Definition Turnaround Artists are hired guns and risk takers who see themselves first and foremost as agents of change. They’ve got deep experience in IT and have the ability to come into a chaotic situation, ascertain what the business needs most, recharge a beaten-down staff and start piling up the wins—quickly.

Completely messy, chronically dysfunctional and insanely challenging: That’s the IT situation in which Turnaround CIOs usually find themselves, though the company names and locales change. And they love it.

When Jay Rollins signed on as vice president of IT for Churchill Downs, owner of horse tracks and races including the Kentucky Derby, he found an IT infrastructure "more along the lines of something you’d see in the ’80s," he recalls, "and whether it was functional or not is up for debate." This was in 2004. What hurt even more: IT-enabled advances that were common in much

of the gaming industry—such as Internet, wireless and sophisticated customer-loyalty applications—were also missing. An example of this problem, Rollins says, would be on occasions when Churchill Downs would offer the same loyalty reward for its $125,000 bettor as it did for its $40 bettor: a bobblehead doll. "We were not treating the big customers any better than the small customers," he recalls.

Turnaround CIOs, as defined using "The State of the CIO" survey data, call change management skills their primary personal strength. They’ve got deep experience in IT, and they are hired to make tumultuous changes to the IT department—and make them ASAP. Sixty-eight percent of Turnaround CIOs said their top priority from the business side is to align IT and business goals; that’s the highest of any archetype.

These change gurus get an anxious initial greeting. "The CFO basically said IT was broken, and it needed fixing," Rollins says of his arrival—which, it turns out, is the typical welcome a Turnaround CIO receives.

Strengths

The Turnaround CIO’s ability to come into a chaotic situation, ascertain what the business needs most, recharge a beaten-down staff and start building successes is both an amazing feat and all part of the plan. "You know coming in what you’re going to do first, second, third," says Marc Smith, a veteran of three turnarounds who is now director of IT for Pabst Brewing.

That’s a good thing—because usually, there’s no description of IT or its services to be found, no centralized inventory of IT assets or vendor contracts, and no CliffsNotes for how IT should support business operations.