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CIO Executive Council

A Peer-Advisory Service and Professional Association for CIOs

Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives

Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.

Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices

Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.

Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices

This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.

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Strategic CIO

Guiding Your IT Department on the Road to Change

After two mergers, the CIO of logistics provider YRC Worldwide had to carefully apply change leadership techniques to blend three IT departments into one.

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By Michael Rapken

July 13, 2007 — CIO —

Although I was hired by YRC Worldwide nearly two years ago to create a strategy to drive innovation, I quickly realized that there was more work to do within IT than just creating a strategy. In the wake of the merger of Yellow Freight, Roadway and USF, the IT groups from our three companies operating in multiple locations had been merged into one unit but had yet to jell into a cohesive team. Adding to the stress from its change of identity, the group had to develop an application road map for the merged organization that would modernize and simplify the application portfolio. Only then would we be able to free up the resources needed to focus on innovation and driving growth. The IT transformation is the biggest change effort ever seen within IT, ultimately involving hundreds of people.

The size and scope of such a task requires change leadership from the CIO. I have to be actively involved, and it's a tough balancing act. I've been spending between 20 to 30 percent of my time as the hands-on manager of our change initiatives during the past 18 months while at the same time fulfilling my strategic role.

Fortunately, change leadership is one of the C-level competencies that seems to be native to the IT profession, even in the middle-management ranks. There aren't many disciplines that have experienced as much change during the past 20 years as IT. People who have worked in IT over time have benefited from rolling with a series of technology changes. That experience makes us less resistant to change.

BE MORE STRATEGIC

Benchmark your C-level leadership competencies

When we become corporate executives, we quickly realize that we are not working in a dictatorship. We learn that we have to take time to understand the needs of our constituents and stakeholders and help them along with technology changes. Without these basic change leadership skills, no IT leader is going to get far.

Creating a Corporate Identity
After the mergers, we had multiple technologies used for similar functions, and this creates a level of complexity that is difficult to manage. It's taken a year and a half to evaluate our portfolio and to decide which of the applications and technologies we want going forward as well as how to manage the migration to our target state. Our target state represents a 40 percent reduction in applications and a 30 percent reduction in total technologies by the end of 2010.