Career / Opinions

In the case of technology contracts, I am an advocate for a prenup. We are talking about businesses - businesses don’t have a natural end point. They can go on forever, or end abruptly.

The number of women working in technology is far below the percentage in the workforce at large, and enrollment numbers suggest that improvement isn't imminent.

A list of the basic 'don'ts' to consider before saying 'I do' to a technology investment - whether it is hardware, software or serviceswhether it is hardware, software or services.

For the CIO job, things are going to get bigger, better and different on a massive scale.

What should IT be paying attention to above all else? How about our organisations' potential for human effectiveness?

Premier 100 IT Leader Catherine Bessant also answers questions on pursuing a master's degree and getting buy-in from the business.

A CIO said I was like the guy who turned up the day after hurricane Katrina -- I come in when technology transformations fail.

Momentum in the public cloud is accelerating, particularly in the consumer realm. Nowhere is this more obvious than in our own households. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been the family CIO for the past decade. My job description has comprised procuring and supporting a growing fleet of PCs, laptops, mobile phones, modems, routers and storage devices. In years gone by my role was essential to the family’s ability to function digitally. I had ‘the knowledge’ and the systems were so failure prone that I was often the hero – recovering that lost homework assignment from the backup hard drive, reinstalling Windows (again) or installing a new program and getting it to work. Thanks Dad! Nonetheless, there were occasional disasters … lost family photos and tears (mine).
Over the past few years, however, the home computer fleet has become dominated by Apple devices – the ubiquitous preference of the teenagers and now also my wife – and a strange thing is happening … I’m becoming redundant. Partially this is because the teenagers now know more about how to use software than I do, and what they don’t know they find out easily via Google, YouTube and their peer networks. It is also because less and less of the software that makes our family run resides in our house. The ability of the iMac, iPads, iPods and iPhones to seamlessly, easily and reliably integrate and share content through iTunes and the iCloud has been nothing short of amazing. My work here as the family CIO is done.

Richard Bach said: “We teach best what we most need to learn,” and it is within the spirit of “what I most need to learn” that I write this column.

Sam Cooke's influential song, A Change is Gonna Come (circa 1963), echoed and foreshadowed the major societal shifts of the American civil rights movement. The engaging chorus scans: "It's been a long, a long time coming / But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will."
This refrain may also herald a new order in IT that has been gathering force for more than a decade. Progressive CIOs are unseating their regressive counterparts and bringing new meaning to IT enablement.

After more than 30 years’ working in the ICT sector globally, one thing I can say for certain is that New Zealand IT companies are among the best in the world.
I’ve seen New Zealand’s ICT sectors grow significantly, emerging as an agile and innovative industry. But I really believe that it could have grown and innovated a lot more, had it the recognition it deserves from within New Zealand.
It is no secret that New Zealand ICT companies face an ongoing struggle to compete with multinational brands. Typically, larger organisations and government agencies have dealt with these brands – and not necessarily because they offer the best service, but more often due to a perceived security around ‘big brand’.
Yet, local companies often deliver exactly the same service with significantly better value for money and backed by a level of project and relationship ownership that you won’t get from a multinational provider.
This country now has some large and successful ICT companies, the likes of Datacom, Simpl, Optimation and Intergen, which have had the agility and commitment to wear through the challenges, prove themselves and grow to the extent that they can now compete with the global players.
Yet, my passion is our smaller, highly-specialised New Zealand companies, the ones that provide targeted expertise. I speak as CEO of Techtonics, one of New Zealand’s oldest ICT companies launched in 1987 when email didn’t exist and cellphones were the size of a man’s boot. As experts in information management and infrastructure optimisation, Techtonics has survived various global economic crises of the times and had the agility to move with the rapid technological changes.
We’ve just signed a major four-year contract with the Ministry of Economic Development (MED) for the implementation and maintenance of Open Text Content Server 10, a new records and information management system that paves the way for enhanced connectivity through the public sector.
We need to see more large organisations and government agencies like MED look to the skill base at their doorstep for the sake of efficiency, value for money and to nurture this country’s innovative and agile ICT industry.
Techtonics walks the talk. Recently I upgraded all our back-end systems so we now use 100 percent New Zealand solutions from accounting, payroll, job-costing and time-sheeting through to IP telephony systems.
Techtonics is also a founding member of key industry bodies, the NZ ICT Group which is a great organisation in terms of the whole industry; and more recently NZ Rise, which represents solely New Zealand, owned and operated ICT companies. It has arisen to promote the use and growth of these specialised companies, linking together collectively in a body that will have the capacity and motivation to compete with the big players.
This brings me to the Government’s shared procurement policy, which clearly has good intentions. But, I’m concerned about the execution. It is already very difficult for smaller companies to win business in the public sector and procurement on a large scale is even more limiting with the restrictive costs of tendering. The potential outcome is a handful of players, leaving the small, expert, agile and innovative Kiwi companies in a position where they’ll have to partner with the big players, possibly just to stay in business. I don’t think that’s a healthy outcome for our innovative ICT sector, especially in Wellington
While shared procurement is a good idea for sourcing ICT products and other commodities, it’s not as practical for sourcing people skills, those expert ICT practitioners who carry out consulting, implementation and maintenance. This should be kept open to all local ICT companies to ensure services remain agile, flexible and responsive to changing needs.
Historically, we’ve seen shared services in the public sector rise and fall several times. Take the shared Government Computer Service (GCS) that was commercialised and eventually devolved because individual CIOs wanted to do their own thing to satisfy their different drivers. Ten years later we saw part of it arise again with the State Services Commission’s shared Government network (GSN) – which never really got off the ground.
Now we’re looking at shared procurement; again with a clear intention to increase efficiency and reduce public expenditure. But at the services level, I think it could be more limiting to Government agencies than it will be enabling. Indeed, there is a lot of potential to reduce public spending with a closer look at current global ICT procurement, reviewing such factors such as the long-term outcomes and the costs.
In the long-term, I am in no doubt that New Zealand ICT companies provide better value. For starters, hourly rates are much lower and then, when specialised expertise is required, there’s no need to pay massive charge-out rates for an international expert to be flown in. In essence, a New Zealand ICT company will provide:

A CIO heads a successful business initiative and gets an industry accolade, then is head-hunted for a similar role in another and, presumably, bigger company. The CIO moves to the new company and leaves six months later, failing to duplicate the earlier success.
The CIO brought the same leadership skills – in business technology and strategy, and more – to the new organisation, but struggled in the new environment. What happened and why does this tale resonate among CIOs across sectors worldwide?

It is funny how life goes in circles. As a young man I knew that if I was going to be successful in life it would be up to me to make it happen. It needed to be that way because my family was a farming family and had been since we had arrived in New Zealand five generations ago. Everyone farmed, it is just what you did. I hated farming. It was hard work, boring and didn’t seem to pay very well. If I was going to avoid farming I would have to figure out how.
The obvious answer was to go to university and get a degree that would help me into a career other than farming. So I did and before I knew it I was a member of the fledgling Deloitte consulting practice. I loved consulting and the environment I was operating in. Every day was different and every day I learnt something new. The longer you were there the more you realised that yes, success was up to you, how hard you worked and how successful you were at providing value to your clients. For me it was nirvana as I was in control.

You meet your CEO in the foyer and he invites you for lunch. exchange pleasantries and then the CEO notes the time of day and invites you to join him or her for lunch. Consider what you will talk to the CEO about over lunch. You have no time to prepare.
This is the very reason you should always be ready for such a conversation - to leave the CEO secure in the knowledge that, in the CIO, he or she has a senior executive who is conversant with the business from a business perspective.

Is it essential for the CIO to report to the CEO?
The reporting relationship of CIOs is frequently an area of curiosity and sometimes concern for Gartner Executive Programme members. It is also a question that Gartner asked of more than 2000 CIOs worldwide in our latest annual CIO survey, which tracks how CIOs balance their business, strategic, technical and management priorities. The survey report aggregates the responses from CIOs in 50 countries across 38 industries, representing more than US$160 billion in corporate and public sector IT spending. I’ll go into more detail about the findings of this year’s survey in a later column.

Many CIOs are not rising to the level of seniority or executive contribution they feel they should be. Why not? It comes down to key areas of leadership failure, such as focusing on inputs instead of outcomes, or failing to use metrics that the rest of the business understands.

Chief information officers are wise to keep an interest in what is on the mind of their chief executive and, in particular, in any issues that may be keeping them up at night. Even though our country has escaped the economic stresses experienced in many parts of the world, CEOs, especially those in global organisations, are still buffeted by mixed signals and concerned about business conditions.
Several key CEO concerns have particular relevance to CIOs. Providing IT support to business operations in emerging markets is growing more important. This is because businesses directly and indirectly dependent on consumer growth are likely to push harder into emerging markets. CEOs will do a lot to go after new markets — scaling up operations in those regions and sometimes entering new countries by acquisition or distribution. Understanding where you and your suppliers could deploy IT if asked will be important.

Last year I was invited to breakfast at the Takapuna Beach Cafe by a friend of mine. The purpose of this breakfast was to introduce me to Ian Howard, a friend of his. I turned up to the breakfast with no particular expectations. However, the conversation we had at the cafe that morning has changed my life’s priorities and I hope it may change yours.
During our conversation, Ian and I discovered that we had a number of core beliefs in common. The most important of these was that education has the power to make the difference in peoples lives. When we say education, we do not mean formal education, or at least, we do not mean only formal education. What we mean is the process that people go through to learn new skills and capabilities. We also share a common belief that most people, and when I say most, I mean virtually everyone, is fundamentally a good person and that the reason they make bad choices is not because they are bad people, but because they do not know any better. That is, they have not learnt the skills they need to be able to make better decisions, often because they have never had the opportunities to learn these skills.

Chief information officers want to be seen as visionaries within their organisations. Usually bestowed with higher-than-average intellect and unique insight into the workings of their companies, they are able to make a large contribution towards both organisational growth and innovation.
Yet, curiously, this rarely happens.

Self-praise is at best unbecoming, and at worst a sin. "We're told by our families, our teachers that nobody likes a braggart," says Peggy Klaus, workplace communication expert and author of BRAG! The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It. "Brag is truly a four-letter word."
And IT professionals in particular shy away from self-promotion. "People in IT have a strong ethos around just stating facts and not exaggerating their contributions," says Nancy Ancowitz, business communications coach and author of Self-Promotion for Introverts. "It's admirable to take care of your team, [but] by increasing your own visibility, you can make the pie bigger [for everyone]."