letters):

      “PLEASE COME AND SEE ME NOW”

      I scrambled straight up to his office expecting to get fired. Instead, the meeting was convivial. Our leader wanted to follow up on a piece of strategy work we had been discussing the previous week. When I asked the Boss why he shouted at me with his email, he just looked at me blankly. He thought I'd be pleased that I was chosen to be the recipient of his very first email.

      For every electronic dinosaur, there are of course plenty of fast trackers who are interested in IT. They may also be great exponents of that wonderful concept – “a little knowledge is dangerous”. The cleverest IT leaders have developed clever ways to please these folk. The steady provision of coloured glass beads, trinkets and other worthless bits of shiny technological metal works well. Trinkets, in this sense, cover all the latest and greatest pieces of new technology, many of which will be named after inappropriate fruits. Many companies are still unfortunately under-represented by female leaders. This means that when great executives from different companies get together at meetings, conferences or symposia, a “boys with their toys” situation can often develop in the breaks between the punch-ups. Everyone will be comparing their “tech” with the innocent yet passionate enthusiasm of primary school kids swapping Pokémon cards in the school playground. You may have put in the best ERP solution in the world, but if one of your Senior VPs hasn't received his 64 gigabyte diamond geezer super-smartphone running the strawberry cheesecake muffin operating system on the very first day it is released, then you could find yourself being very unjustly turned into jam very quickly indeed.

      “Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them.”

Robert Jarvik

      So, it's likely that you will find an astonishing variation in computer literacy amongst your leadership. This might also be tricky to spot at least initially, because the illiterates will almost certainly be experts at concealing this from you. Hiding ignorance is a skill that will have been essential for one who has ascended quite so far in the organisation. One of the ways that concerned IT leaders deal with this issue is to build an Executive Support team. These are composed of people who can pander to every wit and whim of the company's leaders. If you carefully hand-pick your staff, then you can match up your support staff's temperament and skill to each leader. Those leaders that are particularly illiterate can be sympathetically assisted. Assigning a trusted, patient and discreet member of staff who speaks beautiful English rather than dot-net-talk works well. Those bosses that are techno-geeks can of course be regularly fed the latest techno-babble and 4th generation shiny things by your resident geeks. I learned the value of Executive support very early on in my IT career. One leader in a company where I worked had a penchant for smashing his fist onto his mouse when he became particularly upset about things. At one stage he was crunching his way through mice at a rate of more than one per week. However, an unusually empathic member of the support team, armed with a liberal supply of spare electronic rodents, transformed the whole relationship between this business unit and the IT function. A couple of hundred dollars’ worth of mice helped build trust. From this platform we found we could implement quite dramatic change through technological innovation in medicine discovery. This isn't the kind of example that you find in any textbook, but it worked a treat for us. I for one would never have thought that meek and gentle people could achieve such a powerful outcome with just a few plastic animals. Executive support isn't a particularly egalitarian concept, but let's not be too pure about this – after all you want to extend your shelf life, rather than ascend to an ethereal spiritual plane of IT enlightenment. All that stuff can come later when you get into the thorny subject of delivering projects.

      Assuming you are able to get some kind of engagement with your leadership, then it's never a bad idea to play your strategic cards early on. The implementation of a highly aligned IT strategy shortly after you work out which way is up is crucially important to long-term success. Just doing it is probably even more important than getting the strategy right. Any alternatives involve laps and Gods. Strategy Schizophrenia is something you do not want to catch (which is why we talk about it in another chapter). If you are not successful in engaging the leadership, then life will initially be difficult, then intolerable, before finally becoming impossible. Each horror-story anecdote about a project screw-up or a lengthy service outage will steadily chip away at the sandy foundations of your support. Eventually, you will look down and discover, like any good cartoon character, that there is no longer any corporate ground underneath you. After a couple of futile seconds while you thrash your legs and try to defy gravity, the audience laughs and then down you go.

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