The X-Files

By Divina Paredes | Wednesday, February 11 2009

As Baby Boomer CIOs retire or take on different challenges, more Gen X-ers are stepping up to the top ICT posts. Three CIOs in their 30s discuss how they are distilling lessons from their senior colleagues, while managing the challenging economic environment and the rapid changes intrinsic to the job.

Every year Chris Runciman ‘resigns’ as chief information officer of Sheppard Industries.

“I walk out the door and ask myself, what would my successor do differently? What mistakes have we made in the past year that we need to put an end to or what opportunities do we need to seize?”

It is a mental exercise Runciman has been doing for the past seven years, having read how Intel founder Andy Grove does the same thing. “We have to constantly re-evaluate ourselves,” he states.

Runciman, who is 37, joined Sheppard Industries 10 years ago and has seen the bike retailer and manufacturer, best known for the Avanti and Specialized brands, grow to become Australasia’s largest supplier to the cycle industry.

While Runciman started as a consultant, his role evolved to become the company’s first CIO. During this time he set up Aspex Consulting, to which Sheppard Industries completely outsourced its IS/IT functions. “As Aspex we operate as the IS/IT team for a number of companies providing common governance and management frameworks across the client base, despite having different stakeholders.”

With this nuanced dual role, Runciman represents the Generation X CIOs (those in their 30s and early 40s) whose experiences and approaches are markedly different from their more senior CIO colleagues, the Baby Boomers.

These Gen X-ers are now stepping up to the top ICT posts, as the first generation of Baby Boomer CIOs start to retire or take on other work challenges.

Unlike their more senior counterparts, however, the Gen X CIOs have grown up with ICT as integrators rather than as developers. So how did their early grounding in ICT affect the way they manage people and technology issues?

As well, what impact does the current economic slowdown have on their strategies and plans?

Collaboration and change
Runciman describes his management style as “very open and collaborative”.

“I believe our role in the organisation has to be built from mutual respect, from what you bring to the table, and that our role is to encourage appropriate use of

innovation and to enable the business to deliver a better value proposition to our customers.”

He says his annual retrospective, criticism and self-criticism of his and his team’s work has led to incremental changes in the company’s ICT infrastructure and service delivery.

Most recently, the change involved replacing Sheppard Industries’ ERP system with Lawson’s M3 Enterprise Management System. “It is finished, all done and live for a few months, and I am still alive,” he says in jest. He and his team embarked on the project with “our eyes open as to what this was going to mean”.

A steering committee was formed composed of Runciman and some executives, with a permanent project manager assigned for the ERP program. “We took great care with change management and in making sure our staff were communicating with the broader team,” says Runciman.

The completion of the ERP project has led him to another introspection of how to ensure the IT organisation is aligned with the company’s strategy.

What keeps Runciman in-step is his focus on the business. “My real passion is to work very deeply with an organisation, to get to know the business drivers very well and then to innovate in that context.

“My strong suit is understanding technology and how we can apply it to the business as it is growing. It’s looking at ways in which we can innovate in the business context, but using the enablers that IT brings to the table. It is within that context that you can actually create and use IT to differentiate yourself.”

Runciman says he started at Sheppard working on a project “but when it became apparent there were masses of ways in which IT can add a lot of value” to the business, his role expanded. In 2001, for instance, Sheppard built a B2B portal; one of the first bike companies in the world to do so. From the web portal, the company did EDI integration out to the stores and built a vendor management, supply chain coordination system.

An early start
Runciman’s father worked as an IT manager, who at 65 is still active in consultancy roles. As well as having such a role model,

Runciman had an early start into IT. From when he was 15, his summer jobs involved working with technology leaders like Ian McRae (now chief executive of Orion Health).

“I worked though my holidays,” he recalls. “One summer we had a very large patient management system rollout and so I ran a small warehouse where we configured and then installed over 2,000 PCs.”

At the time he was weighing up whether to take a business or engineering degree at the University of Auckland, but says it was McRae who persuaded him to take up engineering because it “would just open up a massive range of options and a set of skills to tackle complex [situations]”.

It was the right decision, he says. With his degree and experiences in different ICT-themed business projects, he says, “Complexity does not daunt me.”

As he explains, dealing with complexity is part and parcel of a CIO’s job and is characteristic of ICT systems. If at all, what he considers more challenging is “making sure that as an IT team we are constantly innovating and we are constantly supporting organisational innovation. Certainly, one of the things I do a lot is to constantly seed ideas out to the business.”

The long haul
Runciman believes CIOs need to work long-term in an organisation to maximise the benefits the role can bring to the enterprise. “I have a belief that the longer you have been with the organisation, the more value you can bring to the table and the more innovation you can actually bring to the mix.”

He says a lot of IT projects are “sold” by the CIOs for three years, but many don’t stay long enough “to really see those results flow through the business”.

He cites, for instance, an ERP implementation. “It really does take quite some time following that to really extract the value and lead to positive results for your customers.”

The Lawson ERP implementation, he says, was aimed at enhancing the company’s supply chain coordination. “Now, it is all about extracting the value out of that investment. We have done the prospecting, we have dug the mine, now we have to mine the gold out of this thing.”

At Sheppard, which deals with multiple parties such as suppliers and retailers, “actually executing your overall supply chain strategy can take time”.

What Runciman is more concerned about is the impact of technology on the business, particularly in regards to the customers. “My passion is really around making sure that business customers benefit from the impact of the IT initiatives that we are undertaking.”

He says the shared services team approach used at Sheppard Industries is an emerging model, particularly in medium-sized enterprises, providing a way for an organisation to retain a talented pool of IS/IT staff and share the costs, for example, of tools such as a system management platform.

“You are able to have a team who’s working across a number of organisations. It is varied, challenging and exciting and also keeps a very strong team motivated.

“As times are getting tighter, I encourage CEOs to really look at that model and explore whether you’d get value in your business.”

He says, though, the current economic slowdown has not prompted him to defer or cut back projects at Sheppard. “We are relatively lean and as an organisation we really see IT as a very important enabler.”

Pathway to the CIO role
Simon Conroy’s career path to CIO was via roles in finance, strategy and project management.

Thus, before becoming CIO of Flight Centre, the 32-year-old accounting graduate says, “I dealt not so much with CIOs as much as managing directors and general managers of various companies. That was where I learned a lot of the more strategic views of the business, looking five years ahead, instead of the here and now.”

Conroy says this experience has influenced his management style and the way Flight Centre views ICT investment. “It is just taking that long-term view [and] not necessarily taking that cheapest option, which will sort out all the issues right through.”

Flight Centre, he says, is a “people business” and is looking at emerging technologies like social networking and the different ways it can interact with customers. “It is just challenging the traditional model of how a service-based operator works and how technology can facilitate that.

“I think a lot of it comes down to the culture of the company itself,” says Conroy. Flight Centre, he adds, “by its very nature, is very young and vibrant. I fit in quite well here.”

Every year, Flight Centre holds a meeting for the heads of ICT across its global operations. Conroy says during these meetings, he sees more younger members or those coming from diverse backgrounds, like retail or wholesale, moving up the ICT leadership team.

“That is just a function of people working their way up the ranks and being given opportunities to prove themselves in the IT field. And they are also not necessarily strictly IT professionals,” he says.

ICT via business
Conroy may as well be describing his ascent to ICT management. He was already working in finance when he finished his accounting degree via correspondence eight years ago through Massey University.

He intends to further his education through Flight Centre’s executive development courses. “We have lots of internal resources for training,” he says.

A general manager’s role is in his long-term plans. He says an MBA is the next step he is looking at, as it is a “great baseline for learning”.

Asked how he thinks the Generation X executives would differ from their more senior colleagues, he says it is around the “degree of loyalty” to the organisation and the way they build up their CV.

Gen X-ers, he says, “would take a few more risks, a few different experiences under their belt which they can bring to a new organisation.”

He cites his own experience, moving from the business side of the enterprise to ICT management. “You get a broader base of experience to bring to a company,” he says.

At the same time, he says Generation X people will look at corporate

restructuring differently. For Conroy, it would be “an opportunity to move on and try something new”.

As to how the prevailing economic slowdown has affected ICT operations at Flight Centre, Conroy says, “We look a lot stronger around capital expenditure now. There is a lot more analysis going into proving return on investment, instead of just solving a need. It just introduces another level of rigour when it comes to the upfront analysis of IT.”

He adds that Flight Centre has already embarked on a virtualisation programme, so the initial investments have been put in. “We are [reaping] the rewards of that now,” he says. “You can scale a lot easier. Having that baseline has really helped us in terms of ongoing capex.”

Innovation hub
Jason MacDonald, director of ICT, Kristin School, is 33 and has been CIO of the school in Auckland’s North Shore City for the past five years. He began his ICT career after completing his bachelor of computer science in Acadia University in Canada.

He has worked in technology focused roles including vendor company Nortel, but his interest has always been in “people and technology”.

Thus, he veered towards ICT management and by his late 20s was a CIO.

MacDonald observes that when he first worked in ICT, the CIO role was “project management oriented”.

But he says the new way of doing IT, “does not see IT as a servant to the business or just a service organisation”.

“We are literally a part of the business and can offer a lot of value and facilitation and innovation as well. It is not just, ‘Let us wait for innovation or new ideas to come from the business’. We can drive that from IT as well. We see that very much as a part of where we are going.”

He notes, “I suppose a challenge now is to have organisations understand that there is a new crop of CIOs developing.”

Open and accessible ICT
MacDonald’s office at Kristin School has an open plan layout and the data management systems with their cooling facilities are in open view.

“I see that as part of IT coming out of the backroom,” he says.

“We are ICT and part of us is being open and communicative, and being part of the organisation. We can express that literally by making our physical environment open and accessible to the people.

MacDonald is already helping develop the next generation of ICT professionals, with Kristin School students working with his team. “These students are going to enter engineering or computer science areas and they are gaining knowledge and

understanding of what the corporate IT space may be like or may be like in the future. I think that is good exposure right from the beginning as students enter

tertiary studies, and also to expose them to what the IT management space is like.”

He says this has a positive effect for a number of students who will decide to go into ICT management or further studies. “It is not just training technical people. We are giving them that greater exposure, which you don’t necessarily get in your course studies.

“One of the things we try to do here is make sure we are right at the leading edge of that environment. So whether that is bringing fibre optics or connecting to KAREN, we want to expose our students to that so they gain an understanding of how to use that environment.”

He says when these students enter the workplace, they will need — and demand — this access. “They know how to use the internet for productive research and good learning, and by cutting that out you are going to take away literally the learning tools of the next generation of employers coming through.”

Asked about the challenges of having the Generation Y enter the workforce, he says, “We have to approach them pragmatically”.

“Part of our role is being relevant, part of that is [utilising] new technologies such as social networking,” he states. “If we can’t find a way to use those tools in our own organisation, our employees are going to use them anyway. We are effectively making ourselves irrelevant if we don’t approach this and take it onboard.

“By taking those tool sets away, you are stifling productivity. They will go to another organisation that has it.”

Lifelong learners
He says students and staff are made aware of the internet user policy and undergo training for this. The training is specific to the age group or their role in the school. There are ethical discussions on piracy and what is acceptable.

“If you know copyright infringement and its effect on the music industry, it is a good example to explain to students how copyright or piracy can affect the people who create the content. Our new digital natives are content creators or co-creators; they are now taking people’s contents and mashing it up into their own contents.

“In a way, we have to teach them both current law and current practice and yet they themselves are creating something new. It is a whole new way; it is important for our staff, our organisation, to understand we are going through a transition [where] digital content, mashups and mixing their content are [happening] more so than any other time. We are here to learn and we are here to, in particular, deliver value to our customers in terms of teaching our students to be lifelong learners.”

The sandpit
Part of MacDonald’s role involves staying up-to-date with new technologies. “I think it is important to understand where each generation is. Usually my focus is on how can I apply that to my organisation? How do I make that work? It is important for me as a CIO to understand how these new tools can be adopted.”

MacDonald says Kristin School has already developed a framework for this exercise; a process that he calls the “sandpit” in which technologies are being tested by users across the organisation.

“The idea is to come in and play. Obviously our play has to have some focus and we want to learn from it, so we want to learn, good or bad, whether this idea or this technology has value.”

One technology that has undergone this evaluation is podcasting. As a result of this “sandpit” process, a business case for the technology to be used both by the faculty and the students has been developed.

In evaluating the ICT tools, “You do have to be quick,” says MacDonald. “Maybe some things are going to be relevant, some things not. So it important for me as a CIO to pick certain ones and bring those forward.”

“What I am seeing now is a huge decrease in the half-life of change,” he explains. “The time that these new technologies come out and the time before they now pass their used by date has decreased rapidly, and it is now important for us to look at these technologies and recognise if we can change our organisation quickly enough to adopt and get value from these tools.”

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