Perhaps the most striking thing about Sabrina Walsh's achievements at Queensland Health is that her chief information officer role there was her first job in IT.
Most CIOs work their way up through the ranks of their IT departments to get to the top, but Walsh took an alternative path. Originally trained as a psychologist, she worked in Queensland Health for a number of years and ended up managing hospitals and health districts rather than following the clinical path.
Waleed Hanafi, as a CIO, is an agent of change and definitely way more a businessman than a technician. When he came into the Global Refund Group, it did not have a specific IT department and he has since been focused on building one from the ground up.
Global Refund is an international supplier of financial services for the merchant market and its interactions with foreign customers. The Group now has local presence in 37 countries, with more than 200 international Cash Refund offices on four continents, supporting clients in Europe, Asia and the Americas.
Leading change effectively
Andrew Diver, manager, systems development and programme management, Vero Insurance
Fact: CIOs have achieved an unprecedented level of validity and stability in their enterprises. It's evidenced in their reporting relationships, compensation and tenures. According to CIO's 2008 State of the CIO research, more CIOs (41 percent) report to the CEO than ever; their salaries are on the rise; and they average four years and five months in their roles.
The acceptance of the CIO and the recognition of his strategic importance in the boardroom have created challenges and opportunities for IT leaders. Expectations are higher. Responsibilities are broader and more complex. But in the midst of those complications, CIOs hold great potential to concretely and positively impact their organizations. In doing so, they increase their chances for moving into executive-level positions outside of IT.
It has been said that the hallmark of a good executive is the ability to create a department so effective and well run that he or she ultimately becomes redundant. While that may be a depressing thought for some, it was an approach that led to Richard Deck taking the step up into a chief information officer role in early 2007, and he hasn't looked back.
This time last year, Deck was coming to the end of his tenure as chief IT architect and strategist at AGL, where he worked for a former MIS CIO of the year, Cesare Tizi (MIS is a sister publication of CIO New Zealand). Charged with the responsibility of taking a lead in developing a long-term IT strategy and solving AGL's complex billing and call centre problems, he successfully implemented a new direction that was strongly focused on outsourcing.
What makes a successful CIO in the eyes of a CEO? And what do they expect from their technology leaders? We get the words from the horse's mouth.
A common goal
How do you zap some energy back into a fading giant?
IBM Australia and NZ chief Glen Boreham reckons it calls for an unconventional approach. His collaborative style of leadership has been instrumental in IBM's recent turnaround in Australia. But he also disavows the long-held management mantra that you should avoid change for change's sake.
If there's anyone who understands the impact of consumer technology on the enterprise, it's Google CIO Douglas Merrill. He believes we're not only entering a new business epoch; it's one in which IT leaders with real technical skills will be more in demand than ever.
Merrill doesn't look like the standard model information executive. If you were to walk into a CIO gathering and find Merrill there, you might take him for a hip entrepreneur or a musician come to perform. He has earrings. More than a few. And long, unruly hair. He wears bright tee shirts and jeans.
It was the best of times. And then, all of a sudden, it wasn't.
"We had just gotten over Y2K. And the dotcom boom and bust. And then came...the disillusionment," recalls John Doucette, CIO of United Technologies. "It was a depressing couple of years to be in IT," says Doucette, who took over the high-tech and aerospace conglomerate's IT helm in 2000. "There wasn't that much innovation in software and hardware. Security wasn't there. People weren't focused on the business." And CIOs, who had surfed so high on the frothy Internet-driven economic waves of the late 1990s, had come crashing back to earth.
Imagine driving your car to work by sitting in your chair in front of your home computer.
You'd type in the detailed route directions, including right and left turns, then enter the desired speeds and terrain information to reach your office.
Why would a successful CIO leave one company to become co-CIO of another with only one-third the revenue and employees? Answer: The new company is Microsoft. Stuart Scott moved there in mid-2005 from General Electric, the US$160 billion, 319,000-employee behemoth where he had worked for 17 years, most recently as CIO of GE Industrial Systems. Then, about a year ago, co-CIO Ron Markezich was tapped to run Microsoft's budding managed services business. Scott has been Microsoft's sole CIO since then.
How is managing IT at Microsoft similar to or different from managing IT at GE? GE grew a lot through acquiring and integrating different businesses. IT had to be at the forefront of that, to be able to connect people and to make the combinations of businesses be successful by enabling people to work together and leverage the talent that crossed from the acquired company to the host company. That's very similar to what we're doing at Microsoft.
There is no question that the current climate has prompted many more companies to tackle ethics issues. Many are making a set of moral values a part of their corporate cultures. And some forward-looking companies are providing ethics training to managers and workers.
While company-wide ethics awareness is a wonderful thing, the recent information about the online persona assumed by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey reminds us that the moral centre of every company lies within its leaders. Those leaders are and should be held to higher standards of ethics and morality-because they are leaders. If, as in the case of Mackey, they are running companies designed around a social responsibility premise, the standards are, and should be, that much higher. The Mackey incident is more about the Achilles’ heel of a standard bearer than it is about illegality or immorality.
The hours were long, and the work was hard. Attention to detail was very important. Our clients paid a lot for our services and they knew it. They expected the best from us.
They expected us to know their names, their favorite things - even their allergies. The customer never had to ask for something twice. Anticipating their needs always meant extra points! In fact, when we knew one of our best clients was coming over, we knew exactly where to seat him, if he preferred bottled or tap water and whether or not we should let our senior manager know so he could come over and greet him personally. Those were the days when customer service mattered. Quality management (QM) wasn't just jargon but was part of every step in the process. You could literally live it. Those were my good old days bussing tables at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago.
Keeping the data flowing and the BlackBerry devices working is no longer enough for chief information officers. They now also have to engineer organisational change to impress the boss.
Research by MIT's Sloan School of Management has discovered links between a company's financial performance and the way its executives view the CIO role.
The sort of leadership qualities required to reach the C-level is the subject of endless debate. There is much focus in the media on "strategies for success", as if following a 10-step programme can get you to the corner office.
Meanwhile, tales of ruthlessness abound in modern fiction, portraying an image of power-hungry people clawing their way to the top. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only is the degree of humility required greatly under-estimated, but the stand-out characteristic of an innate ability to get along with potential competitors is overlooked as a critical success factor. "People skills" can mean the ability to influence people and enjoy the company of others. But it also means the ability to fuse a team of people together and get them moving in the right direction rather than just removing problematic people and replacing them with more compliant individuals. "Hard work" is a given, as many chief executive officers, chief information officers and chief financial officers will testify. And of course you really have to want the job.
At the height of its colonial power, with Queen Victoria on the throne, the sun never set on the British Empire.
In our modern times, in the era of a globalised marketplace, there are chief information officers who can correctly state the sun never sets on their domains.
A few years ago, Darin Brumby set out to prove a point about the role of a modern chief information officer.
Earlier this year, he proved it in style, by being named Computing magazine’s IT Leader of the Year in Britain - an achievement in itself, but all the more noteworthy for a 42-year-old Tasmanian-born former naval officer like Brumby.
If you're like many leaders, you're constantly on the lookout for a new job to expand your leadership ability. And there's nothing wrong with that; new positions typically offer many opportunities to learn and grow. But they don't come around that often, and in constantly scanning the horizon, you may miss seeing growth opportunities much closer to home.
"Dirt, trucks and sea" confronted Noble Coker in February 2002, when he arrived at the site of Hong Kong Disneyland as both the CIO and the only IT professional on the payroll. He had just taken up the awesome responsibility for the creation of the massive technological machine that would drive Disney Inc.'s fifth Magic Kingdom theme park.
"I was warned to expect the worst. Don Robertson, the first managing director of Hong Kong Disneyland, told me: 'I've been in the company 34 years, and I've seen the opening of new parks, extensions, and new attractions, but I've never seen the launch of a large technology project that did not have problems. On 12 September 2005, the world will be watching us.' "
When MIS Australia (a sister publication of CIO New Zealand) named Simon Smith as one of its chief information officers of the year at the end of 2006, the number of phone calls from prospective new employers took a noticeable upturn. He was CIO at digital production house Omnilab at the time and already firmly on the radar of the recruitment industry. The public exposure only heightened the interest.
A couple of months later, he was sitting behind a new desk as a CIO at News Digital Media, the online arm of News Ltd. It is the latest step in a career that Smith says is well planned out and encompasses a realistic approach to the business of career moves. There is an art to putting yourself in the reckoning when the big gigs come up, and Smith is one CIO who does not intend to sit around wistfully waiting for his phone to ring.
