Change Management / Case studies

With the economic recession wreaking havoc on the financial services, automotive, retail and other industries, many IT professionals in those markets who've been laid off are considering an industry switch to open up their job searches.
Indeed, many career experts are urging job seekers to apply for jobs in the few industries that are growing or are poised for growth despite the recession, such as green energy and technology, education, and healthcare. They say diversifying one's job search will increase their odds of landing a new job more quickly.

As chief information officer of BMC Software, Mark Settle says two things make his role “unusual”. The first is providing ICT support for 6000 employees across the globe, of which half are in research and development. The latter involves supporting servers and storage devices in the R and D laboratories in different parts of the world — four in the US, and one each in Israel and India.
The second is that his team is also an internal showcase for BMC products, meaning they use all versions of BMC products internally, and meet with end customers. “This gives us a unique ability to provide feedback to the R and D people about the actual practical issues that we run into,” Settles says during a recent visit in Auckland.

I appreciate all the insightful feedback from my last article, 'The three types of CIOs'.
Many of the comments distinguished between CIOs who excel in one area -- some of whom move on to new jobs once they have to stray from their comfort zones -- and CIOs who can successfully bridge the gaps and become effective jacks of all trades. But let's add a twist: what if the incoming CIO of a Fortune 500 company has no prior IT experience?

There is often a defining project in the career of every chief information officer as they ascend through their profession. Such a project is usually a program of work of gargantuan proportions with the potential to make or break their reputation and determine the future of their organisation.
For Peter Mahler it came in the form of a five-and-a-half-year IT-based business transformation at Coles Myer.

Just as the 1990s were kicking off, David Yuile found himself at one of those all-important crossroads: armed with a degree in electrical engineering and an innate interest in mathematics, he had to decide what to do with the rest of his life.
Now chief operating officer at Australian telco AAPT, he says that as a kid he invested all of his spare coins into arcade games, and he credits the emergence of microcomputers with having rescued him from a career in finance.

From social networking websites and online job boards to career coaches and job search software, job seekers have more tools at their disposal than ever to help them find work. But the most important assets for today's job seeker are a positive attitude and the ability to develop and execute a job search plan, according to a new study from the University of Missouri.
The goal of the study was to identify how certain personality traits - specifically, extroversion and conscientiousness - influence a job seeker's approach to the job search process and, ultimately, to their success. University of Missouri researchers, led by Management Department Chair Daniel Turban, gathered data on 327 graduating, undergraduate and graduate students from two large universities.

What's one positive outcome of the recession? It's leading people to consider a career change. Though the process of figuring out what to do next can be overwhelming, it's also empowering. Taking stock of one's skills, strengths, interests and experience makes an individual realisee how much he or she knows and has to offer. Investigating career options also helps employed professionals extricate themselves from dead-end jobs. For people who are unemployed, a layoff can be the catalyst for pursuing a professional dream.
Considering alternatives to the work you're currently doing or you've done in the past is a worthwhile exercise for anyone, at any point in a career. Despite what the unemployment rate may lead you to believe, there are always options.

Tucked between arctic air currents and hot desert winds, Melburnians know that if they wait long enough, stormy skies turn to golden afternoons. Unlike Brisbane, with its heatwaves that last for weeks, or Sydney and its frequently rainy winters, Melbourne’s weather can switch from balmy to blizzard and back in 24 hours.
A Melburnian born and bred, Telstra chief information officer John McInerney knows how to wait for the weather to turn. He began working for the national telco in 2003, two years before the appointment of Sol Trujillo as chief executive precipitated a deluge of North Americans.

Information technology budgets have been under severe pressure recently, courtesy of the global financial crisis. So it is hardly surprising that chief information officers are leaning on vendors for sharper pricing or better service levels.
Improvements in either area create better value for money, at a time when CIOs need all the help they can get in meeting the growing expectations of their businesses with dwindling resources.

CIOs have to brace themselves for unprecedented pressures in the next four years, which will make the changes of the past two decades seem mild.
This is the brief of a PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) report on ‘the next generation CIO’, which covered 667 senior executives.

"It is important for you to see what others can’t see.” This insight from Graham Lowe, the renowned Kiwi rugby coach, definitely hit the mark for CIOs in these trying, uncertain times.
CIOs are tasked to check out and harness tools, implement strategies and work across the enterprise to help them not just survive, but thrive through the economic downturn.

There's a dozen interview questions that fluster IT job seekers at all career levels. Give a surprised or weak answer to any of them, and red flags fly. Hiring managers may conclude that a candidate is ill-prepared, and thus the job seeker can look forward to more months of firing off résumés in the worst job market in years.
To help IT professionals prepare for job interviews, CIO.com asked IT hiring managers and CIO job seekers to share the most critical questions that came up in interviews - ones that often caused candidates to stumble.

If you've ever sat through one of those irritating meetings with a software company where they promise to understand your needs and provide you with the tools to transform your business, be thankful for the economic downturn.
This is because there are big changes coming down the line in the way technology is supplied to enterprises and their customers and, for the most part, they'll be for the better.

"Stay away from IT." This may seem somewhat unusual advice from Mark Baker, who was a CIO, then general manager and programme director at Foodstuffs Auckland.
His admonition, however, is around the context of how a CIO can ease the transition to heading a line of business.

Recognising the poor state of IT among healthcare non-government
organisations (NGOs), Lien Foundation, an NGO that specialises in

If IT offered gold medals for the year 2008, the winners would include business intelligence, Web 2.0 and cloud computing. Among the lower medal ranks would be software-as-a-service (SaaS), service-oriented architecture (SOA) and vendors who failed to keep up with the service pace.
Perhaps the technology highs of this year were the Beijing Olympics and the US election of Barack Obama. The Games' impeccably orchestrated IT systems opened China to a new level of world respect, while the American Democratic party swept the Republicans from office, using the powerful tools of the world wide web.

Nearly three years into his term as the CIO of the CIA, one of Al Tarasiuk’s most critical duties has been to infuse more corporate-like thinking into the CIA’s IT operations and staff. “My boss,” Tarasiuk says of CIA Director General Michael Hayden, “asked me to establish ‘corporate everything’ for IT — to the [fullest] extent possible”.
But then, just as easily as Tarasiuk discusses agile development and SOA and IT governance — typical CIO stuff — he solemnly switches to the harsh realities of his particular line of business. When asked about information-sharing failures surrounding 9/11, he chafes a little. “I won’t comment on how we got to 9/11,” he says, “but I can comment on how we’ve improved since that.”

In her office overlooking a windswept and wet Auckland, Wendy Bussen firmly rejects the claim made by some in the industry that CIO means “Career Is Over”.
“It’s only the start,” says Bussen, GM corporate services, Auckland Regional Council. “If you have been CIO of a large organisation, you bring your leadership skills. By the time you are a CIO, you are conversant with working strategically.”

From Adesh Goel's perspective, there should no longer be any 'turf wars' between different members of the C-suite. The CIO and CFO are the "right and left hand of the CEO" and the executive team should view the CFO as "an enabler of their objectives and not a handbrake".
"When there is a high degree of trust between them, and belief in each other's judgement, the organisation can demonstrate decisive leadership and focus on the task of delivering value to shareholders," said Goel, who is CFO for e-mail security technology company, BoxSentry.

Most executives believe that relentless execution — the efficient, timely, consistent production and delivery of goods or services — is the surefire path to customer satisfaction and financial results. Managers who let up on execution even briefly, the assumption goes, do so at their peril.
In fact, even flawless execution cannot guarantee enduring success in the knowledge economy. The influx of new knowledge in most fields makes it easy to fall behind. Consider General Motors — the largest, most profitable company in the world in the early 1970s. Confident of the wisdom of its approach, GM remained wedded to a well-developed competency in centralised control and high-volume execution. Despite this, the firm steadily lost ground in subsequent decades and posted a record $38.7 billion loss in 2007. Like many dominant companies in the industrial era, General Motors was slow to understand that great execution is difficult to sustain — not because people get tired of working hard, but because the managerial mind-set that enables efficient execution inhibits employees’ ability to learn and innovate. A focus on getting things done, and done right, crowds out the experimentation and reflection vital to sustainable success.