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How to survive the first 100 days as CIO
CIO Forum: Advice for newbies...

By Julian Goldsmith

Published: Monday 22 October 2007

The first three months of a new CIO's reign are often the most important. At the silicon.con CIO Forum, Network Rail information management director Catherine Doran presented some top tips for tech chiefs about to start a new job at the top level.

She said: "Get to know how the company works, get to know the people. Decide what needs to be done, what's the nature of the problem you're being asked to solve. Then decide and agree on your priorities."

Below are some of the top tips from her presentation.

Do the research - in advance - and then keep learning

Skills Survey 2007

Find out the results of this year's Skills Survey:

♦  Are CIOs getting less cash?
♦ How the staffing crisis is deepening
♦ How techie salaries are faring
♦ Offshoring still a hot potato
♦  Banks hardest hit by staff crisis
♦ Industry falling out of love with IT grads

"I spent 18 years in financial services and telecoms. Fifteen months ago, I moved to Network Rail. Before I walked into the company on the first day, I knew so much more about trains than I'd ever known before", said Doran.

"It's important that you do your homework on the company you're going into because it will prepare you and allow you to put together your plan."

Other important things for a new CIO to get their head around might include corporate governance - details of who is on the management committee, where the board is meeting, how the audit committee works and how investment is done.

"One of the interesting things for me when I moved from BT to Network Rail was moving from a company where everything was governed by what was happening in the next quarter and how the numbers would play in the City to a company where a 30-year investment decision feels OK. That psychologically feels very different in terms of how you approach problems and how you sell your ideas and persuade people that what you want to do makes sense for the corporation."

And she added: "When you get in there you will find there are things that just don't appear anywhere in writing but it's really some of the stuff that drives the company."

Understanding the organisation's three-letter-acronyms is also key. "Never have I realised how important they are than when I moved into rail. It's a whole other language. So, when you combine transport, railway acronyms with IT acronyms, you can talk entirely in letters.

A really good way in the early days of making contact with people is asking them what the acronyms mean. It's a hoot - about 80 per cent of the time, they don't know themselves. But it's an important competency to acquire so that you don't sit there looking like the dozy one in the corner because you don't understand the conversation, because you don't understand the acronyms."

Getting to know the boss - and everyone else is another job to get right early on, said Doran. "Your boss has hired you and they are desperate for you to succeed. They hired you because they had a problem. They certainly didn't hire you to keep everything exactly the same, so they're on your side."

Doran recommends the new CIO should find out how their boss likes to work - and make sure your conversations don't get bogged down in detail.

"They want to have the confidence, when they pick up the phone with an issue, that you'll be on top of it and that if you don't know about it then, you certainly will in an hour's time."

Find out what the problem is

The CIO needs to start by talking about business problems, said Doran, and working out how they can be solved.

"Make sure that the front and the end of the conversation is about business, because the technology is an also-ran at this point. Above all, at this stage is proving yourself to be somebody in the business in the round. IT at this point is your functional specialism. If that's all there is to you, you're not going to succeed around that table, because you'll be marginalised and you'll be asked to speak only when there's a technology question. And how boring is that?

Decide what needs to be done

A new CIO needs to be a mix of anthropologist watching and observing, Red Adair, racing in and putting out fires, and a bit of steady as she goes, keeping the home fires burning, Doran said.

"When I went into Network Rail, it was pretty much that we need to move this organisation forward, we need to make a step-change but actually within six weeks the first thing I had to do was stop a major outsourcing deal that we were about to enter into without having clear views of what success would look like. The degree to which you have to move between [roles] is very much driven by the homework you've done, the conversations you've had, the relationships you're starting to build."

She said it's important to define some early wins - but make sure you are able to differentiate between urgent and important and make the right choices. It's also time to start building a roadmap, to create a sense and a shape of what needs to be done when.

It's also vital to keep talking: "Running through all of this is communication. Within your team and going out to the rest of the business, making people understand what you're doing and why and that you are talking and listening to the input from the rest of the company. All of that builds credibility. Once you've built credibility then it becomes a self-perpetuating thing. Even if you have the odd wobble, credibility will keep people on-side while you fix whatever is broken."

Keep space in your diary - and for yourself

It's easy to start great plans as CIO - and then real life happens. As Doran points out: "It's important to keep some time so that you're able to tell the difference between urgent and important, so that you're able to think about your game-plan and you're able to be strategic in what you're doing."

And its also vital, in the headlong rush to prove yourself, to save some time for you. "The first few months in a new role, particularly if you haven't been a CIO before is incredibly draining, because you are on a learning curve you haven't had to deal with since you were learning to read, so make sure that part of your priorities is how you are going to protect yourself in a work/life balance way and make sure you have downtime. If you don't have enough downtime, you will be less effective."