For whatever reason, senior IT executives our writers approached, across our Asian region, to ask for their advice about best practices in C-suite relationships, were generally less than enthusiastic about revealing their success secrets. Many said they were ‘too busy’ others simply said they ‘could not participate’ and others were simply ‘unavailable’.
Perhaps it was the traditional Asian cultural reticence about commenting on a superior’s role, or maybe it’s just that members of enterprise leadership teams don’t want to give too much away in today’s competitive environment, or maybe it’s just a closed club. But, after much hard work, we found that those senior Asian IT executives who did go on the record, are well worth listening to, as you will discover in the pages that follow.
In February this year, Fairfax Business Research in Australia surveyed more than 200 CFOs and CIOs, on their views about executive level dynamics.
The following C-suite responses, anonymous because of the survey conditions (this may be why our efforts were somewhat resisted—because we named names), give an indication of the mixed perspectives in enterprise leadership teams.
Mixed perspectives
Here’s what some of the participants had to say:
“Having now reported both directly to the CEO and through the CFO, I am now of the opinion that for an organisation to get the best from their IT department, it needs to report directly into the CEO, regardless of the strength of the relationship between the CFO and CIO,” one CIO stated. “Reporting through the Finance area does not provide sufficient visibility and portrays IT from a finance-centric view.”
“Little understanding has led to little concern over the fiscal management of high value assets because they are not understood. There is a willingness to spend extravagant sums on fixing problems that are high visibility, but no value placed on robust support for daily tasks,” said another CIO.
“Finance has the overwhelming desire to curtail new investment or replacement investment until the last minute, and as a result, poor outcomes, and high costs result,” was the opinion of yet another CIO.
“I believe the best organisational structure is for the CIO to report to the CFO, which assists in the management of costs and assignment of priorities for the best cost/benefit outcomes. Unfortunately, where I work, the CIO reports to the CEO so decisions take forever to be made, often due to a lack of knowledge,” one CFO respondent stated.
“A key tension is the balance between state of the art systems and capability vs. monetary cost vs. value of the output in terms of decision making. No one measures the dollar value of bad decisions facilitated by poor IT systems. Someone should!” said another CFO.
Satisfied CEOs
The Australian survey found that most CEOs think their CIO is doing a good job. In a separate survey, when analyst group IDC asked 200 CEOs for an appraisal of the work their IT departments carry out, the feedback they received was also mostly positive.
But here’s the bad news: most CEOs have no idea what their chief information officers actually do. The IDC survey showed a distinct communication problem.
Most CIOs have moved up through the IT backbone of the company, and learned a language particular to the IT environment. So they simply don’t know how to tell the business what they are up to, in a way that their colleagues understand.
Of course, it has been this way ever since IBM put together the first mainframes and punch cards. Later, courses in electronic engineering attracted enthusiastic individuals who liked the elegance of mathematics, and the straightforward response of a machine solution.
But business isn’t straightforward, and the complexity of organisational communication is far from elegant.
Communication breakdown
As a result CIOs have spent decades lamenting their apparent incapacity to engage with senior executives, to secure the funding they need, to align IT with the business and to deliver tangible business benefits.
Some easy wins were made in the 1990s, but in the 21st century, getting anywhere means making a serious pitch involving business strategy.
But the key, as it turns out, is not just to ensure the technology you’re pitching fits in with the overall strategy of the company you work for. The key to securing funding and engaging senior executives is to deal with them on their own terms, recognise their pain points and learn their language.
Research manager at analyst group IDC, Phillip Allen, believes part of the challenge CIOs face is that when the present generation of IT managers began their careers, communication skills and business knowledge were simply not on the radar.
“The focus has been on budgets, and getting work done, not fitting it into the overall business, or communicating those benefits to others,” Allen says. “In the past couple of years, we’ve seen the CIO shift from reporting through the chief financial officer, over to reporting directly to the CEO, suggesting that CEOs want more insight into what is happening with the IT spend.”
Tailor your C–Suite talk
However, even those with good communication skills can find themselves in trouble, says Mary Ann Maxwell, group managing vice-president of executive programs at research organisation Gartner.
“One of the main challenges of the CIO communication strategy is that it needs to be tailored to each separate audience. Even people who have fairly strong communication skills find they don’t know how to tailor their message and stick to the central points, and if there’s a perception that they’re in some way inconsistent, they’ll lose their audience,” Maxwell says. She even cautioned that the best aligned and designed IT strategies can fall apart due to poor communication. “All the ideas need to be wrapped up in clear, consistent and timely communication,” she says.
John Grumber, the third chairman and CEO of international executive search firm Egon Zehnder, says that CIOs and CTOs do not necessarily make good CEOs.
“I spent a whole day in a seminar on this topic and, even though the room was full of CIOs and CTOs with great aspirations, it was agreed by the end of the conference that they did not make good CEOs,” he says. “In fact being too technical can be a barrier to being a successful CEO. What you really need is a CIO, or CTO, who can talk to the leaders of companies in the language that they understand.”
