Organisations are looking to make the most of opportunities associated with the National Broadband Network (NBN), with Gartner Executive Program’s annual CIO agenda survey showing that networking, voice and data communications are a higher technology priority in Australia and New Zealand than globally.
Changes to the role of the CIO are inevitable and those who don't adjust to them will stifle their careers, warns Claus Mortensen, IDC Asia/Pacific's principal for emerging technology research practice.
Talk to any CIO and one issue inevitably surfaces: How do CIOs cope in a world where they can’t keep up with what their employees are doing?
A number of CIOs have been tapped on the shoulder recently to reprise their role -- but in another industry, or in another country. We talk to CIOs who accepted this challenge.
We all understand the advantages partnering can bring to business. But, as any CIO who has had to negotiate a partnership-gone-bad knows, adversity is not often a good bedfellow when it comes to keeping partners — and your CEO — happy.
Internet Explorer 9, which becomes generally available tonight at an event at the South by Southwest show in Austin, Texas, has come to the end of the browser's most elaborate release process.
IT exec Jeremy Hopkins has a bit more on his plate these days than some of his colleagues in high tech. Hopkins is the CIO at World Telecom Group in Malibu, Calif., a job that keeps him hopping.
With IT hiring on the rise, CIOs need to worry about an issue that hasn't cropped up in years: how to prevent their most talented employees from being poached by rivals.
Scenario: Keeping IT Staff at the Business Table
He may run IT for one of the best-known names in technology, but even Microsoft's CIO is grappling with new technology challenges like moving to the cloud and handling consumer electronics that employees bring to work.
It is 8.50 am and you are working on the IT help desk. You receive a panicked call from the chief executive's PA. There is an executive meeting due to start in 10 minutes and she has a number of documents she needs to print for the meeting. The problem is the printer is not working! What do you do?
Campbell Such says becoming CIO was not a specific goal for him when he left university with an engineering degree. It was the result of taking on a series of opportunities locally and offshore, which led to his current role as general manager IT at Bidvest New Zealand."But having done it, I love it," says Such who has been with the food supply company for nearly two-and-a-half years. "For me, the key is not the technology per se. It is how you can use technology to help the business achieve its goal. That is the essence of what I love about my role. It is working with customers, working with our internal teams building those relationships, and then helping business to grow through the use of technology."The company is a wholesale distributor for the food service and hospitality industry, being part of an international group with operations in Australia, the UK, South Africa, Europe, Singapore and China. Customers include hotels, cafes, restaurants and aged-care facilities. "We have more than 11,000 customers in New Zealand and close to 30,000 product lines."The company has grown significantly in the past 10 years and continues to do so."We have gone from small to medium to large [enterprise], and we need to keep our IT systems ahead of the business requirements. The business is prepared to invest for the future. Where I am at the moment, is continuing to build the foundation to grow the business on. That is where I will be over the next two to five years, working with the business to continue growth."He and his team are in the midst of an infrastructure and applications refresh to ensure their systems can support this growth. He compares it with changing the foundation of a house that has become too small for the occupants. "We are lifting it out, pulling out the foundations, replacing the foundations and the plumbing and the wiring, and then putting it back down hopefully without affecting the business too much. We are building a platform from where we will build a 10-storey building as the business grows.""We can't run the business without technology," says Such, who cites the company processes some 180,000 invoices a month alone. "We know that going forward, technology is going to be just a bigger and bigger part of the business. But I want to isolate the techie technology from the people that need to be able to use it. They should just be able to use it [to do their jobs].""We are seriously thinking about what we need to take on board in our systems. The company is prepared to invest to provide the environment to support our customers' requirements."In conjunction with the building of the infrastructure, you must keep an eye on technology that will help the business," he says. "What are the opportunities and what are the potentials of the technologies. And of the systems we can use to help to continue to grow the business?"What he finds advantageous is support from the top for these initiatives. "There is a willingness and understanding of technology in our business right at the highest level."<strong>Global and local support</strong>Being part of an international business has given him opportunities to talk with his counterparts in other areas of the globe, particularly in Australia. "Their business is four times bigger than ours."He says weathering the recession was a challenge, but that the business had the resilience and the strength to grow through it. He finds having a "fantastic, very entrepreneurial team" in the support area of the business and the branches a big help. He says Bidvest has grown in New Zealand, but still retains a "small business heart"."We are not a corporate structure with command and control." For instance, there is no headquarters; instead there is a central support office with a network of distribution centres (DC) around the country. Each distribution centre is a stand-alone profit centre. "The DC general managers are empowered to do what they need to do to operate the business successfully in their region."The IT team is also set up to support this type of operation. Such says the IT operates from the central office. It is an internal team of five with outsourced support around software development and infrastructure. "We run an internal help desk," he says. "But if we need more help or more resources, we work with our outsourcers."He holds regular meetings with the other senior executives. "Each month, we hold an IT steering group meeting. I meet with the managing director and one of the senior execs to review what is going on, what their priorities are and to make sure I am working on the right things. That is the chance to understand more about what we need to do and how we need to do it, and how we can positively impact the business."He is encouraging the other business units to discuss with IT what is going on in their departments. "We are not looking for control, it is more around supporting people."A key success factor for him is communicating what IT is doing with the rest of the Bidvest staff. His team produces a newsletter every two months with online and print versions that detail what projects they are working on. He finds this to be a very useful process. "It helps me to better communicate with the business and to do that on an ongoing basis. Communication is really important. Trying to find the best way to communicate with the business in what we are doing and the value that we can add is something that I have a particular focus on."He says one thing that has never changed in the industry is this: "IT is there to support the business and do what it needs to do to achieve this [growth]."If at all, the shift is around <a href="http://cio.co.nz/cio.nsf/read/39453C208A3E4DBBCC257836007DCCC8"><u>the role of the CIO</u></a>, who has gone beyond being seen as a technology leader. "The CIO is now engaged with the rest of the business, [and is] more around the support of revenue generation."I see IT as such a key part of the business. We could not run our business without it. I see my role becoming the consultative adviser and to become part of the teams across the business, when they are doing their planning and decision-making."We have seen IT leaders move into general management roles or senior roles in business," he says. "I see the role more as becoming closer and closer to the decision-making and strategy process."In the past two years, his focus has been on the internal systems and building the platform to grow the business. But in the next 12 to 18 months, Such says he is looking at other things for the business to grow.At the time of the interview, Bidvest has just issued iPads to eight members of the executive team as part of a pilot project. The initiative came from Bidvest managing director Nigel Boswell. For Such, the pilot is part of preparing for the expected rise in user demand and requirements for mobile tools. Bidvest has an online ordering system where 40 percent of its business is transacted. That is a huge amount of business, he says, as he estimates that with a turnover of more than $500 million in a year, this means more than $200 million goes though the online ordering system.A chef finishes for the day, gets online at 2 am and sees what he wants to order. They have the ability to create menus online and to have the cost of those worked out and to place orders for automatic delivery the next day. "It has become hugely important for our customers and it has been a fantastic benefit for us in terms of our own operational ability to do things more quickly," he says.The online ordering system, with its "incredibly business-focused applications", has been a success for the company having been running for around seven years. But he says the company continues to develop it, citing an ongoing project to develop an application that will run on the iPhone and iPad.He says there are two broad sets of people who will be impacted by wireless -- the next generation of chefs who use these devices and who will expect to have that stuff available to them to do things. Then, there are also the people they want to attract as employees. "We need to consider how we will be able to provide the tools and the environment for them to be attracted to us as a business, and to grow our customer base and bring on good employees."<strong>When opportunity knocks</strong>Such is the first CIO [GM IT] for Bidvest New Zealand. He joined the company from Healtheries New Zealand, which produces health and food supplements for the retail sector. His first exposure to IT was in a technical marketing role with Data General (now part of EMC). He worked for a small business and then went back to IT when he ran a digital imaging bureau, before taking on the role of systems manager with Jenkins Group. Through contacts made in this role, he was offered the role of director of IT for Sinclair Systems International based in California.His three-year stint at Sinclair gave him the unique chance to lead teams based in the US and the UK, simultaneously. For nearly five months, he commuted back and forth between the offices in Fresno, California, and the head office in Norwich, England. "It gave me a chance to get out of New Zealand and get more of a global perspective," says Such."That was an interesting take on different cultures, different ways of doing business," he adds "It was a great opportunity for me to broaden some skills and understand how different people can be in different cultures.""The American and British cultures are quite different," he says. "The MD of Sinclair used to say it was two countries divided by the same language."Such came back to New Zealand to work as general manager for Productivity Software, running the development arm of the software vendor that specialised in ERP systems for the printing industry.A little known insight in his career path, which this writer gleaned during a background research, is some part-time work Such did at university as a model. Queried about this career derivation, Such says the work came about when his sister, who was doing a modelling course at that time, told him they were looking for male models."I was in my early 20s and so I went along," says Such. "They took some photos and I got work out of it for probably a couple of years."He recalls doing a television advertisement for a chocolate bar. "It was interesting and it was fun.""It was just a short-term thing," he says, with a laugh. "And they never called me from the Ford modelling agency in New York.""IT management -- it is much more fun."
In a long and varied ICT career, Bruce Tinsley has served industries ranging from banking through dairying and in several countries, before his current post as CIO for <a href="http://cio.co.nz/cio.nsf/mis/93598E9CFDCF70B6CC2577270009DA2B?Opendocument&HighLight=2,opus"><a href="http://cio.co.nz/cio.nsf/mis/93598E9CFDCF70B6CC2577270009DA2B?Opendocument&HighLight=2,opus">Opus</a></a>, the civil engineering consultancy that sprang from the Ministry of Works.At points in his career, he made a deliberate effort not to be "typecast" as a specialist in one business field or another. He has also been careful to broaden his business expertise, taking an MBA and carefully acquainting himself with the processes and priorities of each new business, before advancing ideas on how ICT can improve matters.His first job in ICT was at Databank, starting in 1981 as a trainee analyst-programmer working in assembler code. It took some learning at first, "but I quickly realised that was what I wanted to do," says Tinsley, who is based in Wellington. "Early in my time at Databank, I thought 'this is my career for life'."The attraction was not so much the programming, even then, but "designing systems, using these tools to help business to make things happen".<strong>Evolution in the enterprise</strong>The hope in the 80s and 90s was that code generators would make programming obsolete "You'd just need to do the business analysis; put the detail into a model and all your programs would be developed for you, we were told. It seems there is still a great demand even for COBOL programmers," Tinsley says."To that extent, I question whether the promises of computing to the business have been realised. In other respects, they' have been hugely exceeded. Tools like the iPad, the growth in ability to communicate, the ability to share information, have far exceeded anybody's expectations from [the 1980s]."A lot of the growth has been consumer driven and the push for business to build on that base is a two-edged sword, Tinsley says."I see it driving quite a bit of demand. People are coming to me and saying 'But Bruce, I can do this at home; why can't I do it at work? I can set up a blog, build a website and create applications; why does it take [the IT department] so long to implement or upgrade anything'?"Some things don't scale well from home to the corporate environment and it's part of the challenge of a CIO to communicate that to management and staff, he says."During my time at Fonterra, the procurement manager asked me 'Why can't we use Skype?' I said 'would you do all your procurements through TradeMe and eBay?' It's a matter of understanding the difference between the consumer and the commercial environment -- and being able to sell that."He spent 10 years at Databank, in a variety of roles. "That was one thing that fascinated me about IT; you could move on from role to role and continue to grow."His first move was to ANZ-Postbank in applications development, IT strategy and a major bank transformation programme. "In virtually every country we did things a different way; different systems, processes, support functions. The global transformation project was around consistent processes, technologies and so on in all operating locations."Tinsley led the New Zealand side of the programme from the IT perspective. When he left ANZ in 1999 and joined Azimuth Consulting, he was partway through an MBA. "I was looking for a way to grow as an IT person. I realised I needed more business knowledge and wider experience. Azimuth immediately sent me to the Philippines, to work with PLDT, the country's leading telco."That was good for a whole bunch of reasons. It got me used to working with external clients and it got me out of banking where I had been for 20 years. A recruiter in Wellington said 'Bruce, you're typecast. People will only look at you as a banking IT person.' So I went straight to a telco." After 18 months' project work, he and a colleague were assigned to guide the CIO in implementing a new strategy."That gave me the nudge to realise this CIO lark was pretty good. It gave me the impetus to move into a more strategic IT role, running my own shop."Work in Malaysia and Korea followed, taking him back into banking but also giving him more experience of major organisational transformations. <strong>Transition and transformation</strong>Returning here in 2005, he became chief technology officer for Fonterra; "I was responsible for infrastructure strategy and architecture. We had outsourced all our infrastructure management to EDS. A large part of my job was managing that new technology development. "In 2007, I saw an opportunity at PGG Wrightson as CIO. Again this was a transformational role. PGG had gone through the merger with Wrightson and had combined the two IT operations. They needed a significant review of capability and rationalisation of applications and infrastructure."We migrated off an old general ledger and implemented JD Edwards; we did CRM and data warehouse. We rebuilt the infrastructure and things were going swimmingly until the economic downturn. I had to reduce staff and cancel capital projects. It wasn't a situation I was keen on. So I left. I did a short-term consulting stint with Downers, in Auckland. Then 12 months ago, I got approached to take on this role."The challenges at Opus are similar to those at PGG Wrightson and the Malaysian bank, he says; "to look at the way we operate and make some quite significant changes."Our ICT infrastructure has developed incrementally over time, but without a real strategy. Our organisational structure is very decentralised; regional IT staff report to regional managers, not to myself. I have been working with management and regional IT managers looking at how we reshape IT support."Opus (number 48 in the <a href="http://cio.co.nz/cio.nsf/ciomis"><a href="http://cio.co.nz/cio.nsf/ciomis">2010 MIS100</a></a> report on the top IT using organisations in New Zealand) has expanded rapidly, particularly in overseas work. "If growth patterns continue, in five years' time we will have more people offshore than we do in New Zealand," Tinsley says. "We'll be double the size we are now. We have to make sure the business processes and infrastructure are in place to support continued growth and a whole change in operating environment."Looking back over his career, there have been similarities and significant differences in each new business area."The transition from banking to telco was not as big as I thought it would be. They both process large volumes of transactions every day. Fonterra was totally different. It was manufacturing, supply-chain and logistics - and my first real exposure to a large international operation based in New Zealand."PGG Wrightson was a big retail operation; it had probably more strings to its bow than any company I have ever worked for," he says.Coming to Opus was a different game again; being a project-oriented, professional services company in the engineering space. "You have to spend time learning those differences when you first come onto the job," Tinsley says.But fundamentally there is a common thread: "It is about provision of IT services to the business and strategic growth issues; you are hopefully seen as an advisor to the business in terms of how IT can be used in a strategic fashion."Hopefully" doesn't sound an optimistic word, CIO suggests. "I don't want to talk out of school," Tinsley replies, "but in a couple of roles I have had, people have not been willing to listen; to them IT is a commodity service provider. All they want is for me to ensure the machine on the desk works and bandwidth is sufficient to give them a decent response time. They don't look for strategic value out of IT. "That comes back to one of the key roles of the CIO; selling the IT value proposition -- that we are more than just PCs on desks; we are about providing a strategic capability to organisations."A key element of his approach is engagement with business general management, he says. "I have spent a lot of this year travelling around New Zealand and Australia, meeting with managers and staff, understanding what they do. I have also met a number of my peers in the industry, for instance <a href="http://cio.co.nz/cio.nsf/spot/991BBC7BE28A9924CC25764C007F670F?Opendocument&HighLight=2,johansen"><a href="http://cio.co.nz/cio.nsf/spot/991BBC7BE28A9924CC25764C007F670F?Opendocument&HighLight=2,johansen">Robin Johansen CIO of Beca</a>;</a> the guys at <a href="http://cio.co.nz/cio.nsf/mis/9123DA80EAAACEBDCC25772700112E25?Opendocument&HighLight=2,fulton,hogan"><a href="http://cio.co.nz/cio.nsf/mis/9123DA80EAAACEBDCC25772700112E25?Opendocument&HighLight=2,fulton,hogan">Fulton Hogan</a> </a>and at <a href="http://cio.co.nz/cio.nsf/mis/B09E15BB0A36C015CC25772700107583?Opendocument&HighLight=2,downers"><a href="http://cio.co.nz/cio.nsf/mis/B09E15BB0A36C015CC25772700107583?Opendocument&HighLight=2,downers">Downers</a>.</a>" This helps make sure when that when the companies are collaborating on a project, the total team can work together and communicate information, he says.Opus has bases in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and Canada. "We have IT teams in each. At the moment they're set up to support their regions. I believe [that's] quite an inefficient model; we have excess capability in some areas and we don't have the capability in all regions in other areas. All up, I've got about 50 IT people worldwide.The challenge for me is how we make more efficient and effective use of them. We are working through that process at present."In the formal structure of the organisation, Tinsley reports to the chief financial officer -- a structure that is often criticised as distancing IT from top management. The reality at Opus is different, Tinsley says"If I want to talk to the chief exec I can just go and knock on his door. Hierarchically I am separated, but in terms of communication I am not. One good thing is that our CFO is very technology-literate and keen to drive the strategic agenda as well."While IT should be close to the business, there is danger in letting the distinction fade completely, he says.The conduct of IT operations demands rigour around process -- change management and capacity planning, the good operational disciplines; if you start embedding that out in the business you lose the potential for those good practices to continue and to be driven centrally."If you devolve responsibility you start losing control. It can be like herding cats; especially with the growth of IT knowledge among the engineers in this business."<strong>Sage advice</strong>What advice would he offer to IT practitioners aspiring to a CIO role?"Understand the business, know what drives it. Learn about the financial and business drivers; learn about marketing, learn about business operations and driving efficiency."I came to this a bit late myself," he admits; his first major move was the MBA. "I think I spent my first years at Databank almost in ignorance of what the banks actually did and the underlying processes that utilised the technology. I was focused on the technology itself. Anyone who wants to be a CIO absolutely has to understand what it is that drives the business to succeed." Another piece of advice: "know the IT industry. You don't have to know how to pull a PC to bits to be a CIO; in some ways I think that is a detriment. It is knowing the various components of the industry -- operations, infrastructure, applications, the strategy component, project and programme management. There are a whole lot of things that happen within IT and if you want to be a CIO you have to understand what they are and how they interact with each other."The other thing is: know your peers -- in similar industries and in the vendor arena -- because for better or worse they're the people you'll grow with throughout your career. I see people I met 30 years ago who have risen through the ranks alongside me. It is remarkable how many I still keep engaging with, especially in the New Zealand market."
The relationship between the CIO and the architects that work for them often lacks a clear line of communication, which can result in a major gap between what the CIO really wants in a well-architected environment and what the architecture team ultimately delivers. Why? Although the CIO might have a high-level understanding of EA's value to the company, he is less likely to provide a clear problem set for enterprise architects to attack, resulting in too much emphasis on architecture design and too little on solving specific problems. Over time, it is primarily this lack of defined goals that leads EA teams into trouble when budgets get tight. Getting a clear set of CIO aligned EA goals positions EA to become a more valued member of the IT organisation.
A panel of ICT leaders discuss the business technology issues that will have the most impact in networked enterprises -- and how to manage them.