CIO — Back in the boom days, CIOs were like players in a corporate game of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? playing with big IT budgets for a slew of enterprisewide projects. Today, with spending locked down and empty cubicles surrounding the remaining IT staffers, the game may feel more like Survivor, a test of deprivation and endurance through a bear-economy obstacle course. So what happens when your corporate sponsor?the CEO or other executive who brought you on board and signed off on your major projects?gets voted off the island by an antsy board? What happens to your projects, your employees...and you? Here is the hard-won advice of a few CIOs who’ve been there.
Don’t Forget Your Customers
The game of CIO survival can be won or lost before a high-level chair-shuffling ever takes place, says Malcolm Fields, vice president and CIO of Hon Industries, an office furniture maker based in Muscatine, Iowa. Fields successfully steered his IS team through a major transition two years ago when the executive who signed off on an advance planning and scheduling package left just before implementation. When the dust cleared, Fields had to sell the project to a pair of new company presidents as Hon Industries was split into two business units.
Some of Fields’ biggest allies turned out to be his customers, those business-unit leaders across the company who could vouch for the work IT was doing to help solve problems. "If you spend all your time marketing yourself to one person?the CEO, CFO or whoever?then you lose all the equity you’ve developed in one fell swoop when that person leaves," he says. Instead, help executives in logistics, manufacturing and customer relations "understand exactly how your IT organization empowers them and their departments to move forward," says Fields. "Not only do you cover your rear, but cultivating those relationships makes you a more effective CIO because you better understand what your customers need." What’s more, any one of those executives could become the next CEO?your new boss.
A broad base of support for the IS group’s work is bound to impress a new CEO, says Charlie Feld, founder, CEO and president of The Feld Group, an Irving, Texas-based IT consultancy. "Those relationships are important because they show your work is not done in a vacuum. You’ve developed a joint agenda with the business units, and your work is focused on moving the business forward."
Don’t Forget Your People
As a leader, you have the job of keeping your staff attuned to business needs. When those needs change, IT workers need to be asking themselves questions like, What are we trying to accomplish in the new regime? and How will that change the customer experience? The Feld Group had been running Burlington Northern’s IT organization for a year and half when the company merged with another giant railroad, Santa Fe, in 1995. Feld says he moved quickly to end any talk in the IT ranks about which railroad’s technology system was better. The only question he allowed on the table at meetings was, What will work best for the new company? "Each company had its own systems footprint, culture and business model," he says, "but we didn’t worry about what the old models looked like because those old companies were gone."
