When you leave does the company sustain or hurry to change your legacy ?

Step by step, brick by brick, one person at a time, year after year for four decades, the promoters built the business into a large force in the industry, becoming a dominant force in markets where they operated. They were not in the global top 20 but they were number one in their home ground garnering respect of partners and competitors. Their success was a result of investments in people, process and technology well ahead of the curve, and then retaining them; technology played an important role in their profitable scale up.

With the Promoters endorsing investments, they thrived through the transition of IT from monolithic mainframes to client-server, moving to web-based technologies as they evolved. At that stage they hired an experienced IT Manager who was brought into a specialist role to take charge of the future. He rallied the diverse investments across business units and brought in sanity to IT enterprise architecture. He created a technology team which build applications suited to business need and evolving customer expectations.

He was quick to understand the business and participate in discussions on business growth and how IT could help. As the solutions kept increasing in number and complexity, so did the IT team to service the growth in business and IT. At the turn of the century the advent of COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) solutions created a buzz that could not be ignored; so on behest of the business and the Promoters he started evaluating solutions. Vendors lined up to demonstrate their wares anticipating a high value, marquee, and referenceable customer.

Comparisons between handcrafted bespoke solutions which the business used and the evolving though comprehensive solutions from global players followed. Most COTS solutions fared badly on industry functionality out of the box, but scored on flexibility which was declared unimportant by the IT team citing better fit to processes which had withstood the test of time. References to challenged implementations in the market were enough to defend existing set of solutions which had started slowing down the business’ ability to deliver.

The quickening pace of technology change resulted in additional stress on the team that was unable to cope with keeping the lights on and innovation simultaneously; the well-entrenched CIO began feeling the pinch. In the absence of headcount addition being allowed, he partnered with external services vendors to build satellite systems barely sufficient to keep the business satisfied while competitors had started enjoying the benefit of simplicity and agility set on the foundation of evolving and now better COTS solutions.

Business continued to grow on the shoulders of high customer traction to the brand; uneasy calm had occasional ripples due to difference in outcomes that their complex IT enabled. Lead times to deliver new functionality crept north and noise came in random spurts subdued by the personality exuded by the CIO. The Promoters sensed trouble and hired a big name consultant to create a plan and roadmap for the new desired state in a world that had begun embracing Digital and the industry was facing disruption from new business models.

Consultants love situations where recommendations are fairly straightforward and easy to implement; even a fresh management graduate with exposure to technology would have come up with a solution – reaching for the proverbial low hanging fruits – which would have been marked improvement over existing legacy which had now become a weight to carry on with. They went through the song and dance, interviewing people, benchmarking against industry, talking to experts globally to prepare a strategy and lay out the solution to alleviate them from the current state of affairs and regain lost glory.

Coincidentally the superannuation of the CIO neared emboldening the CXOs to seek new ideas and fresh IT leadership. The consultants were tasked with finding a replacement and refresh/replace the technology solutions as appropriate; confidence in the IT team and their legacy had reached an all-time low. The writing was on the wall, it was no longer going to be incremental innovation, rip-and-replace would prevail to get rid of the legacy that may have served well in the past, and it was no longer relevant or useful.

As a CIO barring a few instances, I have always been careful to protect past investments to whatever extent feasible and build on top of whatever technology may have been deployed. At the same time I have also attempted to keep current the landscape in every enterprise to ensure that the company does not lose the innovation race and stays on par if not ahead. Emotional or insecurity led decisions can hurt growth and career aspirations. Stay relevant, keep your ear to the ground, be ready for the next disruption, better create it.

Lunch-time networking causes indigestion

The new email is a retrograde step and not an upgrade; life was so good with the older system. What is happening with our IT ? The world is moving ahead and we are going backwards. How do you expect us to be effective when we cannot even communicate with our customers ? I don’t know what to do, probably this year again thanks to IT we will have some unhappy customers !

I had approved the investment almost 2 months back and you are telling me that we still have not placed orders ? How do you expect us to work ? What is the problem ? As the Business Head when I have given the go ahead who can challenge the decision ? Why are you trying to save a few thousand dollars ? Do you know that the loss to business due to this delay is in hundreds of thousands ?

These are a sampling of lunch time ranting as described by CIO friends. One of them was a good guy, dedicated, focused, always ready to please; his team imbibed the same ethos and worked hard, always available to the business. He was successful in a typical way with conscious budgets and a fair set of initiatives that kept the engine humming. Inorganic growth and lateral expansion caught him capacity constrained which was beginning to hurt. He did not like the lunch time discussions anymore which ended up embarrassing him most of the time.

A long time back one of my managers gave me an interesting insight; we all typically have our office lunch with our teams. If you look around in the lunch room you will see a finance table, legal table, an IT group, and so on. These groups get together automatically and enjoy shop talk and extended work discussions over the rice, curry and bread. In open organizations there is a reserved table for the Managers where you will find the CXOs quietly having a meal with small talk. Most employees stay away from this table and likewise the CXOs.

My manager who became and stayed a friend believed that the world should not be polarized this way. He too ate at the staff canteen whatever food was served and consciously sought new groups every day to share a meal with. Likewise he expected all of us at C-level to break our comfort zones and network with staff across levels and functions. The discussions though initially polite became a tool to measure the pulse of the company. Employees warmed up to the idea and based on their ease opened up with some of us.

Observing this through the years I realized that the behavior is universal; birds of feather flock together. People gravitate into groups with familiar faces and shun the relatively unknown; if they find no seat within their groups they rather sit alone and not with another group; they did what they did, it was automatic. I saw similar behavior in social gatherings, networking dinners and wherever people got together. Off course there are exceptions who love to meet new people and merge into any group easily.

Practicing what I learned whenever possible, the initially forced experience soon made me welcome into any group. No walls went up or conversations died when I joined a group for lunch. The connect with people created empathy that I could use in various discussions around problems and opportunities as well as driving change which came along with the interventions IT created. We connected beyond work related transactions and built many friends who light up when we meet even in a casual encounter on the streets or a mall.

One of the answers would be that it is all about anticipating requirements, partnering the business and being proactive in your discussions. If you are a good CIO who is aligned to the business, and connected to the customer, blah, blah … lunches can be fun. Your customers’ perceptions are your reality; any change takes a lot of effort and consistency. Another view is that some people will never be satisfied whatever you do; so don’t get impacted by all these ramblings, manage them separately and keep going. Go and sit on another table rather than get indigestion.