Recovery from the brink of ignominy

It was the first day at work for the CIO in his new company and he was excited about the prospects; the enterprise was one of the early adopters of technology and the business was growing faster than the market. The CIO having gone through multiple rounds of interviews and battery of psychological tests had made it. The first meeting was with one of the CEOs of a business; he arrived early and waited for the CEO. Arriving on time the CEO shook hands and sat opposite the CIO and opened the meeting with the remark, “I hate IT !”

Not knowing how to react, the CIO smiled and commented “Thank you, now that is a starting point”. The meeting went on for the allotted hour after with the CIO emerged with a list of things to fix, projects that the business CEO wanted to execute yesterday, meetings that he had to schedule over the next few weeks with other business leaders and he had yet to meet his team. Wondering about his decision, he walked across to the adjacent building where the next meeting was with his reporting boss and the Managing Director.

As he settled in he discovered the root cause of the bitterness with IT; there were many anecdotes and tales of his predecessor, his interactions with the business, his approach to any new solution and the way he managed the team. He (the predecessor) was the first CIO the company had hired when they needed to leverage the next wave of IT and moving from a local benchmark to being a global benchmark in the industry. Technically competent and extremely articulate, the ex-CIO had everyone eating out of his hands.

No one could have faulted the best of breed technology decisions, validated with more than adequate research from global consultants and industry reports. For his team and the business, he always had answers for any technical problem; his team supported him though they hated his micro-managing style of operation. The resultant rift continued to grow until one fine day the CIO fell into the chasm. Business leaders heaved a sigh of relief and hoped that the new CIO would put in better efforts to understand their viewpoints too.

The newbie met everyone across layers, from shop floor to Boardroom, warehouse to suppliers; he worked with the feet on the ground understanding their pain, met customers gaining insights on drivers of top line. Expectations were set with the teams on key deliverables and measurements with checkpoints on what to report and when. Meeting with key vendors determined traction and connect that he could leverage to move into the next gear. The biggest change was in the attitude of his team and how they approached the business.

Soon he was part of the business teams networking with executive assistants and chiefs with equal ease getting around with a conviction that people accepted at face value. His team liked the empowerment and the freedom; they knew help was at hand whenever they needed it, so was a good word and encouragement. They worked in sync and turned around some of the faltering projects excited by the prospects of growth, visibility and glory; perceptions of IT started its uphill journey towards collective credibility.

The team that was written off by the business shed their reserve coming out into the open with new found confidence built on the foundation of success and the strong shoulders of their leader. They saw a change in behaviour from their customers and reciprocated fuelling the fire of performance taking it to new heights. Internal and external appreciation poured in acknowledging the return to leadership position in an industry. The turnaround was complete, the new CIO had once again been able to bring the function back to relevance.

It was an industry conference on a global stage where the CEO was presenting on the business success and differentiation with help from IT. There was applause in the room after the keynote was delivered; the CEO bowed as his colleague the CIO joined him on stage. As they got off stage they were hounded to discover the secret sauce of the CEO-CIO relationship. The CEO said, “I hated IT a few years back until this guy came on board and changed everything. Today IT contributes to our growth and I love IT”. Both grinned cheerfully and with hands on other’s shoulders walked away.

Footnote: When I wrote about “Living with Bad Hires” many readers wanted to know what happened after the CIO was fired. This is the story of what happened.

Change is like that only !

We all have been part of multiple project teams; projects big and small, spread over weeks to months and years, functional and cross-functional, department, geography, or enterprise wide. We have played roles ranging from team member, functional or project lead, sponsor, champion, or simply an observer. We have shared the euphoria on successful completion and anguish of failed projects, the pain of projects missing timelines, the anger when someone does not get it, the relief of recovering from missed milestones, heartbreak when a project was abandoned.

Every project has its set of protagonists, antagonists and fence-sitters; the mix largely determined not always by reality but the perception of impact to self, team, function, and organization. The difficulty level and the change to existing norms, processes, role, conventional wisdom also determines the enthusiasm demonstrated by everyone. Position within the organization hierarchy and age too play an important role in determining how we embrace the project and the change it brings about.

Change management has thus become an industry where specialists and consultants have defined frameworks to help overcome resistance to change. From proactive to resistive management, these practices collate experiences from multiple projects with a hope that some of them can be universally applied. The faith in such an intervention keeps fuelling the growth of change specialists and enterprises continuing to invest in managing change with every project. There are a few basics that address the challenge: engagement, communication and agreement.

Project charters to creation of a team, and bringing them together typically defines the first few stages of any project. The collective belief in the outcomes is a basic necessity to create a foundation on which the project will be build. When a motley group gets together the first time, their collective conscience needs alignment to the common goal. Achieving this requires the leaders to engage the team in formal and informal settings. Their professional, social and emotional states require tuning with each other.

Communication needs a plan and then you break the plan to adapt to project progress; there will always be instances when a few will raise a furor that they were not informed or involved or constrained from participation. Everyone in the team needs to take charge of communication rather than a few chosen ones tasked with it. It is not just status reports, newsletters, and email campaigns, but open and honest dialogue within the team across hierarchy and laterally, is the best mechanism to keep the spirits high and aligned.

Whenever a group assembles, there is disagreement, conflict, and politics; projects with significant change also bring fear of the unknown, surfaces insecurities, and highlights missing competencies. These emotions and states challenge not just the project, at times also the company and business continuity. It does not matter if they were mediocre or high performers in earlier roles, or their longevity; the fact that they have to change is unpalatable to the human mind by design.

Young are impressionable and embrace all ideas without judging them; as we grow older we benchmark any new ideas with our past and what we believe is correct. We want things to be white or black equated to right or wrong rather than as an alternative view or way of working. What we disagree with is not necessarily wrong. This fixation to slot every action or decision into two buckets leads to conflict and a change averse behavior. We all learn through experience as there is a limit to what we can gain from others.

Every day is a discovery of our ignorance; we have to unlearn the past to learn something new. Giving up old beliefs is always difficult, they were part of our lives and brought us where we are. As Marshall Goldsmith said “What got you here, won’t get you there”. I believe that change starts from self. Change is a threat when done TO us, but an opportunity when done BY us. Threats are resisted, opportunities are embraced. We have to give up being a caterpillar to become a butterfly.

Change is like that only !

Long tail of IT apps

For most companies that got started with their IT journey in the era of the mainframe, their journey through the evolution of technology created problem of the plenty. Client-server was a favourite for department apps, and the browser made proliferation easier beyond the department. With X-base it was easy to create small specific purpose apps; even users could churn some code that soon turned mission critical. The ERP attempted to consolidate all processes and apps, but most survived the onslaught citing unaligned ERP processes or mission critical status. The cloud now adds to the complexity by making it easier for new apps to flourish.

Every company thus maintains consultants (sometimes ex-employees who developed the apps or maintained them before retiring), vendor relationships, or deadweight to sustain the process these apps enable. Esoteric technologies requiring some antiquated infrastructure continually escapes the axe whenever renewal is discussed. Proportionately, larger the company, bigger the number of apps it has. Examples that I have observed include more than 40 instances of core ERP; another proclaimed build-up of 8000 apps over a 25 year legacy. Many did the same thing for different people using different technologies, but neither wanted to change to the other.

How do these apps defy all attempts at eradication and survive even the strongest attempt to weed them out ? Their patron saints are strongly entrenched in the corporate labyrinth and any change is touted as disruptive to the business. The CIO after a few attempts gives up in favour of bigger battles to fight with higher business impact thus leaving the long tail of applications wagging the IT function more often than pleasant. Thus many people within the enterprise continue to exist to keep the machinery chugging despite options of a better way of life.

An interesting phenomenon was recently narrated to me by a much acclaimed CIO of a well-known and progressive company when his users started defending a not so good a system. This app was a sore point with the functional owner as well as the IT folks with an unusable interface and complex execution of processes. Everyone hated it and it attracted jest and ire in every management meeting. With no change being pushed from the function, the CIO finally decided to do something about it and started an initiative to replace the solution. This is despite the fact the new app offering a significantly superior experience and ease of administration.

Is this only about change management or is the issue much larger ? I believe that the CIO should task some of his/her team members to systemically go behind the hidden long tail apps to wipe them off. When they are working, no one is complaining; they give sleepless nights to IT when they fail. Is there an easy way out ? No, so keep on pushing, nothing good came out of staying put and maintaining status quo. Change is always difficult, but change is the only constant.

If you don’t like something change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.

Where to draw a line ?

A recent conversation with another CXO, I came across an unusual observation from the lady, which lead to me rethink the question, what is indeed the role of a CIO in a company. Should it be limited to creatng technology projects based on business priorities and strategy or it should go beyond the "normal" definition towards being the "Change Agent" beyond IT.

The CIO drives change that is created with the creation and implementation of IT systems or lead by some technology deployment. Successful execution creates positive value for the company, whereas change when not managed effectively may result in technology lead expensive inefficient processes. The good CIOs do not wait for business to spell out the next system change or new initiatives, they create the need based on their appreciation of how the new solution may create value for the enterprise.

Some CIOs with dual roles, i.e. IT and another business function have lattitude in what they do and also the span of influence is larger. These individuals tend to have higher success with change as compared to technology only CIOs (with a few exceptions). As CIOs move up and sideways in the enterprise, their well rounded view of the functioning of each department and function creates many opportunities for being the "Change Agent".

During my discussion with the lady, I spelt out a few initiatives taken up by the IT organization towards creating efficiencies and adding to the bottom line (most of the initiatives had no technology), I was advised that in many companies other CXOs (respective function heads) would typically take up such initiatives and not leave it to the CIO. She also advised me that such initiatives will typically fail because of lack of ownership towards change by respective business units.

While some of the comments resonate with the past, I believe that the new age CIOs do not wait for such initiatives to be thrust upon them, but take on challenges and opportunities even if they may be disruptive to some. The success of such initiatives will ultimately depend on the CEO or the Management Board endorsing the actions of the CIO.

The future does promise to get exciting for an enterprise where empowerment is the norm and CXOs are free to constructively challenge each others domain to take performance to the next level. Afterall as Jim Collins says "Good is the enemy of Great".

Are you creating IT leaders

I get asked the question many times by different people, what has been your contribution to your company or the IT industry at large ! Earlier the focus was on answering the question based on the projects executed by self or the team, then it shifted to measurable value to the business and the wonderful "IT-Business Alignment". Somewhere down the line when that came with ease and almost became routine (with some notable exceptions), I began to think about how have I and how can I contributed to the IT industry.

Thinking through my journey over the last 25 odd years, I am able to create 2 distinctive stages. The first was when I was learning and following instructions of other business and IT leaders. While I did contribute to the discussion and influence the direction, my contributions were in the realm of project management, technical disciplines, and execution.

The second stage in which I continue today and been in this role for the last decade or so is when I was driving the direction, creating influence across the IT organization and business adoption of IT. But that was only part of the role I played. The realization that teams can be effective irrespective of the mix of people and skills, with some mentoring and coaching, there was a subtle shift towards encouraging people to start working independently.

Over the years, this nurturing became a habit and the bright team mates started blossoming on their own. All they needed was the impetus and encouragement that they have the potential which can be tapped into to develop into leaders in their own right. A few took on the opportunity and a few viewed it as a challenge; most of them however dived in with some conviction created out of their self-esteem stoked with a mix of mentoring and some pushing.

The result after a decade is that almost a dozen have achieved success and become CIOs in their own right contributing well to their organizations. For most of these talented individuals, some of the influence of thought stayed. They have become business IT champions and not technology professionals attempting to get budgets sanctioned for every small project.

What have you as a CIO been doing ? Are you creating followers or leaders ? Do you acknowledge talent by providing them the platform to grow or like some hire people who will not threaten your existence or position. I do know of a few such individuals (not necessarily CIOs only, but even CEOs and other CXOs) who will by design hire mediocre staff so that they can be at their beck and call, and not challenge them.

It's an elongated period (rather than a moment) of pride to see them grow and take on leadership positions; some of them humble me by mentioning that I played some role in their ascent. I wonder where do I go from here ?